6-6-11 Monday (I’ve Got No Class)

Most of my coworkers were in a training class today and again tomorrow to learn a new system.  My turn will be next week.  The phones were hideously busy.  As soon as I finished one call, another would immediately come through.  You see, in a call center, or at least mine, you don’t “answer” the phone.  It happens on it’s own.  There’s a beep and then someone is on the line… no button pushing.  While I’m on one call, I do have the ability to go into a mode indicating not to send another call until I say so.  I had to use that option a few times to try and maintain sanity, or take a sip of water or even go pee.  It’s definitely the busiest I’ve ever seen it and I’m sure that’s attributed to my comrades’ absences from the phones.  I will say the day went by so quickly though.

Meanwhile, I’m already dreading my turn at training.  When I went through my initial training, our instructor was Jay.  He was the best.  Lively.  Kept an awesome pace.  Funny.  In the back of the room sat another trainer.  She didn’t do much… that we saw.  I found out through classmates who peeked at her paperwork that she was a spy.  Maybe she did other stuff but she certainly took notes on what classmates were doing during training.  Who was sleeping, who was texting, who was late, etc.  One day, Jay had to leave early so she took over for a couple of hours.  She has the personality of a rock.  I was so thankful she didn’t teach the 6 week class.  I would have failed.  A.D.D. would have kicked in for sure.  The point is, SHE is training the new system class.  2 days X 8 hours = 16 hours of horror.  Please, please, can I be lucky that next week Jay will teach my class?  Let’s join hands. 

I rarely proofread before I post.  I apologize for that.  Sometimes I find out I left out a word or put in a word like “past” instead of “part”.  Naturally, the spellchecker passes it and I think it’s good to go.  I decided to read this post and edit accordingly.  As I read the previous paragraph I thought to myself, self, cause I like to call myself that, what good did the spy actually do?  The texters, the sleepers, the late-comers, the cheaters, they all still do that crap and seem to get away with it.  Why do these people still work there?  It’s obnoxious… really.

Training happens to be up the hall so as my coworkers take their breaks we gain knowledge about the new system.  It sounds like good and bad points.  I can tell you that our current system in a lot of ways is horrible.  It takes a long time to do anything due to the abundance of useless screens.  There’s application screens that if translated to paper would totally destroy forests.  I’m exaggerating but think “name and address on this screen and then another piece of info on the next one”.  People, it’s a screen, you can make it bigger or smaller.  You can format it in so many ways.  Ugh.

I’m sure having a program changed is probably a nightmare.  How’d it even get that way to begin with?  Who approved it?  Who said, “This is perfect.  Roll it?”  Perhaps our bank software (not where I work) programming friend, Derek, can shed some light on this?  I’m obsessing.  I know.  It simply kills me.  A multi-million dollar corporation and this is the best we can do?  Oy.  OK, I’m done.