Week Nine: What a Wednesday
Week nine was hectic - I am probably beginning to sound like a broken record, but it is true! I think my Wednesday afternoon, in and of itself, justifies my use of the word “hectic.”
Wednesday morning was relatively calm. I got to the office at my usual time, brewed my tea, and opened my emails. I addressed the immediate things I needed to respond to or follow up on. This generally includes filing, updating approvals trackers, moving forward with flight itineraries, or corresponding with field offices and consultants.
Once I got through those initial emails, I was able to transition to working on the Roles and Responsibilities Matrix for US National (USN) and Third Country National (TCN) Consultants’ Rate Requests that I had been tasked with drafting. I was excited to receive this assignment, as I was able to use my experience with contracting and setting rates for USNs and TCNs to shape a new process. The new Roles and Responsibilities Matrix is intended to streamline some inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the current rate-setting process that requires the Field and Home Offices to coordinate with the Consultant. I was happily working on the Matrix around 11:30 when my attention got diverted.
I was asked to review the June invoice that needed to be finalized so we could send it the client (USAID) for a project in Mexico. The team had received the invoice the previous morning and finance had requested a 24-hour turnaround time. Which meant that by the time it landed on my desk, finance was already expecting to having it back. I had to work quickly and but also be thorough as I stepped through the process for the first time. I compared the invoice to the field office expense report for discrepancies in any dates, amounts, line items, etc. Like many tasks comparing large excel documents, this is a tedious process that is made possible only with dual monitors. I also had to reference previous months to ensure that we had not double-billed. I found and flagged some edits and returned the document to finance.
With one down, I was tasked with reviewing the next June invoice that needed to be finalized to send to the client (USAID) for the second Mexico project. Again the (now past-due) 24-hour turnaround required me to work quickly but without losing my attention to detail. I also had to work quickly to finish this task because I had two other deadlines to meet by close of business (COB) on Wednesday!
Once the invoices were behind me, I had to review a Project’s Quarterly Report which was due to the client in a few days. We had just received it from the Field Office (FO). One of my colleagues reviewed it, and I was the second reviewer before we returned it to the FO by COB. The FO needed to approve our substantive edits before we could move forward with final edits and formatting. This 25-page document was written by a non-native English speaker whose English is excellent, but still required edits, primarily to sentence structure so the document would flow more naturally and read more actively and powerfully.
Finally, I had to finalize the Project Implementation Team (PIT) Indicators for the two Mexico projects. These indicators capture internal proxies that allow us to measure performance for every project on a monthly basis. These four COB deadlines that hit me all at once on Wednesday kept me very busy, working through lunch and hustling to get everything done! That, my dear readers, was just my Wednesday.
Last weekend it was my turn to visit James, whose 2L summer internship is with a large firm in New York City. It was really great to get more context for his summer: see his apartment, his office building, his commute, his weekend hangouts, etc. Just like all of our weekend travels to-date, we packed a lot in! I took the redeye Thursday after work and arrived around 7:00am Friday morning. Once we got from JFK to his house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we dropped off my bags and went out for breakfast and walked to Domino Park to see the waterfront. In the afternoon we had lunch at a famous empanada place in Hell’s Kitchen (where I got to watch the end of the stellar Wimbledon semi-final match between Kevin Anderson and John Isner)! Then we walked around Soho, primarily to see and admire the contents of the three-story Patagonia store! Then we set off toward the Oculus and the World Trade Center Memorial, which was very moving. For dinner we met up with friends (most of whom are W&M Law students) at Chelsea Market and then walked the highline trail for sunset.
Saturday James and I set out to see Union square (and its Farmers Market), Washington Square, James’ office building on 5thAvenue, and Central Park. We made it home to relax after being out and about for most of the day. We had to rest up because James planned a date night on Broadway! We had a great dinner and saw Come From Away, which is a great musical if you get a chance to see it! Sunday my flight left at 9pm, so we made the most of our day until I had to head toward the airport. We had breakfast at the house and went to the Museum of Natural History. We wanted to see the animal and dinosaur exhibits. It was a first-time visit for both of us. So much to see, we did what we could with the time we had, but we’ll have to return! We left to meet friends for lunch in Soho and had a great meal with them. By the time we made it back to Brooklyn, I had about an hour to pack up and get back to the airport! I landed back in SF around 1am on Monday, slept, and woke up for my usual commute to the office!
