My Lady and I were sitting at the kitchen table last night listening to Internet radio on Pandora.com (if you haven’t found it yet, go. It is wonderfulness). I was having a bottle of one of my favorite beers, she was drinking her favorite brew, Mountain Dew, and we were chatting cheerfully about one thing or another when the phone rang. She checked the number and rattled it off to me, it was the number of the place I had interviewed with on Friday. ”Answer it please.”, I said. It was the HR director, calling to offer me a job!
Rewind to Thursday. I was grumpy. Feeling depressed that I’d applied to so many different places and no one had called me back. What does a girl have to do to get a job that is NOT in a call center in this town?! Feeling a little defeated I began looking through the customer services jobs. I knew that I am qualified and would get any job that I applied for in that field so I thought I would look through all the listings and pick out the ones that pay the highest and seem to be the least stressful. The very first one I found STARTS paying more than I was making at my last job when I left after working there for nearly 4 years. It was described as a “small” call center and is located just down the road from where we live. I read the requirements for the position and somehow knew that if I applied I would get it. I moved my cursor over the “Apply Now!” button and hesitated… “Do I really want to go back to a call center?!” I asked myself. I reread the job description and decided to go for it, find out more detail about the position, and if it comes down to it and I don’t like the feel of it, I can always turn it down. So I applied. Within 30 minutes I got a call. She had to leave the office at 5 but she really wanted to get me in for an interview on Friday. There was a form I had to fill out and sign and an on-line assessment to take before they could interview me, so she emailed it to me. I finished both and sent them back promptly. She called me back to let me know I was the only one she’d ever had to make a 100% on the assessment, lol. I got scheduled for a phone interview the next morning with the HR director. That call went very well, we walked through a mock call and she seemed impressed so she scheduled me for a face-to-face interview with the center managers that afternoon. I prepped, dressed, and put my game face on then got stuck in traffic. I ended up being 10 minutes late for the interview. 10 minutes! I couldn’t believe it, but hoping that I hadn’t ruined any chance I had, I gave the interview my best and then had to take 5 assessments in their office. The first of which was a spelling test! I laughed when she showed it to me and she looked at me questioningly. “I’m a bit retentive when it comes to spelling.” I told her with a smile. I didn’t mention that I will sit and play Bookworm for hours on my PC. (Yes, I’m a geek. We’ve established this, moving on.) As I was leaving one of the ladies met me at the door to let me know that I did “very well” on the assessments and that once a decision was made they would be calling the candidates that very evening to let them know. I left feeling pretty good about it, despite my tardiness, and thoroughly expected to get a call on my cell phone later that evening. I even told my Lady, “I will be surprised if they don’t offer me the position.”. But Friday evening came and went, as did Saturday, and I didn’t get a call. I’d planned on calling first thing this morning to check on it and see if they’d made their decision.
I didn’t have to obviously, as she called me on Sunday night. Turns out she had to leave work early on Friday and did not have the chance to call anyone. I took the phone and went out to sit on the front porch to talk with her. I accepted the position and set up an appointment for a drug screening today, thanked her and ended the call. When I walked back into the house I shouted “I have a job!”, throwing my hands up in the air. It was a great end to a great weekend. Granted, it’s customer service, but it’s customer service for the government… yeah, I’m kinda sorta gonna be working for the Department of Homeland Security. Fucked up huh? I’ll be taking calls from businesses with questions about the new guidelines for the handling and disposal of chemicals. It’s verbatim scripting so it’s pretty much gonna be a no-brainer. It’s also a very small call center and the call volume is low to moderate. I anticipate being bored a lot, but with a much lower level of stress than what I was taking on before. It offers great benefits, insurance all around, and paid vacation and holidays. As far as a call-center job goes, it sounds ideal… posh even. We’ll see, of course, I haven’t started doing the work yet. But I think this is going to be exactly what I need to get me through the rest of my schooling.
Friday I took a roadtrip to my birthplace with a good friend of mine to shoot a low budget horror movie. It was much fun. I can’t wait to see our death scenes. I was stabbed to death. She was strangled. I came home tired and road weary, my clothes stiffened with dried fake blood. It was good times. : )
