Part three, where we get into the nitty and the gritty of my job at Stuff Empowered. Before I begin, let me state this: I LOVED THE PEOPLE I WORKED WITH. Those of you new to this blog may not know but 99% the time I make fun of myself and 1% of the time I make fun of others. (Okay, if I'm waiting in line at the pharmacy, it's more like 99% of the I'm making fun of the people in front of me, but whatever.) I especially want those new to this blog to know...any jokes I make are not at your expense. So don't take offence.
And, as always, Todd...consider this your warning. LOL
Part Three
So, I took the job at Stuff, Empowered. It was, by far, the biggest company I've ever worked for, and that includes the year I spent teaching at a parochial school where I was basically working for GOD. (Yep, that's how big this company is.)
The first day on the job at Stuff Empowered isn't actually a day at work. It's ORIENTATION. ORIENTATION is held at the CORPORATE location which is on the other side of town from where my work location was. It's worth noting that while it was no big deal for ME to go to orientation, because of the size of this company, several of the people in my class actually lived in other cities, set to work as far away as an hour.
I live a charmed life, I do, I do.
I got there on time, which for me, is 20 minutes early. As I sat and waited, a gaggle of about 30 people came in and waited in the lobby. I struck up a conversation with three women and a younger guy, even though I knew immediately I was never going to see the younger guy again. he was an engineer who was going to be stationed in another city. The women, however, were going to be working at the same building I was. FRIENDS FOR ME!
I won't bore you with orientation. They spent the better part of 5 hours walking us around a building 90% of us weren't going to be working at. And the other 2 hours were spent talking about the insurance benefits. I was doing great, hanging with my little circle of new friends, until they started they handed out our job locations and assignments.
None of my new friends were going to be in my department. I was the only one going to my department. This was a surprise for me because I thought we were all going to be doing the same thing.
Clearly, I hadn't paid all that close of attention in my interview.
Then they did their insurance talk.
This is the first time in a long time that I was going to be paying for my insurance. Hubby takes care of that. Also, remember, I was taking a GIANT pay cut in this job. So when I started looking at the weekly numbers and what my income was going to be against what my deductions would be...
I realized I was going to owe Stuff Empower money after working full time.
So I wasn't going to be with my new friends and I was going to be more broke at the end of a work week than I already am.
Which is why I walked through the door at my house, sobbing uncontrollably.
One would think I wouldn't show up the next day to start work. One would think I would continue my search for a remote job.
One would be wrong.
I showed up at the correct building the next morning. I still had no idea which department I was in, what my job title was, or where I was supposed to go in the massive office building. Good thing the receptionist was a bit more filled in. She looked at my name badge (which they made at ORIENTATION) and told me where to go.
Once I got to the third floor I saw a group of people standing near an empty cubicle. I was happy it was a group because that would seem less weird or something if I walked up and said, "hi I'm new." Or something clever like that. I'm quite the wordsmith.
That's when I met...let's call them RED.
(Red is non-binary and therefore I will use they/them pronouns out of respect for them.)
Red is kind of hard to miss. They have bright red hair, like bright red. Somehow I knew, like I know my own name, that Red was 1) going to be my trainer and 2) going to be a friend, a real friend, by the end of the day. Red reminded me way too much of Skippy and that's before we started talking!
"Hi I'm Red. I'll be your trainer."
"Hi, I'm Sarah. What are your pronouns?"
(And that, my friends, is how you make friends and open the minds of someone who might seem very different from you. You show respect to them. Also, Peaches and Skippy have spent some time kind of explaining non-binary and how to address non-binary people. I don't fully understand it, I'll be honest, and I am not 100% perfect at getting it right. But my job, as I've always seen it, is to show kindness and respect to all people. otherwise, what, I'm going to be that cranky old woman who's yelling at kids to get out of her yard? I live on a block with a woman like that. I don't want to be her!)
Anyway, Red walked me around and introduced me to everyone...I of course didn't remember a single name, but it was a nice try on their part. Then Red parked me in my cubicle. The empty one they'd all been standing by when I came in.
The empty cubicle right next to the bathrooms.
If you've read this blog for a while, you know I have issues with public restrooms. So parking me next to the only restrooms on the third floor seemed like God was really trying to tell me something. Like, hey, dummy, coming home sobbing yesterday didn't stop you from showing up today, so today I put you next to the communal crapper. I'm trying to tell you something, would you listen?
Clearly, I wasn't listening.
I was in a pod of four cubicles. One was empty because that person next showed up for work. The other two were occupied by "Molly" a fresh-faced little blonde who reminded me of the Swiss Miss Coco girl. I found out later this newly minted 21-year-old was a badass motorcycle rider, and a really, really smart gal. Oh, and a friend, too.
The other cubicle was "Tucker" another 20 something who had the bad luck of being the only constant employee in this pod. Every time someone in the pod quit, Tucker was blamed for it. Poor Tucker. He's a good guy...he really didn't deserve it.
