Nodding Off

I used to have a really hard time staying awake while scoring essays online, but lately I've been doing better with that. Of course, it helps that I'm not also working a full-time job. (I've been scoring for twelve years, and until the past two years, it has been supplemental income.) Today, though, it was all I could do not to doze off -- starting about two hours into my eight-hour shift. I wasn't doing a very good job either. At least not by my standards. I didn't calibrate well -- anything under 8/10 is subpar as far as I'm concerned, although my employer sees it differently -- and that skewed my scale for most of the morning. I felt like I was poking along, even though my numbers were in the average range (I assume). When I am going at my usual pace, I have had scoring leaders say things to me like, "It's not a race!" or "I was going to tell you to watch your rate, but your reliability is good." I've never had anyone tell me to speed up, but I do know that "they" are looking at our rate as well as our reliability (how many essay we assign the same score given by test development). I'm not sure how variables such as topic changes play into that, and as I write all of this, I realize it probably doesn't make much sense to anyone who hasn't done this particular job.

As if I wasn't having a hard enough time already, the marketing guy I write for sent me four emails within a half hour about getting articles posted on the secondary client's site. The first one happened to be just before my lunchbreak, so I told him I was working until 5:00 and would get to it this evening. I'm sure he doesn't know that my work email pops up on my computer screen, so it wasn't entirely his fault. But I haven't heard from him in two weeks, so I'm not sure what the emergency was. When I finally had a chance to read the emails -- which I did not do the minute I finished my scoring shift -- I discovered that they contained conflicting information that's preventing me from posting the articles tonight anyway. Sheesh. For someone whose company (who is just a two-man operation) has won local marketing awards for the past three years, he is not a good communicator. That's okay; it works out kind of well for me.

I've been on the computer since about 7:30 this morning, with the exception of two fifteen-minute breaks and a half-hour for lunch, when I got up and moved around as much as I could. I've discovered that there's a lot I can get done in fifteen minutes. With this, my final sentence, I shall close the computer and not look at again until tomorrow.