"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar." ~ Drew Carey

I've been moved at work. A year after my former boss the VP told me he thought I should be in the other building, the small crowded building with the call centers, it finally happened.  I've been dreading it, but nothing I said would make any difference. It's loud in here, there are frequent distractions, and a lot of my job is analyzing, which ideally would require thinking and concentrating.  My job title is Analyst, after all.

And I don't have the same boss anymore. Despite the fact that I work with multiple departments, my former boss the VP has decided that I should report to the director of one of the departments. There is a whole other operations/technical department and they are the obvious fit for my position. I have spoken to the two heads of that department and they agreed and said they would love to have me, but again, my former boss the VP doesn't agree. Coincidentally, that department is in the other, quiet building.

I got the news while sitting in a meeting with the director guy - my former boss the VP came in and said that, if I didn't already know, I wasn't reporting to him anymore, I was reporting to the director. If I didn't already know? How could I have known?

So here I am in the noisy and crowded call center reporting to a person who doesn't understand what my job is, exactly, and whose department is only one part of my job.

I've worked here for a little over three years now, and it's really a good company. The benefits are decent and it's a growing, obscenely profitable company. I'm hoping to possibly get a promotion... and I'm hoping that will mean more money for me.

In the time I've been here I've gotten much better at many aspects of working in an office. I can be aggressive when I need to, taking charge of meetings, standing up for myself, blah blah blah. I am quite a wimp by nature so it has been really good practice for me to be in a situation where I have to take control and make things happen.  (I failed to win the battle of where I would sit and who I would report to, but it wasn't for lack of aggressive trying on my part.)

I've also learned about selling. I am not a natural salesperson, but now I understand the importance of sales techniques in everyday life. Really, in just about every interaction with other people you are trying to sell them on you, to some degree.

My Dad was a great salesperson. He worked in department stores and opened up two women's clothing stores of his own. But then he decided to move back to VA to raise me, and he transitioned into a broker position, where he sold stocks and retirement plans. He worked with a lot of the universities and community colleges in the southwestern VA area.

Looking back on it now, I can see what he was doing - as he got older and closer to retirement, he was smart enough to realize he needed continuing income without having to continue to work for it. After he retired he got commission for years and years from the sales he had made, in addition to his Social Security and his Veteran's benefits.

What a cool guy.  I sure wish I could talk to him about it now, and ask questions.

Planning a vacation

I'm trying to plan my time off for the rest of the year. 

It occurred to me recently that I really do have somewhat of a talent for my job in that I love to plan ahead.  I still hate math and spreadsheets and sitting under fluorescent lights for 8+ hours a day, but there are aspects that come somewhat naturally to me.  I like planning ahead and being organized.  I like it when I can help the agents in the call center with their scheduling problems and conflicts.  I like helping other departments with forecasting their call volume and scheduling their agents. I am getting much better at training the supervisors and team leads on using the workforce management computer programs, and leading meetings with a bunch of people around a conference room table, and it's possible that one day I won't dread having to stand in front of the new hire classes and talk about workforce expectations and answer questions.

Anyway, I want to go visit Mom two more times between now and Christmas, and I want to take a little vacation with my sweetie to celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary the first week of October.  We just went on a vacation to Cleveland to celebrate Greg's 40th birthday in April at the Cinema Wasteland convention, which means two things: One, he's super grateful because, even though I had a great time, he feels like it was his vacation and I think he kinda feels like he owes me one now.  Two, we spent a lot of money (relative to not going on vacation, anyway) and I think we both kinda feel like we shouldn't spend much again so soon.

There are new cheap flights between the Orlando area and Roanoke, which means we could go back to my "home" (it will always seem like home, but since I haven't lived there since 1988 I'll go ahead and add grammatically incorrect quote marks).  I feel guilty that I'm reluctant.  I should go back now while my 100-year old aunt is still around, I should go visit all those relatives I haven't seen in decades, I should go while my Mom is still around for me to tell about where I go and who I see.

That thought really stabs at me.  She would love to hear about me visiting "home", just LOVE it.  I could bring back pictures and stories of people who haven't been so good at staying in touch. Not to mention visiting my father's grave. And this would be a lovely time of year to visit southwestern Virginia, the Appalachian mountains. Not too cold but a little nippy, possibly leaves turning brilliant red and yellow.


It just doesn't seem fun, though, it seems like an obligation, which makes me feel guilty.  I wish I wanted to do this, I feel like I ought to do it, and honestly I feel like I ought to want to do it.

It's also an expensive option.  Even with the cheaper flights it's still a car rental plus gas plus hotel for 3 or 4 nights plus meals. I may be able to get good discount hotel rates through my company, but still.

Or... we could go to Universal and go to the new Wizarding World expansion.  Oh man, it looks SO fun.  We could stay onsite for two nights in the brand new super cute lower-priced Cabana Bay resort and get a Florida Resident discount; staying onsite would get us into the parks an hour before they open to the non-staying-onsite general public.  We could do the new Hogwarts Express train ride between Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, and the Gringott's ride.  It would be less expensive than going to Virginia, even factoring in meals and buying a reasonable amount (!) of Harry Potter crap.

Or we could just say home and spend a bit of money and time on fixing up our house, which has an ever-increasing list of things that need to be repaired or replaced or just fancied up.  That idea has a lot of appeal and would, in many ways, seem to be the most mature and adult option.  Plus a nice staycation would be relaxing.

What would I regret later?  How badly would it hurt me if my mother passed away before I went back to Virginia?  How guilty would I feel if I chose a children's book and an amusement park over an opportunity to delight my mother?

The thought of going back "home" after my mother isn't here to tell about it is just heartbreaking.  There is no one, no one, who shares my memories from my childhood.  I grew up without siblings in the house, and my father is gone, my aunt who lived next door is gone.  I have a few cousins who remember their own slice of childhood that sometimes overlapped with my own, but no one who knows it all like my own sweet Mom.  The neighbors next door who had an outhouse and raised bees, the way the snow drifted in the hilly backyard, the taste of the Silver Queen corn that Dad grew in the garden, the constant breeze from living in between two mountains. 

