Working:

I started my first day at the HMO today. The job is really pretty good. It's about 8 minutes from my house, and since I get an hour for lunch, I can come home and eat (and save money). It's a casual workplace, and my boss said jeans are OK. The people seem nice. What I'm doing is basically taking reports from claims managers in South Carolina and reformatting them (in Word) so they "look pretty." The job seems sort of dumb to me; why couldn't they just create a template for the files and send it out to all the claims managers? The template really wouldn't take longer than two days for me to write, and I imagine someone who really knows Word could do it in an afternoon. I also copy the files and move them to wherever they're supposed to go. The most annoying part of the job so far has been the claims managers who use tables for some of the columns. I don't absolutely hate tables in Word (though I've never had them come up looking all that great), but taking them off is a bitch, particularly since the tabs often come out really weird. At least I have a lot of experience making Word stop screwing up my papers, so I'm pretty competent. And if I get really bored, I can think about the $11 an hour I'm making and think that the boredom's worth it.

Oddly enough, I got two calls about possible jobs today. I have to call them back tomorrow and see what they have to say. Not because I'm looking, but because I might want something after this ends. If not, it seems polite, at least.