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.

Scheduling Shenanigans

The 4 days of training hours weren’t half as bad as my hours this past week. Training ran from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. which suited my not loving mornings and got me home in time to see the family but not quite early enough to eat with them.

In case you didn’t know having dinner with my man and child is a huge thing for me. At one point Dash’s work schedule was so bad he was seeing his other daughter Miska (who lives 4 hours away and he only gets to visit her every other weekend) more than he was seeing us. There were many a long uncomfortable conversation about fixing this – which we did but it took almost a year. So when it affects us we are very careful to make sure everyone is in agreement that the sacrifice is worth it and that ALL of us are willing to contribute to whatever cause it is I am working for.

This week however I did not get home before 11 p.m. During the training the company did not bother to ask for our availability and so I was aware that the schedule was going to be nasty. I talked it over with the family and it was decided, if this was what the company required then we would all pitch in to help around the house and with our time (i.e. not seeing each other as much as we’d have liked) but only because we knew that it would end on December 20th. It was stressful when I first saw it (yeah I cried). I made effort after effort all week to tell the higher ups that I had limitations and when the schedule was posted it was almost a slap in the face because the hours I got were in direct opposition to what I had asked for.

Tuesday our Team Leader (TL – Richie) handed out a sheet asking for our availability (poor guy was bombarded by people with the exact same problem) to his credit he did listen to his team and was making the effort to make us happy and until yesterday I was afraid it was going to be wasted effort – because as hard as he pushed for it, it was still out of his hands because Ama (HR – Director) was the one making the schedule. I have to say I am pleased because all my requests but one were given within a half hour time differential. The one still outstanding is a minor glitch I think can be remedied in another week. It means the family has to make a concession for it but at least it is workable and we don’t always get everything we want.

I got my first pay check yesterday. I deposited it this morning as well as glancing over the new bills coming in and the news letters from school. Not to much to worry about for damage control which is good so I intend to spend the rest of this afternoon doing what I want to do because the rest of the weekend is going to be loud fun with the fam.

Inbound

Okay so it works out that my big 2 month secret doesn’t need to be a secret that long. That Friday (which by now is a week ago) I half-assed sent out 3 resumes because our Christmas was in jeopardy of being non-existent. An hour later I received a phone call for an interview the following Monday.

Monday morning I awoke Bug for school and headed off for the shower (this is something I usually save for the evenings as it relaxes me). I dressed in my everyday clothes (I had 3 hours before I needed to leave for the interview), styled my hair and put my outfit on the bathroom door as Bug was leaving for school. I then decided to go out on the back sun porch for my morning smoke.

And here’s where things get interesting. A couple of weeks ago when Binner moved out we changed the locks. The new door knobs even when locked will turn from the inside. Yep that’s right I locked myself out wearing jeans and a t-shirt. I hurried to the school to see if Bug had her keys, she did not. From the office I called Dash to ask him if he thought I should take the bus/cab to him to pick-up his keys with only 2 hours to go before the interview. It would have been nearly impossible for me to make it on time so he decided to come home let me in so I could change my clothes and then he dropped me off.

I was hired for an Inbound Call Center Agent whose contract runs out on Dec.20th. The pay rate is $10 an hour and there is a bonus if we fulfill that contract $1 for every hour worked. The training was 4 arduous days long and yesterday was my first day on the phone. There have been some issues with scheduling but I guess I’ll have to do the best I can.

So the reason I was going to keep this all a secret is because I seem to have only a 2 month attention span with the jobs I take and was afraid if I got excited that it would happen again and disappoint myself. Seeing as how the contract is only 9 weeks long it won’t be me who tires first. At any rate since I spend all day in front of a computer screen I may not update more than once a week – I just can’t take looking at this bloody screen after an 8 hour day. I’ve also found it’s very tiring. Still trying to figure that one out.

Jinx Me Not

Ah! Is the weekend really almost over? I’m happy and sad about that. For a couple of reason but those are later. Let us begin with…

Thursday (I know not technically part of the weekend but that’s where the fun begins) – My daughter reminds me at bedtime that not only is she having a sleep over the next day but our friend Biz is visiting with his 2 kids for the weekend and us with little more than PB&J in the cupboards. So arrangements had to be made on the fly for me to have the truck on …

Friday so I can go grocery shopping. Since we only have the one vehicle and I shop like the world is coming to an end when I go. I can not be one of those people who shops via bus. How anyone does that really is beyond me.

• So I drop Dash at work.
• Do the shopping.
• Race home to prepare lunch for Bug.
• Open the mail and find out that the cable/internet bill is 4 days past cutoff.
• I borrow money on my overdraft to cover it.

Mind you this latter is of particular importance because as of September I should have been saving for the x-mas fund but we spent ½ of it on weather proofing the house ‘cause the landlord is a cheap bastard and the other ½ getting a $238 TV we salvaged fixed for half the price. So I had to use Octobers’ x-mas money to pay bills and I can see the trend building (I saw it building because I redid the budget to see what was going to happen) so I decide for the second day last week to half-ass look for a job (Tuesday I put out 3 e-mail résumé’s) another 3 e-mail résumé’s on Friday. I of course was shall we say quite a bit more than mildly depressed. Christmas is my favorite holiday and no not for the commercialism but because it is the one time of year I can give to my family freely. I love watching their faces light up, that’s my gift. I also love decorating the tree.

Anyhow an hour after that I got a surprise which I can not talk about for the next 2 months on the grounds that it may jinx me. I had to wait for Bug and her friend to get home from school to go pick up Dash which really sucks because Dash is finished work at 4pm Bug walks through the door from school at 3:45pm and we are stuck in rush hour traffic coming and going. We get home have dinner and then Biz drops off 2 more kids ages 3 and 5 to watch while he and Dash drive an hour coming and going to Barrie to drop off his niece at her Dad’s. By the time they get back we visit for an hour and then it’s off to bed for the yawning lot of us.

That will bring us to the slogged un-caffeinated Dash who was awakened by Bug’s friend’s father at 10:30. I really don’t understand parents who are up at the crack of dawn on a freakin’ Saturday. Haven’t these people heard of sleeping in? Especially since I asked her mom if she needed her home at any particular time and she said, no. Oh well that was one less mouth to feed. I made pancakes for 3 kids and 3 adults which put me in the kitchen into the afternoon. Cook then clean. We tried to take the youngins to the park but we got a mix of hail and rain so that forced us indoors again.

Sunday, hell is that today I guess for another couple of hours it is. Right so it was clean the house so I don’t have to worry about it this week because I may be otherwise occupied. I can’t say, really. I won’t find out until tomorrow anyway. Ah, look never could keep a secret so now I have to post before I ruin my future.