It's also worth considering that the Wizarding World is going to be crowded; the first week of October is not peak and kids are not out of school, but the new expansion will pack in tourists anyway.  If we waited to go in January we'd have nice (?) cool weather and the smallest crowds of the whole year.

I am sure of one thing, if I hesitate too long to book a Universal trip for October, it'll be too late.  All the media coverage of the Wizarding World will ensure sold-out onsite hotels very quickly.

I suppose I'm lucky, really.  Trying to make a decision between nothing but nice vacation options is a pretty good thing.

Certification

I am so very happy to be back home, in my own house with my own bed and my own stuff.  I like my stuff.

This is the first time I've ever been on a business training trip, and it was interesting to me how many others in the class were taking it so much less seriously.  To be fair, many of them were already using this very technical forecasting/scheduling program when I've never even seen it before, so they probably felt less worried about taking the final test and becoming officially certified.  But if a company is paying $3,000 plus travel expenses to send you to a class, shouldn't you be a little concerned that it would be bad to fail?

I don't know, maybe part of it is that all of the responsibility for using this thing falls on me, I'm not part of a large department of people who can share info and help each other.  Either I figure it out and do it right, or it won't get done at all.

Maybe I'm becoming the lady who has a stick up her butt.  That's also possible.  The second to  last day we got through the end of the manual at noon, and almost everyone left.  The instructor laughed at the rest of us who stayed to get another four hours of practice and called us his over-acheivers.

More stick-up-the-butt evidence was my getting annoyed at the others in class who wanted to know the most expensive restaurants to go to so they could take full advantage of their expense accounts.  Three nights out of the five, I went back to my hotel room after class, connected to my work VPN on my work laptop and actually worked while eating room service that I spent $20 on.  Including the tip.  I mean, my company is stupidly profitable and I'm certainly not worried about it going under or even downsizing, but still.

The other two nights I went out with three IT people from my company who just happened to be there attending coding meetings that week.  There was the very quiet, very skinny 29-year old semi-redneck geek woman who listens to country music, drinks energy drinks and alcohol, smokes cigarettes, eats fast food, considers 6 hours a lot of sleep, and gets sick once or twice a month. There was the skinny 27-year old 6'5 Christian man who has Bible tattoos, piercing rings in his earlobes, refuses to go to Hooters because it's not moral, spends hours online gaming, and seems to make a genuine effort to be kind all the time.  Then there was their boss, a 50-something guy who has five kids, is going through a divorce, has a pacemaker, is overweight, doesn't wear a seat belt, and spends a lot of time smiling.  None of these people knew who Quentin Tarantino was, or Joseph Gordon Levitt, and seemed genuinely confused and slightly disturbed when I spoke (briefly) about my husband's awesome exploitation/grindhouse/horror movie website.  (which is this)

I tried very hard to be social enough to at least bring me up to a Normal Human level of interaction, without forcing myself to be so far out of my comfort zone that it ended up hurting me.  It's a fine line.

A third bit of stick-up-the-butt evidence was the way the class members and the instructor all talked down about call center agents.  Excuse me, the term was call center a couple of decades ago, now with emails and voicemails and chats the term is contact center.  Often someone would make a disparaging remark about how demanding the contact center agents were about their schedules, or how sneaky they were with trying to get away with misbehaving, or how needy they were in general. This also happened with Big Boss Guy, who told me how he had hired several members of his team from the contact center department, and laughed when he said that they were underused and misappropriated resources well above a contact center agent role.

I hate that. It's disrespectful. And even if it's true some of the time, it's not true all of the time, and in my personal opinion, not even a majority.  I need to figure out a kind, non-confrontational way to tell people who say those things to get their heads out of their asses and stop being snotty and mean.

In my contact center, the job is hard as hell. They are taking incoming calls, but from basically people who are being transferred from somewhere else, and they're not even sure why. The agents have to get enough info about the caller to determine if they can even afford our stuff, and if they can, they have to sell them a vacation to take a timeshare tour.

It's genuinely a good deal, there is absolutely no deception involved, it's a good value for the money and a worldwide luxury brand, but still.  It is timeshare telemarketing.  They get hung up on all day. They get told NO at least 90 to 95% of the time.  All day, every day.  It's really, really hard.

And dammit to hell, if they do a good job, they get PAID.  I wonder if Big Boss knows how much, because all those commissions and bonuses and incentives add up.  The actual hourly wage is a fraction of the income for the good ones. And the bad ones... get fired.  No pressure!

I try really hard to be nice to them, to help them out with their schedules/time off/whatever, if I can.  And they are so nice to me, too. They appreciate it, they express it, and they give me high-fives and side-hugs whenever I go to the call center.  I mean contact center.

Anyway, I am feeling better about my job in general.  I got a raise a few weeks ago, they just paid thousands to train me on this new thing, so I'm taking that to mean they are confident in me and my future with them, even though my actual boss is still as remote and non communicative as ever.

(He didn't even tell me about the raise, I went in and asked for one after my one year anniversary, and he told me "my stock was solid" with him and he would see what he could do.  The next month it just showed up on my paycheck.)

After being gone for a week, I'm kind of looking forward to going in and working at my cubicle tomorrow. Relatively speaking, of course.

My own tiny personal break room

It may very well be kind of neurotic or anti-social to spend all my breaks in my car.  But I like the parking lot; this is my view.  And I get the best spot in the shade under the big tree because I get in so early.  (Yes, I'm Sheldon.)

I like sitting in my car and eating my lunch, or calling Greg, or calling Mom, or going on Twitter or playing a game on my phone.  It's way more relaxing to me than having to make small talk about congress or work or some popular tv show with a co-worker/stranger in the break room.

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain. ~ Dolly Parton

Driving home from work, we are on the 408 toll road heading east, going past downtown Orlando.  It's stormy pretty much every day during the summer afternoon commute, although not always this dramatically.

At least we are headed home, where even if it is windy and stormy, we will be cozy with our kitties.  Who may well be hiding in the back closet, but still under the same roof with us.

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn. ~ Emily Dickinson

This is actually the same intersection from my previous post, the one with the Poppy Z. Brite quote.  This time, though, it's morning, and I've just dropped Greg off for his stupid day of work and I'm on the 7-minute trip to my stupid day of work.

