Hopefully this post will be tolerably coherent. I make no promises: I am sated on fresh air, superb food, good alcohol, and good conversation. I am in a fairly advanced state of bliss, which is contrary to my usual state of obsessive focus.
Not that I’m complaining. I’m just saying.
The new job is in an industry I’ve never worked before. And it’s a pretty highly regulated one with a lot of complex concepts, so there’s about a zillion acronyms and abbreviations I need to learn. I was getting a little worried – since several of us didn’t have the proper system access (or any, in my case), the training was kind of ad-hoc and felt disjointed. So I didn’t feel like I was really putting all the concepts together the way I should and retaining them properly. But we got the system access all sorted out this afternoon, and after taking all the appropriate tests I feel a little better. I could still use some time to study up – I might do some research on my own this weekend, since we can’t take the training materials home. And I really need to get this stuff down so I can be able to do my job confidently and competently. Kind of hard to lead people if you don’t know what they’re doing.
Still, I’m enjoying it. There’s potential for growth there, once I prove myself.
I go back and forth on the question of moving up. Part of me wants to see how I could deal with the challenges of the next level. Part of me thinks it would be cool to have an office instead of a tall cube and to be that much farther removed from talking to the customers. Plus it’s always nice to have more money.
At the end of the day, it’s mostly about the perks and prestige. Which tells me that moving up isn’t a great idea – if you don’t actually want to do the job so much as you want to get the benefits of doing the job, you probably shouldn’t go for it. Plus moving up means more work, more headaches, and less time to write. And that translates to less happiness, not more.
On the other hand, the idea of doing that exact same job for the next couple of decades doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’d get bored and restless. So there’s that.
Luckily none of this is a particularly pressing issue right now. It’s not like there’s a promotion dangling in front of me after one week on the job. Right now I’m focused on the learning. Figure out how to do the job, then do it better and better and deal with what happens then.
Today was Mom’s birthday. So of course I called her, and we chatted about my new job and what was going on with her.
Mom’s always been a crafty, creative person. Apparently she’s always wanted to learn basket-weaving, which is something I never knew. (Parents – so full of surprises.) But she could never find a class to take when there was time to take it. Until she found one right there in her little corner of Kentucky, and it was scheduled for today of all days. So naturally she signed up, and spent the whole day weaving a basket. She was just tickled pink at the whole thing.
I’m proud of her. She doesn’t do enough things she really loves – another drawback of marrying a domineering stick-in-the-mud. And while I’ve never tried basket-weaving myself, I can imagine it’s challenging. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Plus how fun is it to do something you’ve always wanted to on your birthday?
My day was somewhat less fun. I feel bad for the guy training our class. They don’t have our computer access set up yet, which is really making a big crazy mess of his plans for the class. He’s quickly running out of ways to improvise and stuff to show us that doesn’t require computer access. And no matter how much he keeps after the IT folk to fix our access, he doesn’t seem to be getting much cooperation. So more improvising, more vamping, and all of it while he’s on the road and starting to come down with a cold.
Still, I’m having fun. I’m re-adjusting to the schedule. I’m learning my way around a building that’s laid out at diagonals to its walls rather than in the traditional grid pattern. I’m learning about the complexities and constrictions of the business.
Stuff is good.
I can be a pretty strongly change-averse person. So it surprises me a little to say this, but here it is: I don’t really care about the changes to Facebook, and I don’t understand all the ruckus that goes on when they happen. (Let the irony and mocking commence!)
Back in my days working for the pay TV company, one of the things I struggled with was sympathizing with customers who couldn’t watch their sports. Most of the time the issue was with the original broadcaster – either they didn’t have the rights to the game or they were showing something else – so there wasn’t much we could do. We didn’t offer credits for that because it wasn’t our fault. We were sending the same signal from the satellite that the customers were paying for. What that signal carried was another issue.
But this was rarely a satisfactory answer. They wanted to see the game, and they wanted to see it NOW. Most of the time they wouldn’t have been satisfied with a month of free service, because none of that mattered: their team was on, they wanted to see them. And the fact that they couldn’t was absolutely infuriating to them. I had people get more upset over missing a football game than anyone did when I had to explain why their credit card rates had doubled.
