"It's the End of An Era!"
There are times I love being on the phones and times I loathe it. But all the time, I love the people I work with. We sit in groups of four as we do our work, and we talk with and at each other all the time, during calls, after calls, between calls. Sharing information, bitching, asking for help, rolling our eyes sympathetically at one another. And I'm about to leave all of that camaraderie.
We have most of us spent three weeks in training and two weeks in "nesting" before being set free to be "Ambassadors". Sales Ambassadors. Such a silly term, but not inexact. We have to spend 6 months from our start date in the positions we were hired for. Then we are free to apply for other internal positions. But getting through six months is no cake walk. This is energy- and emotion-intensive stuff! It took me all of four months to be able to come home and not jump into bed to sleep nearly instantly. And now I'm on the verge of a new job. A regular job. An 8-5 job instead of this 9:45-6:00 job. A job in which I don't have to be sat at a desk every stinkin' minute and push the right buttons to justify my going to the bathroom or whatever. And I'm thrilled and I'm sad. Not just about the people I don't get to work with every single day, but also about the people I won't get to talk to on the phone! What a parade of interesting people flow through that phone! Old people, young people, angry people, shy people, confused people, sweet people, rich people, kind people, utterly hilarious people, greedy people, mean people. I'll kind of miss them... So, truth be told, I am something the British call a "nutter". My version of nutterdom is that I'm intense, I'm driven, I'm friendly as all get-out (whatever that literally means - what is "get out"?), I'm gutted by the depths of spiritual devotion, I am a basketcase crying all over myself when I'm touched by something, and I'm also convinced that if I can't get ahead at this point, I'm going to die alone and poverty-stricken. That last one alone makes me want to move forward Right. Stinkin'. Now. Show me the money! But even more than that: Show me the meaning! I only want the money for that feeling of security. I'm working on feeling the security with or without it, but in the meanwhile SHOW ME THE MONEY! Along comes my new boss, just before Christmas. Takes one look at me and knows about me. Says to me within a month's time, "When I met you I thought, 'She's hungry.' I knew you'd rise to the top quickly, and that you'd get bored if there wasn't more to reach for." Too true! Ridiculously true. I'm freakin' Scarlett O'Hara: "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!" Scarlett O'Hara minus the petticoats.
So here I am, 4 months in, and my boss tells me to apply quickly to a job that just opened up with Agent Experience (AX). QA Administrator. I wasn't too shocked about being given the opportunity before my official 6-month mark because I had been told in my first month that that sometimes happens. I had no idea that that "sometimes" was pretty freakin' rare.
Turns out, even my boss's boss went to bat for me to have the interview. So, "something's happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear". I actually wore heels to the interview. Heels. Me. The fall-over queen. My boss is walking with me down to the first floor and says with obvious teasing: "Can you walk in those?" "Shut up," I tell him. I was even wearing Spanx or some other bullshit, and oh God those things are painful. They mess you up bad! A higher-up friend says to me peacefully, "You really didn't need to wear those." I respond, "I know" - though I did not - "but I did anyway..." I don't think the dress and the heels and the Spanx did a thing for my interview. But apparently I did. Here's the crazy bit: I have now been told at least three times that they wanted me for this position because of my outgoing personality. I have mostly been feared in my life because of my outgoing personality! "Lori, sit down at your desk and stop talking to Phyllis!" "Lori, you need to be working on those Excel spreadsheets, not asking questions about them." ("But I need to know how this will impact that group's work over there!") "Nope, that's above your pay grade! Just do the Excel spreadsheets!" That was my 20's. Anyway, I have been given to understand that this is all A Big Deal. So I believe it! But mostly, I'm psyched because I'm being tapped to talk. A lot. I've been told that the first bit of work I'm going to do is to go talk to people. We have one AX group here, and there are two others, and I'm going to go talk to people here and remotely, I would think, and learn what the whole gig is about and how to be really useful in this make-a-difference universe. Since people are my jam, this mission is not exactly a hardship, though it will require a fair amount of note-taking and organization on my part so that I don't miss or forget a lot. There's one major thing that strikes me about all of this. My age. It's just incredible to me that at my age I am being tapped to rise. In a corporation - the one thing I have run from from the minute I walked into one in my late teens, as a secretary. After all that I've walked through, after all that I've gained and lost and gained and lost, to be in a place like this that has a career track to it when I'm just at the age where you're supposed to be retiring strikes me as fairly Fellini-esque. But I changed materially when I came home from California. About four and a half years ago I decided to take stock of the fact that my plan of pushing really, really hard for my goals had had the opposite effect I sought, and that it was time to try NOT pushing. Time to try letting go and letting it all work itself out. Talk about frightening. So, to the degrees that I could, at any given time, I did. I "fell into" sales. The very very last thing I ever would have wanted to do, or thought I could do! I saw it as lying. Hated the idea. And then it turned out it was about things I love, and I was good at it. Why has my life had such a serio-comic path? Anyway, five months ago, a dear friend hit me up on Facebook, telling me about a walk-in interview at Macy's, and I went that very same morning, and 90 minutes later I had a job on the phones, selling. And now I'm leaving VSS (Virtual Store Support) phone work and moving into AX as someone who will be expected to help bring a lot of change to the ways that things work for the people on the phones and how that impacts absolutely everything. I could, if I wished, retire. But retire with what? With what money? Plus, honestly, I would be bored to death. I need to be out and about with others. With no one at home to be my "other", currently at least, working is the next best thing! I spoke to a woman in her 80's on the phone one day who said that she had retired, and that after three months she went and found different work because she was bored to death. I get that. I am still and forever driven by wanting to make a positive difference in the most core of ways, meaningful ways, real ways. I am still and forever driven by communication, and by deep connection with others, and by reaching for more. It's the end of several eras, then. The end of phone work. The end of working with my "mates" (still on the British thing here, apparently). And the end of looking at my 60's as a time of retreat. Still as late a bloomer as ever, then. Still a nutter, always. And for the first time ever, hired for being me. In a corporation.
©2019 Lori Kirstein
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AuthorWorking in Sales at a Call Center for one of the biggest stores in the country should come with hazard pay. Archives
December 2019
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