We went in extra early, and it was a lovely morning, really.

Watering the grass I'm standing on

Well, the job that I wasn't impressed with or interested in actually called and offered me the position, for 5k/year more than I'm making now.  I considered it, but turned it down because A) a lot of that extra money would be eaten up with gas and tolls, B) no pension, C) the work area was depressing, D) no paid PTO days or accruing PTO hours until January 2014, and E) they were just weird and disorganized and strange through the whole process.

The other place brought me in for a second interview.  They remain very interesting to me, but who knows -- we'll see if they come back with an actual job offer.

In the meantime, last week I did it.  I got up the courage and marched in.  I didn't mention to my boss that I know that a half dozen people have gotten many thousands of dollars in bonuses so far this year because of the abandon rate that I have worked to lower.  It's half of what it was last year before I was hired, and it's directly related to my being there to forecast how many calls we will get, schedule agents at the right times to answer the calls, and to set hiring parameters to make sure we have enough agents.  The supervisors and managers have a hand in keeping the abandon rate low by controlling when agents log off the phone for breaks/lunches/impromptu training, however they do it by looking at the call volume numbers from my forecast.

I did mention that he told me, nearly a year ago, that if I did a good job they would reward me, potentially with bonuses.  I asked him if he thought I had done a good job, and he said yes.  I pointed out that my major responsibilities are actually somewhat above my title of Analyst, most of what I do is at a Manager level (and I also reminded him that a couple of times lately he has accidentally referred to me as a Workforce Manager).  

He told me that he would be happy to set me up with a specific compensation plan where I would be paid bonuses based on a scale.  I said that'd be fine with me.  He said he would consult with the director of the call center (who also reports to him) to get his feedback on how that should be set up/measured.

He also told me that he sees changes happening within the next 6 months that would mean the creation of a new Workforce Manager position.  He said while he couldn't promote me into that position (I don't know why not…?) and it would have to be posted as an open job, he thought I would be the obvious candidate given my experience within the company.

So.  Now I'm waiting to hear back from him about what kind of comp plan, and I'm wondering how much of a factor the potential new position should be if I should actually get a job offer.

I also told him that I had been offered a job making more money and with less responsibilities.  I told him that I turned it down, and that I am happy working for this company, and that I think it's a good company (which is true).  He said that he would encourage me, and everyone, to go out into the job market and interview somewhere else occasionally just to "see what else is out there".  He said that can have an impact on the "grass is greener" assumption.

I see his point, but it had the opposite result for me; I have found out that I'm making less money that most others at my level and I'm doing much higher-level things.  When interviewers ask me why I am considering leaving my current position, all I have to do it describe my job, and that answers that.

Still.  I do like it here, and I like having more responsibility.  Also, I heard a great saying recently:  The grass is greener where you water it.  So I'm trying to water my grass here.

For the past several weeks I've been consciously trying to let work go, to NOT check my email when I'm home, to NOT bring my laptop home, and to stop and question the situation if I start to feel pressured or stressy, to hand off work whenever possible.  I've found out that a lot of the stress and pressure I'm putting on myself, and I've been focusing on NOT doing that.  I still think about work when I'm at home, but less.  It's actually made a difference, a noticeable one.

Everything is defined by my head, really. I just need to fix my head!

I had two interviews this week.  One was for a company that processes orders in a call-center style way, and uses the same technology as a call center.  This company wouldn't do an initial phone interview, wouldn't give me any idea of a salary range beforehand, brought me in for a single 30-minute interview with one person, showed me a windowless, crowded workspace, quizzed me on call center workforce terminology (What are the three components of Average Handle Time? What are the steps to create a forecast?) and, ultimately, can go suck it.  I'm pretty sure they are not going to call me with a job offer despite the fact that the interview went okay, but if they did, that'd be a big fat NO unless they offered me a brazillion dollars more than I'm currently making.

The second interview was at a place that had already done an extensive phone interview with me and given me a salary range.  The benefits are better than what I have now (including, oh my god, a pension) and would begin on day one.  The job description sounds like a combination of challenging but reasonable, and I'd actually be part of a team.  (Maybe someone would even notice if I didn't come in.)  It's also an extremely large, profitable, stable company.

The only negative would be that it's even farther away from home and I couldn't carpool with Greg anymore.  It would be around a 40-minute drive, and that would be taking freaking toll roads.  Ugh.

I think the interview went well, but you never really know.  I'm hoping they call me in for a second interview.

I tried to go to work this week with a different perspective.  While it does feel weird that I have such a distant boss (did I mention that he came to my building for a meeting with me recently and I realized he doesn't know exactly where my desk is?) I do also like being autonomous.  It also occurred to me that I have a lot of power.  I suppose it's odd, but since I am doing work so far above my actual title I'm the one setting policies and putting procedures in place and telling the managers and HR and even the director how things should work, and they are all listening to me.  I do feel underpaid and bit undervalued, but at the same time I feel heard and respected.  That's certainly something.

I'm going to keep looking and I'm still cautiously hopeful about the one job possibility, but I'm also going to try to frame my current job differently in my head.  It's all about perspective, really.  I'm working on having a more positive perspective at work, on not putting so much pressure on myself (one benefit of having a boss that doesn't know what I do day-to-day is no real deadlines, ever, so why am I putting so many on myself?), and not thinking about work EVER when I'm not actually at work.

This weekend I've tried really hard not to think about it.  I didn't bring home my computer, and I haven't checked my work email even once.  I still had an unpleasant work dream a couple of nights ago, but maybe it'll get better.

Someday, I'd like to dream about something other than my job.

Last Saturday marked the one year anniversary of my last day at my previous job.  What a long way I've come since then, and how much I've changed.

I used to spend a lot of the time just monitoring incoming phone lines and the agents taking calls; I'd switch agents from one line to another if necessary, track down agents who were missing, and try to make sure that calls weren't holding too long waiting to be answered.  While I was doing that, I'd have plenty of time to do other things if everything was working okay - I mainly just had to keep a close eye and react quickly when anything started to be a problem.  But I was good at it, and could head off most problems, so I had time to write blog entries and read message boards and blogs.  I tried to do it discreetly, and unless I am in complete denial, I looked busy while switching back and forth between screens.  You know, as opposed to my coworkers trying to hide the fact that they were reading magazines or playing games on their phones.

