3-2-11 Wednesday (Learnin’)

It’s been a good Monday and Tuesday.  Nothing special happened but nothing bad happened either.  Does the absence of “bad” make something good?  You’re being to analytical… quit it. 

Some more about work.  There’s 18 people in our class.  One guy has been gone for over a week due to a family emergency (possible death) in California.  I’m not sure what will happened with him since he’s missing a lot of stuff.  The company frowns on missing training but the trainer makes it sound like they’ll try to work it out in some way.  One of our other classmates never showed up Friday, Monday and Tuesday.  The trainer hasn’t heard from her and we suspect she just quit.  Fellow classmates speculate that she didn’t like it based on conversations they’ve had with her.  Other classmates say she became unexpectedly pregnant and wasn’t very happy about that.

Our class is definitely full of different personalities but for the most part, we all seem to get along well.  There’s 3-4 people that I eat lunch with daily.  I like that.  I like socializing with my coworkers.  Sometimes a lot of the class is about interaction with one another for various skill building in customer service and sales portions of our jobs.  We role play a lot in class.  All in all, our trainer makes it fun.  The company makes it fun.  Several times we’ve even played hangman on the computer to learn various terminology.  There’s such a wide variety of training techniques that my company uses.  I’m grateful for that.

On Monday, 2 top sales people came to our class to answer questions we might have.  One had been there 8 months, and the other was less.  Both had no sales experience but are doing so well.  It was great to ask them questions and listen to their tips.  I felt they had spoken open and honestly despite management being present.  I think if management was worried about what they’d say, they would even offer to have them talk to us.  The Q&A was helpful.  Like “what do you wish you had paid attention more to in the class?”  Things like that.  We already know that once we “hit the floor” we won’t utilize the various customer service acronyms that so many companies have.  Learn it, know it, do it but it doesn’t have to be broken down.

One speaker, Josh, had went through the training in a 3 week period.  Mine is 6 weeks.  That confirmed my suspicion that this could all be taught in a shorter time.  I’m sure that different studies had revealed that trainees respond better to different types of training than others.  Maybe retention of material is greater when done a little at a time? 

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Jim is taking off Thursday and Friday.  He’s got a bunch of time off, some of which can be carried over and some can’t.  Probably in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to schedule some time off already!  Hopefully we can squeeze in a trip before my schedule goes wonky. 

Wednesday: I just mentioned about the guy who had been out of work for a while.  He returned today.  Since he was there the full day, we’re pretty sure it will be worked out with him.  At lunch (he sat with us), he said no one had said anything to him so he was a little worried.  We all felt that they wouldn’t have let him go through the whole day if there was an unresolvable issue. 

It’s over a week and I’m still plagued by congestion and an abundance of snot.  Does anyone need any snot cause I’ve got plenty over here.

Nail biting = stopped.  The anti-nail biting polish is working well.  It’s a shinier nail polish than I’d like but it’s doing the job!  My cuticles look horrible though.  I think when they become longer I’ll treat myself to a manicure to get me on track.

My 6,000+ photo snapping camera is dying.  90% of the time I can’t get the zoom to operate.  Using Consumer Reports I’ve decided on the Nikon Coolpix S8000. 

I needed something thin and with anti-shake.  This camera has a 10x optical zoom whereas mine has 3x which was fine for it’s time.  Jim redeemed some Discover points for Sears gift cards totaling $150.  We’ll have to come up with more money to make the purchase.