the ongoing administrative vs. face-to-face issue

as awful as this is going to sound, it's wonderful to hear that y'all are dealing with these issues too. this last week is the first time it really came up at my internship, and it was really tough to handle. it's nice to know it's not just me. my internship has actually been mostly face-to-face interaction up to this point. a little bit of computer work on the side, but for the most part i've been dealing with a one-on-one basis with our homeless and low-income clients. however, this week, my supervisor asked me to focus on the "bigger picture" issues, i.e. creating a better client database. i've known it's been coming for a long time, and i was eager to get started. i knew it would be a little tedious, but i was ok with that. however, it turned out to be a lot harder for other reasons. there is VERY little separation in our resource center, so basically my "office" is a computer desk in the corner of our main room. what i found is that all the homeless and low-income clients i've been working with started getting all peeved that i wasn't paying attention to them anymore. i'd told all of them i would be sort of working on some other things and other volunteers would be taking over a lot of my daily interactions with clients. however, when they saw i was still in the office they thought i'd abandoned them or that i chose to "leave" their cases. they're already dealing with so many abandonment issues that i didn't want to ignore them, so i tried to juggle working on the database and keeping up with my former responsibilities. the result was that i couldn't really focus on either. struggling to satisfy everyone was really stressful, and it felt like everyone was unhappy. i guess it's a little different than the overall administrative vs. face-to-face dilemma, but how do you deal with these things when they're both immediately pulling you in different directions? ug. i wanted to do both, but i think in the end it made more sense to focus on one at a time.

anyways, just thought i'd share my two cents on the matter. adios until next time.
joy