Rambling Rantings And Ravings On A Friday Night From A Guy Who's Processed Way Too Many New Loans

... and I mean WAY too many new loans.

Work did have its upsides today, however. I took a cue from Kati3 and began to notice some of the more interesting names and places on the documents. Three in particular stood out:
1) An address: "8 Memory Lane" (perhaps we should take a trip down there)
2) A name: "Michael Jordan" (he lives in Tujunga, California, apparently)
and 3) A phrase: "Mary Beard, an unmarried man." (um... there's just way too much there to comment)

And on the other upside of work, I broke my own record for speed today. The department standard, which we new hires are supposed to reach by September 1st, is to process 85 docs an hour, and be in production for 6.5 hours each day. That comes out to about 550 docs a day (552.5, to be exact). Being rather precocious, I passed 85 docs an hour maybe 2 weeks ago, and now I'm not satisfied with myself unless I'm consistently at 100 or higher. But today I got a very large batch of docs that were all the same format, and I hit 122 docs an hour. That's just slightly less than 30 seconds on each document. And, at the end of the day, I had processed a grand total of 650 docs--100 over standard--in only 5.78 hours.

I must confess I'm slightly proud of myself.

But now since I'm sure you've all just been holding your collective breath desperately waiting for the great "3" story, I'll present it here in all of its glory.

During the class part of our training, we had three guys who were "Senior Data Processors," also known as SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), who helped us and answered our questions. The first two were named James and Anh (pronounced "ah-n"). Then a third guy joined us, maybe halfway through the second week, whose name was Thanh (pronounced like "Anh" with a "t" in the front). I picked up the names quickly, but it took Katie a little longer. One night she asked me, "What's that guy's name again?" I answered that it was Thanh, like Anh but with a "th." I added as a joke that Anh's name was really spelled the same, Thanh, but the "th" in front of his name was silent. Katie laughed, and after a short pause said, "Well, there's a silent 3 in my name, so I guess it makes sense." That had me in stitches for several minutes, until one of the SMEs (probably Thanh himself) came over to check Katie's work and I had to control myself. When we exchanged phone numbers several days later, I entered her into my phone as Kati3, telling her that I had discovered where the silent 3 was ("That's very leet of you," she replied). And she has been Kati3 ever since.