I did a good job, I really did.  But it certainly wasn't challenging.  And this new job that I've been in since the beginning of August last year has been nothing but challenging.

I've learned to speak up.  Now when I have meetings with directors and senior directors and vice presidents I can keep my head enough to talk, answer questions, and even ask them questions.  I've also learned to speak up for myself, both when defending my work or ideas and also about HR related issues when they refused to honor the verbal agreement about PTO time/paid holidays.

I've learned to do a buttload of things I'd never done before in NICE IEX TotalView, the program I use to forecast future call volume and schedule ~200 agents.  I had no idea how little I knew, but within the first few months of working here I'd read the entire manual and most of the program's help screens.

I have a much different perspective on the industry in which I work.  I can see how this company is structured on a level I didn't have access to at my previous job, and going to that convention in April gave me a whole different view of how everything fits together and what other companies do.

I've learned to train people: I've trained dozens of managers, supervisors and team leads on the program we all use to see schedules and watch agents.  I've learned to lead meetings and take control if it gets off track or loses focus.

I've had to learn to be less intimidated by people, or at the very least to hide it from them.  I've struggled with taking things personally, and have hopefully gotten better about having the perspective to know it's almost never personal.

But here's the other part:  I know that I have made a massive difference in the way this call center works.  Before I came they forecast future call volume on a spreadsheet, guessed at how many people they needed to staff the call center, and did schedules for the agents on a spreadsheet.  They had no way of knowing if the agents were actually working the right schedule, if they were missing for any part of their shift, and whenever anything came up for the agents to attend (like meetings or training) they just pulled agents off the phone at random.  They couldn't see how call volume was likely to go later in the day, or whether they were under- or overstaffed.

But... here's the other other part.  I don't think they, in particular my boss or the VP that he reports to, really have any idea what I do, how well I do it, or how much of a difference it's making.  The managers know how much of a difference it's making, because it's directly affecting them.  But the call center director has only been there for 2 months, so he didn't see what it was like before.

(I was very entertained to discover that, upon his first tour of the call center when he had his final interview, the new director guy asked where the "workforce department" was, and was visibly shocked to hear that it was in fact just a "workforce person".  But this person does the forecasting, and all the scheduling?  Yes, he was told.  She sets staffing levels?  She approves time off requests?  What about scheduling training and meetings?  She does that, she does that too, she does that too, he was told repeatedly.)

I suppose part of it is me, I could have done more to explain what I was doing and how it all worked.  Honestly, it took a few months for it to really sink in that they had no clear idea of what the whole concept of workforce management really was.  I was going merrily along, fixing things and setting policies and figuring stuff out, and kind of assuming that someone was keeping track of me.  But now I really don't think that was the case.

The final straw was when I found out that the three managers, the director and the senior director (my boss) all got big bonuses based on the extremely low abandon rate, which is low because of my ability to manage the call volume and workforce.  I mean, that's what they hired me to do, isn't it?  And maybe they thought I wouldn't find out about that huge bonus that they all got, or maybe they just don't give a fuck.  

So, I got mad, and then I started working on a plan to go to my boss and ask... for what?  A raise, a promotion, a bonus, some sort of acknowledgement of the degree to which I rock?    I'm still thinking about it, and I'm still not sure.  And I also updated my LinkedIn profile and my resume and applied for a couple of jobs.

On Wednesday I had a phone interview for a job that sounds SO perfect.  It sounds challenging, but without the massive stress of my current job.  I'd be replacing someone who is relocating, and be part of a team.  I haven't heard back yet about an in-person interview, but I'm cautiously hopeful.

I suppose if I could hang in for another year or two things might change completely.  The new director guy is backing me up with my pleas for help, to hire at least a couple of others who would do workforce stuff too, but my boss keeps saying it isn't in the budget.  The truth is that they are all sales people who don't see value in a non-revenue-producing role.  It's possible that they may do it next year, and it's possible that in a couple of years I could be heading up a whole workforce department.  But do I even want to do that?  

This job is challenging, but in a way that is exhausting me.  I am so wiped out when I get home from work I barely have any energy to be creative, or to get things done around the house.  I hate that.

And truly, the thought of leaving just makes me so happy.  I am really grateful for the various things I've learned while at my current job, and the opportunities for growth, and the experience.  But I am ready to go somewhere else.

Getting Oriented

I was sitting at my desk at work one week ago today, having read my sister's email about how she and her husband and my brother and his wife planned to take Mom out to lunch for Mother's day, and I thought, and thought.  This could be her last Mother's day, how much would it mean to her to have her three kids all there together, wouldn't I just love to see her again.  Could I make it work? Could we afford it?  And I asked Greg what he thought.  And I'm sure we all know what he thought.  And I sent an email to my boss the drill sergeant and requested Friday and Monday off, and he answered 45 seconds later and said okay.  I called and spoke to LaDonna the retirement home director and she said (in what has to be the strongest Southern drawl I have ever heard, and I am from Georgia) that it would be just lovely for me to see Mom for Mother's day and of course I could stay in the model apartment again with no charge and it would be just fine.

I drove up on Friday, had dinner at the retirement home Friday night, and gave and received lots of Mom hugs.   Mom actually seems better, more happy and more energetic and just more on top of things than when I was there in March.  I tried to talk her into going to lunch with me on Saturday, because she just never gets to leave that building, but she was afraid it would make her too tired and she wanted to be okay on Sunday.  

She kept asking questions about where she was.  Where exactly is Alpharetta?  Is it near Atlanta?  Why don't they show it all the time on the weather map on the news?  Was there a Walmart nearby?  A Walgreens?  A Red Lobster?  And I finally realized she was trying to get a picture in her head, she'd been in that building nearly constantly and she didn't even know what was around her.

So I took her driving, and we drove down the street and all the way around the big mall nearby, and I pointed out the Target and the Ruby Tuesday and the Chick-Fil-A. We drove past big office buildings with brightly colored flowers planted in front. I assured her that I had checked and there was no IHOP, no Walgreens, and no Red Lobster anywhere close, unfortunately.  We came back and I parked across the street and we looked at her retirement home from there, she could see the entrance and the parking lot and the landscaping all around and the McDonald's drive through next door.  We picked out where her apartment windows would be around the back.

