Watch Out Here I Come

I believe we left off with my going to an interview last Friday. Interview is a relative term since it was for a temp agency (A-HR). Which is basically a meet, greet and test kind of thing. They want to know how well you will interview and find out what marketable skills you have that best suit the needs of their clients. I was greatly surprised by the results of my tests.

The Tests given were for numeric, words per minute, Excel and Word. I figured that I would do poorly on the numeric and average at the Excel. Turns out that it was my typing that was rusty at a measly 35 wpm. I of course think I will be retesting sometime in the very near future as I once tested at 90 wpm and the 35 wpm will vastly reduce the job opportunities. It really shouldn’t have surprised me that I did 77 strokes-per-minute at numeric since that’s pretty much what I do all day with the campaign I am on now.

I got an overall rating of 74% on the Excel and 81% on Word.

My interviewer asked what job I didn’t want to do again and are you surprised to know I said Call Centre? Its mind numbingly tedious, I have the same conversation every 3.5 minutes at an average of 127 times in an 8 hour shift. I need a bit more of a challenge, sometimes a bit more pressure and chaos – after all that’s what I’m good at and complaining all the while secretly my soul burns for it. Don’t get me wrong it’s not that I hate it just that I have higher expectations of myself than this job can afford me. So far I’ve worked the empty-headed job, the so strenuous it almost killed me job and now the rinse lather and repeat job. If that isn’t from one end of the spectrum and back again I don’t know what else it is. Can’t I please find something in the middle?

Aside from that for the first time in my life a FEMALE co-worker asked me to go out with the GIRLS and I accepted. This was shortly followed by her coming to my house to help me pick out an OUTFIT. Tomorrow I’m going to her house so she can do an emergency hair MAKE-OVER! Good lord I’m turning into a girl (I just spent 2 hours in the bathroom trying out a new hairstyle) what next? I’m actually quite excited but if you’ve read me before you know I spend less than 30 minutes doing shower, make-up and hair combined. I don’t mind looking decent but I’ve NEVER been the kind of female who preened herself. Oh and here’s the kicker – can you guess where we girls are going?

Do you really want to know?

I’m almost embarrassed because I’ve never been before.

It’s dare I say it a…

MALE REVUE!

Baby, roll those dice!

I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet but things have been extremely busy around here. Besides working which pretty much leaves me mentally drained with no desire to sit in front of the damnable machine there has been Christmas shopping and now Dash and I are toying with the idea of moving North again.

Over the weekend I had some horrible stomach thing that had me in agony at both ends. That was intensified by some In-law cliché hoop-la which basically left Dash and I tired, as this nonsense has been going on for 3 years now. I won’t get into it because I’m not the bashing kind and the story is to long to tell basically the women don’t approve because I have a mind of my own and speak my opinions and won’t just happily follow their ideals.

At any rate it effects my 11 year old more than it should and we are putting a stop to that now.

Monday was technical hell at work, systems rebooting on their own, freezing up and queues filling up for one person and not others, etc. Tuesday the owners were in so the TL’s were running around intensely upset and taking it out on us. Today I picked-up a shift to offset the Sunday I was sick. Through all of this I have been amazingly up beat laughing at all the absurdity.

I got a call back on a resume’ I put in 2 weeks ago and will be meeting with HR on Friday to take tests and talk about my goals so I’ll have a job to go to after the holidays hopefully.

Dash found a job up North whose starting pay is $65k a year and though he hasn’t fulfilled his dream (the whole reason we came to TO) we are all in a flutter about seeing were fate leads us as there may be a rent-to-own house in the Northern deal ( which is my dream) and his can be reached from the North as well so we’ll see where that roll of the dice takes us. Mostly it boils down to whether we stay or go there are positives and negatives to both sides but one of them has triple the salary he is making now and that’s kind of hard to pass up on without even trying.

I know all this is very vague but things are so up in the air right now I’d rather have my facts straight before I go blurting out half truths and things that may or may not happen besides call me superstitious when I get my hopes up and start spouting about how great things are going to be somehow a piano always manages to drop down on us.

No! No! No! YES!

Last week wasn’t really anything worth writing home about, so of course I didn’t. I was supposed to have Friday, Saturday and Sunday off but because I was sick those three days I decided to volunteer for a Saturday shift. Which in and of itself wasn’t a bad thing ( I still have 18 hours to make up) until the little Indian girl next to me pissed me off.

In a Call Centre the rules are simple:
1. Answer the phone.
2. If you have a question raise your hand.
3. Work as a team.
4. If there are calls in the que clear them before taking any breaks including lunches.
5. No internet surfing between calls.