Training at Stuff, Empowered is pretty intense and overwhelming. Especially since I still had NO IDEA what department I was in, what my job title was, or what I was going to be doing. I really should have paid more attention in that interview.
Red, whose whole job was to train people in the post sales department (aha! I learned something) spent the next two weeks encouraging, teaching, leading, and prodding me through the process. That first day, though, was funny. I got home from work and Hubby, who now works at home all day and is not completely unlike a golden retriever who's ready to GO OUT once the humans come home from work, wanted to go for a walk. I'd been caged in that cubicle all day, so I was up for a nice long walk. At one point, while chatting about my day, there was a squeal of tires and who should pull up next to us, but RED! Turns out they live close by (another sign that Red was going to be a friend.) So Red met Hubby and I felt like, okay, now I HAVE to go back for day 3.
***
One of the rules at Stuff Empowered that seem kind of harsh was the following: NO CELL PHONES SHALL BE VISIBLE AT YOUR DESK.
Now, when a company says that, what they mean is you're not supposed to be chatting, facebooking, instagramming, instapotting, or shopping online during work hours. Save that stuff for your breaks and lunch. Right? I interpreted that correctly, right?
Apparently, the way most of the women on my floor, especially the people on the other side of the floor in Customer Experience (We in Post Sales feel very superior to Customer Experience, although I'm not sure why), interpreted this was, "Take your phones into the bathroom and watch videos or talk on the phone or take out a home loan while you're there."
Oh yeah, you know I'm going to talk about this.
I already hated the idea of using the same restroom as roughly 100 other women. Oh, and the toilet paper? Let's talk about that for a minute: It was see-through. Not thin. My mother uses thin toilet paper and we give her all kinds of grief. Enough so, that she now has toilet paper for COMPANY. (I've heard of company hand towels...) No, this wasn't thin. It was SEE-THROUGH. And it broke apart and dissolved on contact.
So, I'm sitting in the stall, listening to this one woman who I swear lived in the handicapped stall, talk to her friend AT FULL VOLUME ON BOTH ENDS (why did I need to hear that conversation? Or any of them?) and I'm faced with using toilet paper that basically turns into shards in my hand and will (BELIEVE ME) will induce a yeast infection.
Also: No ventilation or fan in the bathroom. Which means every sound, every word, every SMELL wrapped itself around you in the room...and immediately outside...
WHERE I WAS SITTING.
After two weeks I figured out what my job was: sit, chained to a computer by a phone headset, and make endless calls every day telling small stores that they owed a lot of money to Stuff, Empowered, and they'd better pay up or the company would cancel their order. You know, the order they placed a year ago for an empowering unit that, thanks to covid and supply chain issues, and labor shortage, and I don't know some windstorm in Fiji, had been delayed several months.
8 hours of that. Broken up by a one-hour unpaid lunch.
I was basically, thanks to drive time and this lunch, giving this company 50 hours of my life, for the price of 40. I was already working 8 hours more a week just to try and make up for the wage difference, and then tack on another 10 hours of unpaid nonsense time...I was beyond exhausted every day after work.
So... chained to a desk next to the restrooms. I couldn't even get up and walk a proper amount of time to get to the restrooms. It was like four steps. I found myself envying people whose desks were on the other side of the wall from us. Not only were they by windows, they had at least a fifteen step walk to the bathrooms.
The breakup of my days came when people would stop on their way to the bathrooms to chat with me. That seems weird. "Hey, I have to pee, but first let's talk to this random person sitting by the bathrooms."
I got to know several people on the floor that way. Nice people. But all of our conversations ended with, "Wow, I really have to pee."
Meanwhile, I was a dog in a cage on a leash.
It wasn't all terrible. Molly and Tucker and I had some laughs, mostly about how awful the job was. the pod next to us, made up of "Jasper," "Nate," "Trixie," and "Nellie," were fun too. We worked together well, I thought, and shared a number of fun little jokes and GIFS in our group online chat. So that passed the time a little bit.
Fun fact: Stuff, Empowered does not provide a garbage can under the desks. I didn't really think about it, I mean, I had a tiny little toy sand bucket I used for the three Kleenexes and one K-Cup I had every day. At some point I'd stiffly stagger the nine steps to the centrally located garbage pod and dump my stuff and then stiffly stagger the nine steps back. I did proper walks on my two breaks, and I ate lunch in my car and then went for a longer walk. Got my steps in, but really, sitting at the desk the rest of the day did a number on my joints. Red insisted I could get up and walk about, but HOW when the job expectations were high?
So, most of the time if I did break away from the leash, the first several steps I kind of looked like a Zombie walking out of my cage and on to the restroom highway.
MONDAY: Part 4-An apple brings me a bruised elbow and a new opportunity.
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