I showed her a map on my phone of the area, and how Alpharetta is right next to Roswell, so if the weather map on TV shows Roswell she should just assume it'll be the same in Alpharetta.

I don't think that even with her walker she is strong enough to walk very far, so while she could maybe shop in a drug store, going through a mall or even a Target would be too much for her.  Next time I go up there I'm going to take her out to lunch with me, though.

Lunch was awful in that way that going to a restaurant on Mother's day is inevitably going to be awful; it was confused and crowded and noisy and we had to wait too long for everything.  But still, we were all together. And Mom and I shared an entree, and our salmon and broccoli was pretty delicious.

The best part was just sitting with Mom, reading the paper or watching Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune or America's Funniest Home Videos (it's way better with the sound off and the closed-captioning on).

Going back to work today was crap, but I'll get through the backlog of work, and it was worth it.  I'm determined to go back in a couple of months.

*High five*

Some days at work I am in the building where my official cubicle/desk is, with the team of people who are quiet and geeky, who walk past me in the morning looking at the floor and not saying Good Morning.  And some of them look a little surprised if I manage to say Good Morning to them as they go by.

It seems like most of the people who are in that part of the building are quiet and geeky.  The IT people, the Voice Services people, the contractors from an outside technical company.  Most of them are men, and many of them are Indian, all of them walk around tapping on their phones without looking up.  The ones who aren't actually carrying around open laptops, anyway.

One day I walked through the parking lot and arrived at the door just ahead of an Indian guy.  I beeped my card and the door unlocked and I opened it for him, standing behind it.  He looked kind of stricken, and stood there in front of the doorway trying to persuade me to let him hold it for me.  I smiled at him in my impersonation of a friendly office worker, and tried to make a little joke:  "I can be a gentlemen." He finally went through the door, looking so sad I ended up feeling bad about it.

Some days I work in the building where the call centers are.  The main call center I work with is a fairly high pressure sales environment, with incoming calls that are all identical, so every single call is the same spiel, and the vast majority don't buy.  They are expected to maintain a 6% sales average, which means 94% of the callers don't buy from them.  That's depressing.  They get an hourly wage, but they also get commission, and everyone is very focused on sales.  They have upbeat music coming from dozens of built-in speakers in the ceiling, and the supervisors and the managers walk around yelling (yelling) COME ON PEOPLE, TODAY IS A GOOD DAY, LET'S MAKE IT HAPPEN, LET'S BRING IN THOSE SALES, WE CAN DO IT!  *clapclapclapclapclapclap*  WE CAN DO IT!  They have smaller incentives that vary by day: make three sales today and get an extra $50, sell a particular destination and get $25 per sale; and bigger incentives, like every sale during a quarter is one entry into the drawing, and the prize is a car.  (A nice car, too.)

I kind of like it there, although it is really hard to focus on figuring out how to solve a problem or put together a complicated spreadsheet.  People smile at me, and say Good morning or Happy Friday.  Probably a dozen people have come up to me and just introduced themselves, shaking my hand and looking into my eyes.  If I stay over there for a whole day, I am almost guaranteed at least one spontaneous and sincere high five.

I kind of like the high fives.

The other call center I worked in today for the first time.  It is people making outbound calls, which is much, much more difficult.  They have dozens and dozens of calls every day, and if they are doing good they make one or two sales.  They get hung up on a lot, even though these people are actually customers of my company who have expressed interest in hearing about a timeshare.

So this call center is even more focused on being energetic and positive.  At the beginning of the day, they have a 5-minute motivational speech given by someone who stands up on a desk at the front of the room and leads everyone in a pep rally that involves a lot of yelling, hooting and clapping.  Everything is positive, everyone is smiling, everyone is talking about what a great job people are doing. The music is extremely high-energy dance music, and it's extremely loud.

I was looking forward to the energy, but it wore me down after a couple of hours.  I waited until today to spend time there because today I had a lot of fairly mindless data-entry type stuff to do, but even still it was so hard to concentrate.

These people are even more outgoing and friendly.  One guy who had a smile that reminded me of Arsenio Hall came up our of nowhere and asked me to help him with an Excel spreadsheet (I think my laptop made him assume I was IT).  Another person just randomly handed me a chocolate candy, and multiple people introduced themselves and shook my hand.

I'm kind of fascinated by the different personality types in the sales departments vs the technical departments.  I know which one I'm more likely to fit in with, but I also know which one I have more fun in.

GOBAMA

I had a meeting with my boss today.  This is my hands-off, non-bossy boss.  The one for whom I've worked for 3 months now with exactly 3 meetings, 0 emails and 0 phone calls.

I like working independently, I really do.  I do also have a tendency to think the worst. I am not exaggerating when I say that when I tried to imagine how this meeting might go today I teared up slightly, thinking about how I would feel if I got fired.

Did I mention I was the one who called this meeting?  Anyway.  Not only did I not get fired, but my boss praised my performance so far and talked about the possibility of my taking on a larger role within the company.

Whew!

We also chatted about the election, and he said that he couldn't vote: He's Canadian.  What?  Those Canadians are positively indistinguishable from regular people; I had no idea.  I told him I voted already, and he seemed to be curious, so I told him: I am a Democrat, I said, a liberal, and - after a slight hesitation - an atheist.

Me, too, he said.  Right down the line, check check check, he said.  What?  I work for a Canadian democratic liberal atheist?  Wow.

He's thinking of becoming an American citizen, just so he can vote.  He spent a few minutes ranting about how Obama's health care plan is not socialism, and how Obama is sure to win 300+ electoral college votes even if he doesn't win the popular vote (ha). I'm not sure it's really a good idea to rant about politics in an office setting.  Or maybe it is okay, but only when they agree with me.

I feel more comfortable and more encouraged at work now.  So that's good.  Now if only my chosen candidate (aka, the right candidate) wins tonight, it'll be a great day all around.

