Winter isn’t Donyetta Turner’s favorite season.
It has a way of knocking well-laid plans off track and into a snowy ditch.
“Especially in South Dakota,” she said. “Every winter, they put me on edge.”
As a staff clerk for the department of agricultural and consumer economics’ Tax School, which helps tax professionals keep current on ever-evolving licensing requirements at 30 state locations, Turner processes and tracks the delivery of workbook orders, making winter a perennial challenge.
She spends a good amount of her workday, snow or not, communicating with customers.
“I like dealing with people I haven’t met,” she said. “I’ve always been a people person. I don’t just talk to them, I listen.”
It gets busy at times, like now, but she said she welcomes the frenetic pace.
“It makes the day go fast,” she said.
Turner said the department is small, but effective.
“We work as a team,” she said. “We’re a small team but we’re a good team. Sometimes there are headaches, but we get along and we all want to get the job done.”
After several years with the Champaign Unit 4 School District, she started working at the university in 2001 as a clerical assistant at McKinley Health Center. The job included filing and retrieving medical charts and records.
She said she enjoyed working at McKinley because staff members were supportive and easy to work with.
“The people were really nice there,” she said.
Turner was promoted to clerk after about two years, which led to an opportunity as a payroll clerk at Facilities and Services.
She was kept busy at F&S processing payroll time cards for some 1,400 workers.
That meant answering any number of procedural questions and regularly having to remind some of them of recurring payroll deadlines.
“I hate to keep bothering you” was a phrase she repeated often in pursuit of serial procrastinators. But it got the job done.
In 2006, Turner became pregnant, but there were complications that left her unable to work and on disability. It was a difficult period in her life, but she was soon back on her feet and anxious to get back to her job.
But the job wasn’t there. The time off had forced F&S to fill her position, and in 2007 Turner went to Central Stores to work a job answering phones, sorting mail and coordinating shipment schedules.
She soon retook and passed a chief clerk test and was sent to the Tax School in 2008. Last year, she was promoted to staff clerk.
At home, well, you might not find Turner and her family at home that often.
With three school-aged children and a fourth a freshman in college, Turner finds there is always an activity to support or a ceremony to attend. Just keeping up with the 7-year-old is a job itself, and a part-time retail job eats up the balance of Turner’s awake time.
She said the family structure was turned upside down about two years ago when her husband, Devon, underwent heart transplant surgery. The procedure was successful and he is healthy today, working as a building service worker at the Illini Union.
“We’ve been through the hoops, but we’re doing really good now,” she said. “We do everything together as a family. They are my life.”
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