My lunch was scheduled for 6:45 15 minutes before that the que didn’t get loaded but got a little busy as in 8 people in que. During the next 45 minutes 3 people were out of their seats chasing down the team leader (who was alone for the first time) to ask questions numerous times and the little Indian girl went for her 15 minute break with 3 people in que. The TL asked her if there were calls in que and she said no. Over those 45 minutes the que would fall to 3 then fill again to 8. By this point smoker (I can push my craving to 3 hours but at 4 it's full on bitch mode) that I am I was very frustrated. Okay that’s not quite the truth I was pissed.

I’ve been working this job for 3 weeks never in all that time has it ever taken the team 45 minutes to clear 8 calls. The team I trained with cleared a que of 20 in 15 minutes. The team I trained with would never leave their cohorts with even 1 person in que for their breaks and my team would TRY to answer the question themselves with the quick reference if the TL was busy or took longer than expected to get to them.

Finally I’d had enough I had to go on my 30 minute lunch or I was going to start yelling at the customers, which would not have been fair to them or professional. After I made this decision I took another 2 calls, then immediately spent the next 5 minutes talking this over with the TL. I was seething while I ate my lunch, thankfully the little Indian girl had enough sense to not talk to me let alone look at me in the cafeteria – good for her because I would have given it to her with both barrels. As is my custom after I finished my lunch I went down to have my smoke and was back at my desk 5 minutes early ready to log in. The little Indian girl was nowhere to be seen, when I informed the TL she found her asleep in the cafeteria.

Of course later she was caught surfing the net and deviating from script which is a huge No-no for the company whose campaign we are on. The TL even put me in charge once while she went to smoke (as there was no one else to relieve her) because I was the senior agent on the floor. Thank god my shift was only 6 hours. Needless to say I was happy to get out of there.

Sunday I had resigned myself to having a lazy lay around the house and recuperate day. Best laid plans and all that jazz Dash in rare form decided he wanted to get part of his Christmas shopping done and that he wanted it to be a family affair. This is a man who has refused 4 Christmases in a row to shop before the last week. So that’s what we did with our Sunday. The good news is we now have the shopping completed for his side of the family in their entirety, which is one less thing to worry about because since he goes north only every 2 weeks we will be celebrating with his family on the weekend of December 15th. We both agreed yesterday after work that after Sunday's hijinx we felt like we needed another day off. Of course last night we had to pick up the larger items bought on Sunday and none of us got to bed before midnight. Le sigh!

The gifts are exceptional so far this year and I think the rest will be just as wondrous. It’s been 3 years of us trying to have as wonderful a Christmas as our first year together. I believe this one is going to surpass them all. Now if I could only get a little snow the season and all it’s magic would be complete for me.

Strep & Snow

Monday morning I attended work doped up because I had a sore throat. Nothing I took seemed to last longer than 2 hours so by the end of the day I was thinking that I had made a heroic effort at showing up instead of calling in. That night I had tried everything in my arsenal of cold medications, colds, flu, Nyquil, Buckley's (awful shit) Tylenols 1 and 3 and nothing I mean nothing would last longer than 2 hours and that was about the length of sleep I got that night.

Tuesday morning I succumbed to my illness and actually carried myself to the Doctor. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again I will not go to the Doctor unless I am dieing or whatever I have can’t be cured by me. I had narrowed it down to 1 of 2 things Strep throat or Mono both of which would require antibiotics to get better and I was certain that that medication would begin to make me feel better within 24 hours so I procrastinated as long as I dared and went at 1:30 in the afternoon. The verdict - Strep Throat.

Kudos to Canada for it not costing anything to see the Doc but what’s up with having to pay for the medication to make you feel better $65 freaking dollars later and that didn’t include the $15 cost of the note for work. Don’t even get me started on the fact that Dash went to fill his new prescription for his asthma yesterday and it cost him $100.58. Needless to say we are looking at his coverage from work to see if we can get any of that $180 back.

I’m contagious you see so I missed 3 days of work and really didn’t feel all that bad. Besides the fact that talking irritated my throat and a rumor that if 1 person in a Call Center gets sick everyone does I could have been at work. Not only did the medication cost $180 for both Dash and I but cumulatively we have missed 5 days of work that amounts to $451 in lost wages. ARRGGGHHHH!!!

I’m eligible to work tomorrow but that’s the one day we aren’t open so I go back to work on Saturday. I have to go grocery shopping today or I’ll starve this weekend. Bug and Dash will be off to the much colder Ottawa for the weekend so I guess all will be quiet on the home front. Speaking of I saw my first snowflakes today. Have I ever mentioned how much I love snow?

Listen…did you hear that?

All the Canadians just groaned with frustrated agony at me. It’s funny the looks I get when I say that. I can’t help it I’m a winter born child and I LOVE SNOW!!! It could be worse I could wish for it. I don’t I wait patiently for that first magical blanket. When it arrives that’s when I feel surrounded by the spirit of love, kindness and charity. It is my season and I am most comfortable in it – complete and content.