Obama has seemed so much more like a regular person than other politicians. When I found out he was a Mac guy, my opinion of him went up a notch. When I found out he'd read all the Harry Potter books, up another notch. Weirdly, when I found out he was a smoker, he seemed all the more human, not like someone who had been raised from birth to rule America, and went up another notch.  But the thing that really got me was when I found out that he was a member of a book co-op in Chicago.  I had never even known such a thing existed before: a co-op,  for books!  Wow, what life must be like in the big cities, I tell you.  But what does it say that Barack Obama was a member of a book co-op?

Well, I love him for that, I really do.  I voted for him, and I will feel genuine joy and hope for the future of our country when he wins tonight.

I'm Tense.

Hurricane Isaac is turning more and more westward, which is good news for us here in Orlando. However, my husband has to go drive his delivery truck all over Tampa tomorrow, which will be getting the outer bands of the storm. He can tell me that he knows how to stay safe, and he won't do anything dangerous, and his company won't ask him to do anything dangerous, but the truth of those statements don't help at all. He was already in for a pretty crappy week, with all the Republican National Convention traffic, and now I'm just glad that he has a vacation day on Friday so it's at least a short week.

I did make progress last week at work, verifying that those six sections should be combined into one, and I got that done. I'm getting closer to actually having to forecast how many agents will be needed and when, and actually start putting together schedules. I did do this at my last job, but not frequently, and not on the same scale as this. Part of my brain feels pretty confident that I can do it and do it well, but part of my brain just wishes it were done already so I can stop feeling like there's a cloud of potential doomy failure hanging over me.

On Thursday afternoon I was moved me to a new area at work, a much larger cubicle in a very quiet department in a building across the road from the call center.  They really did listen to my complaints and they worked to find a solution, an empty space in a technical department. Everyone there is very quiet and not overly friendly; I got there early Friday morning and said "Good morning!" to the first couple of people who came in, but when they both just looked at the floor and mumbled "morning" at me without looking up or introducing themselves I kind of gave up. They are certainly not the outgoing sales people that I was surrounded by in the call center. I was doing tedious work all day Friday, having to go back and manually combine the historical call data for all six of those sections, for every day, for thirteen weeks. I don't know, maybe I'll get used to the silence and the people, but for now I kind of miss the energy of the call center.

Here's a picture I took with my iPhone on the way home from work one day last week, at 4:30pm. The sky doesn't look like that today, it's been that solid gray that, for people up North, means snow.

Today is Friday

I'm unexpectedly disoriented.

Last week I tried to stay busy.  Up with Greg every morning at 6:30, working out, going to free classes at the library and the Apple store and the Workforce Central Florida office. I got more cleaning done than usual, and made dinner for Greg every night.

This week I feel further adrift. I had a weird, almost panicky moment on Wednesday when I realized that I had no idea what day of the week it was.

I kind of hated going to work every day.  Especially with my hellaciously long commute, I was gone from home for 10+ hours every workday.  Before work was filled with getting ready for work, and after work I was tired.  I felt like life was passing me by while I was busy going to work, being at work, coming home from work, or recovering from having been at work.

Even though I didn't want to do it, I guess it defined me, in a lot of ways.  It's like a giant chunk of who I was is gone now.  Even if who I was was a person who resented the hell out of having to spend so much time away from home.

Greg has been awesome, as usual.  He's encouraging me to go visit my Mom in the next couple of weeks, and I guess he's right.  If When I find a new job I won't be able to take time off right away.

I'm a little off-balance right now, but it's getting better.  I do at least know what day it is today.

It's Over.

The second week of March I found out that my little department of 8 was basically being eliminated.  We would find out more details in a week or two, we were told, but as of April 16 my job would be gone.  They would be creating new jobs, they said, and the 8 of us could apply for those, but they didn't know how many, or what would happen to the rest of us.

Weeks passed.  April 16 passed.  I dragged out my old resume and, with the help of my good friend Wooz, polished it up.  I searched around online and applied for some jobs.  I had two phone interviews that both started with them telling me that they were sorry but the job had just been filled.

More weeks passed.  The stress at work mounted, especially since they had told us not to tell anyone; there would be an official announcement and until then we had to keep it quiet.

When will we get answers, we asked repeatedly.  Maybe this week, they kept saying.

Months passed.  I finally realized I needed to think of it as a reprieve, the longer it dragged on the more time I'd have to find something else.

Then the morning of May 21 they brought us all into a conference room, with our boss, her boss, and the HR lady.  They were creating 2 new jobs, similar to our current roles, that the 8 of us could apply for.  Those of us that didn't get them could apply for a job going back on the phones in the call center.  They said the same thing was happening to the marketing department, and we could also apply for those newly created jobs.  Most of our job duties would be transitioned to the supervisors, to admin, and some would just be eliminated.  They offered us a bit of severance, which I wasn't expecting. The transition, interviewing for jobs, etc. would take three weeks. Anyone not taking a newly created job or going back to the phones would have their last day on Friday June 8.

I had my last day on Friday.

I did apply for the two positions, but there were others in the department that had literally been doing the exact job description duties, and I hadn't.  Most of my daily duties were given to supervisors. I also applied for a newly created copywriting job in the marketing department, but it was the same situation there, someone(s) had already been doing that.  I wasn't a bit surprised when I didn't get either one.

The stress of not knowing what would happen or when it would happen was pretty intense.  People at work have been snappish, tense and uncomfortable.  And sad, knowing that our very close family was being broken up.

We had one last potluck a couple of weeks ago, our boss brought in barbecue pulled pork in her crockpot and someone else made baked mac and cheese.  Our department always decorated for holidays, putting up American flags or shamrocks or hearts or snowflakes, and last week all of the decorations were spread out in a conference room for people to take.  (I took most of the St. Patrick's day stuff.)  Our boss got too sad and ended up not being able to go in the room.

On Friday, driving to work and walking into the building was surreal, knowing it would be the last time, ever. After sixteen years. I started working there in January of 1996.

Our boss had set up a nice breakfast in a conference room, as a way for the whole company to come by and say good-bye.  Out of the eight of us two got the new positions, two decided to go back on the phones, and four of us took the severance and left.

