Work yesterday was highly tedious. Just endless explanations of financial terms, and pedantic explanations of various computer screens and what everything on them means, and listening to people take calls. It just dragged on forever. The first girl I sat with seemed pretty cool. She was actually a rather interesting and intelligent individual, with a fairly aggressive demeanor, so having her training me on the phones was at least interesting. But then they moved me to sit with this other girl, under the premise that I should sit with her now since I would be sitting with her all next week, who was very blase and deadpan. She had that generic young, granola look and seemed unenthused about everything. She didn't really take much time with the customers on the phone, just seemed unresponsive and annoyed, saying as little as possible to them. Of course this was frustrating to me, because it doesn't exactly help me learn. It was pretty apparent that she hated her job, which is not exactly what I want to deal with when I first start a job. At one point she said "I used to be a waitress and I had to be really nice because they could just walk up to my boss and complain but here I don't care." Great. When she went on lunch she had me sit with someone who was even more unresponsive than her, and was a "how 'bout that?" sort of girl. Apparently she had grown up in the down river area of Detroit (land o' trailer parks) and moved to a very small town in western michigan. Her response to my saying I was from Chicago was "we-e-e-e-l, Chicago huh?". I was actually relieved when the other girl got back from lunch and I could move back to sit with her.
So today is day three. In my experience with jobs, the first day is usually okay, and then the second day is a lot worse, the third is worse than the second and it starts to improve from there. I am not looking forward to this.
I wish they would lock me in a room with all the manuals I have to read and just let me read it myself, then give me a little quiz to make sure I've got it or something. Throw me on the phones where I can just do my job and not have to go through the grueling training.
And yesterday the crazy woman I told you about seemed to keep wanting to be my best friend and was just driving me nuts. At lunch, I called Rob, and I walked past her to find a seat in the break room. She was sitting with another girl. As I walked past, she called out to me "why dont you come sit with us, Amy?" um...because I'm obviously on the phone and having a conversation? Christ.
"You're right, there is an unspoken message: it's fuck you, leave me the fuck alone!"
When I got out of work, I saw Rob and he told me some bad news: at best he might have to go to Columbus for a week. At worst, he might have to do this huge project in Cleveland where he would be gone for six weeks over the course of four months. Neither one of us is happy about this. I hate when he goes away. Aside from the more practical problem of how to get home from work at night when he's gone, there's the more serious matter of my hating when he goes away. I hate when he has to go out of town for three days. Now it looks like he may literally be gone half the summer. It sucks.
Today does not promise to be a good day.