People kept coming up to me with tears in their eyes.  I hugged so many people.  I didn't cry.  Everyone said they'd miss me so much, that I was just so nice and so helpful.  What were they going to do without us?  Keep in touch, people said, look for me on Facebook.

You can be a writer now, people kept saying.  You can find a job that's more suited to your creativity, my boss' boss said.  You will end up being glad this happened, my boss' boss' boss said.

So many people there have worked there for a decade or two.  We sat and shared stories of how things were back in the olden days, and so many people told stories of how I'd been nice to them or helped them out.  I was surprised to realize that two separate co-workers, independently of each other and unbeknownst to each other, had both given me the same nickname:  angel.

It was in the quiet moments, sitting with my co-workers, when no one was actually speaking to me or looking at me and I was just watching everyone, when I almost cried.  "Don't cry until you leave," Mom had advised on the phone the night before.

And I didn't.  I had my final paperwork meeting with the HR lady.  She told me that she had been able to see so clearly, in the copywriting interview, that I know what my passion is.  Follow your passion, she said to me intensely, leaning over her desk. You know what you are good at, go do it!

I said goodbye to my sweet boss one more time, and she cried.  I hugged my co-workers one last time, and several of them cried.  My desk was empty, I had cleaned it out completely the day before. I signed off the computer and walked out. For the last time.

I called Greg to tell him I was on my way home and that's when I cried.

I felt pretty numb for the rest of the day Friday.  Greg said we were celebrating, we were not sad.  We ordered a pizza for dinner, a treat for us, and had champagne.

Saturday Greg took me to Yankee Candle and Hallmark and Barnes and Noble.  Buy something, he said.  Get yourself a little present.  We're fine!  I bought a couple of tarts and birthday cards and a Christopher Moore book on sale.

We had lunch at California Pizza Kitchen, and over salad and pasta Greg asked me if I wanted to tell him about how it went at work on Friday.  I teared up and said, Not yet.

I told Greg about how I didn't want to take time to relax, like so many had advised me.  I wanted to start off Monday morning with serious intent, and get going.  Why waste time?  Greg gently told me that I had spent the past three months under a ton of stress, and the very first thing I needed to do was unwind.

He's right.  I am wound up.

But I'm all right.  I'm extremely emotional about saying good-bye to my co-workers, many of whom I've worked with for the whole sixteen years.  I feel really strange about not having a job to go to.  But at the same time, I am enthusiastic about finding something great.

As I keep telling Greg when he looks at me all squinty:  I'm okay.

My Life, Full of Stress and Parties and Pain and Love

I'm fairly stressy lately.  Things are changing.  I am fine during the day, but then I wake up in the middle of the night and immediately terror and panic charge towards my poor sleepy brain.  Even if I fight them off and force my head to think of other things (if I were a crew member on Voyager, what would my job be, and would Chakotay and I end up dating?) enough panic gets in through the chinks to keep me awake for hours.  

Jaw pain doesn't help.  I'm going back to the dentist tomorrow to have my nightguard adjusted. My bite is uneven, hitting primarily on the right side, so I get more pressure there, and my teeth and jaws end up aching if I clench my teeth in my sleep, which apparently I do frequently.  I guess it's a sign of being too stressed out that I want to punch everyone who tells me to relax.

Greg and I did have a really nice long Memorial Day weekend, and I relaxed, at least a little.  We have friends who are moving to Georgia, and they had a going-away party on Sunday.  Despite occasional rain showers courtesy of Beryl, it was a fun party, a celebration of our friends.  Kids running around and splashing in the pool, adults making alcholic Butterbeer and grilling chicken wings and bacon-wrapped shrimp, lots of picture-taking and laughter and hugs.  We've known this couple for a long time.  Since before they were even a couple, much less married and with a son.  It was a nice party and a fun day.

Then on Monday, Memorial day, I open up the laptop and pull up Facebook and the first thing I see there on my screen is my father's grave.  My cousin in Virginia visited the family cemetery for Memorial day and she posted a photo for me.  Despite how unexpected and kind of shocking that was (I may have cried a few tears, just for a minute) it was a very sweet thing for her to do.  Mom said she'd like to see it, too, so I'll print it out and mail it to her. 

Yesterday a pretty cool thing happened:  We made the last payment on my car.  What a good feeling!  Plus, next month we will make the last payment on Greg's car.  No more car payments at all!  Boy, that'll make a huge difference in our monthly bills.  It's a relief.

So overall my stress is manageable.  Most of the time I'm fine, I am even hopeful about the future.  I would say 94% of the time I am looking forward to the next phase of my life, and 6% of the time I am terror-stricken and panicky. 

But I'm glad I have nice, thoughtful friends and family.

Kittens > Work

I hate this.  There is something going on at work and I've been directed not to talk about it, so I'm afraid to write about it here, even though as far as I know no one from work reads my blog.  But it is all I can think about, any other thoughts that happen to make their way into my head get pushed out of the way sooner or later by thoughts and worries about work.  We are supposed to have a big meeting on April 4, so maybe I'll be able to talk about it after that.  Maybe I'll have answers then, I don't have any real facts right now anyway.

Greg and I are planning to go see The Hunger Games movie soon, although it might not be this weekend because, somewhat ironically, I have to work.

Greg's birthday is on April 5, and his birthday gift will be a kitten. Greg absolutely loves cats, and has never had a little baby kitten. 

When we went to the Humane Society 6 years ago we planned to adopt a kitten, but then Greg got completely distracted by the full-grown adult cats. We had to adopt one of the adults, he insisted, the adult cats are more likely to be put down since everybody wants kittens. I argued that so many kittens are born every day and not all of them do get adopted, plenty of kittens are put down too.  But it's MORE likely they'll get adopted, Greg insisted, and then when an adult siamese cat came over and jumped up on his lap, that was the end of it. She is a very decisive cat. So we brought her home and named her Sydney.

I knew Greg couldn't go back in the Humane Society and see all the poor potentially doomed adult cats again without getting sidetracked from wanting a kitten, so when a co-worker (See?  Work again!  Every thought leads back to work) mentioned having a new litter of kittens, I said we'd take one.  Last Saturday we went to meet the kittens and pick one out (One, I told Greg. ONE.) and holy crapmuffins, they are just the cutest little things with their pointy tails and their blue eyes and their wobbly attempts to claw their way up on the couch with us.

We'll pick her up after work on Wednesday April 4 (Work! That'll be the day of the meeting. Okay, stop thinking about work) and the next day will be Greg's birthday.  We took that day and the next day off, so we'll have a four-day weekend to celebrate the anniversary of Greg being born, get to know the new member of our family, take her to the vet for a check up, and introduce her to Sydney.  Hopefully that'll go fairly smoothly and fang-free, we're planning to restrict the teeny fluffball in one room for the first day or two, then gradually get them together.

Madame Sydney might wake up to acknowledge a kitten

Possibly the long weekend/mini-vacation will also include watching lots of movies and having Chinese food delivered, we'll see.

She really is adorable, as all kittens are.  She's got blue eyes and fluffy gray fur with a few little spots and streaks of white.  To continue on the tradition of naming cats after movie characters (Sydney is from High Art) Greg wants to name her Alabama (from True Romance).  Alabama was the hero of that movie, maybe our teensy little fluffball will turn out to be heroic as well.

I Still Don't Know What I Was Waiting For

"I still don't know what I was waiting for

And my time was running wild

A million dead end streets

Every time I thought I'd got it made

It seemed the taste was not so sweet

Then I turned myself to face me

But I never caught a glimpse

Of how the others must see the faker

I'm much too fast to take that test."

~ Changes, David Bowie

Every time I think things at work are so bad, just SO very bad, they get worse. It's darkly hilarious to me now that just a few months ago I was worried about vital programs not working, about not being adequately trained, and more recently about having a smaller desk in a noisier place.

I have always struggled with how much to write about my job. I wouldn't want to be Dooced. And really, people whining about incomprehensible corporate policies, their annoying co-workers quoting nonsense from Fox News, or the unfairness of being passed over for a raise is, typically, pretty boring, right? Blah blah blah. Who cares.

"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everybody, and they meet at the bar." ~ Drew Carey

I've spent 16 years at this company working at a job that is good enough. It's not my life's work, I've never felt that it was any kind of calling. I look at lists of numbers and put numbers into reports and spreadsheets. It's not like I'm saving people's lives or anything. It's not meaningful.

Next week I'm driving up to Georgia to visit Mom. I wonder if I ought to cancel the trip, but I can't, she's looked forward to it for so long, and I know that she would be deeply disappointed. So would I. I'll drive back on Friday, and be home with my sweetie for my birthday on Saturday.

Then back at work for whatever Monday brings.

I'll be 46 years old. Everything is changing.

David Bowie performing Changes live 1973

Routine Interrupted

My department is open 8am to 9pm, which means one (potentially reluctant) person has to be there until 9pm.  We have one lady who likes that shift well enough to work it three weeks out of the month; the one remaining week is covered through a rotation with the other four of us. This week it was my turn. 

I absolutely hate working until 9pm.  My commute is an hour, but I can cut it down to 30 minutes if I pay for toll roads.  A year's worth of toll road tolls, even just one way, is over $1,000, so yeah, I'm not spending that.  But I do pony up the cashe maybe one day every couple of weeks if there's a pressing reason, like if I am sick or in a big hurry.  Or if I have to work until freakin' 9:00pm.

Greg and I are both big fans of boring routine, which is proof that we are elderly.  At around 6 we have dinner together (Greg usually cooks), we hang out and talk, we go on our computer(s) and check email and Facebook (during which time we IM each other interesting links or pictures).  At 8:00pm I call Mom.  At 8:15 or so we give the kitty some treats, this is now mandatory even though I have begun to question the wisdom of starting up that particular habit.  (Siamese cats are sure noisy if they want something.)  Then Greg and I and the kitty get cozy on the couch and watch tv.  Around 9:30 or 10 we start to get ready for bed, and then we sit in bed reading until around 11:00pm.

Getting home at 10pm blows that away completely.  Taking the toll roads and getting home at 9:30pm is a little better, but not much.  I really miss our dinner time and our hanging out time and tv time.  I do not necessarily miss kitty treat time, although I do miss kitty curled up on my lap time.

Next week I am back on an early shift, and I am extremely glad that this work week is OVER.


I hate to say that there are any good parts about having the late shift, such is the intensity of my loathing, but it has given me extra time to work out in the morning. My new Denise Austin dvd has a 5-minute stretching warm-up, four different intense 10-minute cardio workouts, and a 5-minute stretching cool-down. This week I've been doing the two 5-min stretching and two of the cardio, for a total workout time of 30 minutes.  I've been sweating a lot more. And I've actually been liking it! Next week I will have to get up appallingly early if I want to continue, so we'll see how that goes.    

It sure would be nice to have a job with the same hours every week.

Ready for a Weekend

Yesterday at work I was walking back from the restroom and I met a co-woker chickie in the hallway.   She's one of those co-workers that I really don't know well, but I like her, and we sometimes chat a while when she has to call my department for something.  She appeared to be just arriving, she was carrying her purse and holding a Starbucks cup out in front of her like it was a lifeline pulling her along.

I held the hallway door open for her.

"Hi!  Happy Friday!"  I smiled at her.

"No, it's not," Chickie said.

"Aw, why not?"

Chickie heaved a big breath and said, "I ran out of gas on the interstate."

"Oh, no!"

"I had to walk to a gas station, and carry back one of those things full of gas, and I was trying to put it in my tank on the side of the road, and people were honking at me."  She made a sad face.

I held open the door to the call center for her.  "Oh man, that's awful.  Well... at least it's Friday, right?"

She stopped walking and looked at me.  "I have to work tomorrow."

I know how that is, you really can't be all Yay Friday when you have to work on the weekend.

"Oh." I said. "Boy, you need a hug."

I was kind of kidding, really, but then she held out her arms, so I gave her a squeezy hug, being careful not to hit her coffee.  I hope her day got better.

My days at work have all sucked since we got even more bad news this week.  Nobody at work has hugged me either, although Greg told me that he's been trying to be extra nice to me at home because I'm so sad and stressy about work.  Which made me tear up a little.

Oh well, it's Saturday morning now, and unlike sad Chickie, I do have the weekend off.  Yay for that!