Alan Hood

I know there are some out there who call themselves purists and will only use charcoal for grilling. Not me I am a gas griller all the way. I had my grill for about 10 years and every year it got better and better. After you have used you gas grills for about half a season they become what I like to call seasoned. By seasoned I mean they are full of all the grease and animal fats that when the next time they are started they add aroma and taste to everything you are grilling. It might sound gross to you but the same thing happens with a charcoal grill but to a less extent and you get the wood smoke flavor instead of the real flavor that everyone loves.

Well my old grill finally gave up the ghost and believe me it has been a sad day around the hood household. So I have been looking at new gas grills and came across a site where I think I am going to buy my next one. They have some of the best gas grills I have come across and the prices are perfect. I have kept the grate and some of the lava rocks that are nice and covered to give the new grill some instant seasoning. I can’t wait to get my new grill, these new gas grills are incredible, but I will always miss the old one it has been good to me for a lot of years.

I find it hard to get motivated to go to a job that I hate more and more every day. When you find yourself in a position that you just hate what you are doing for a living it can become very frustrating to even wake up on mornings that you have to go to work. How do I overcome this frustration? By looking forward to the new year when vacation time starts again and I am planning to take every Friday and Monday off for the first 2 months. Along with my regular Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday off I will only have to work 2 days per week for 2 straight months and I will still get paid in full. I know it sounds insane but I really can’t wait. Working 2 days a week is exactly the kind of job I need to maintain my sanity. During those 2 months I plan to get the websites really rocking and hopefully I will not have to go look for a different job when those months are over. Well at least I hope it will happen by then. Over all I would say that the chances are pretty good considering the massive traffic growth that the sites have seen over the last few months. One of the sites is hitting that magical 200 unique visitors per day threshold that makes a website actually worthy of speaking about. But either way even if I have to go look for a different job after my vacation is all spent at least I will be able to keep my sanity unlike what I a currently doing.

Working for a large corporation can be very frustrating at times. Especially when you can see the things that are going drastically wrong with the company but can’t do anything about them. The difficulty and frustration I feel affects the way that I perform and in turn affects the customers again. But the real frustration is that the company doesn’t set up any real channels for employees to give them any kind of real feedback and relies on a very high level of matrices to determine how the company is performing. And what did I do to vent my frustrations? Of course I set up another blog about working in a call center to tell some of the stories about what is going on inside of the mega-corporation. Take a look at that blog and over the next couple of months you can get the real scoop about what happens to you as a customer after you call in the get your account settled with one of America’s largest companies. You will be in for a real eye opener.

I went back to work yesterday after a 10 day vacation, and I have to say that working for a living really sucks.  I know everyone has to do it but every once in a while don’t you just wonder how in the hell you got to this point in your life.  For me it’s almost an everyday thought.  What kinds of really stupid decisions have I made that made me end up working in a shit hole like this?  I have always been a little antisocial at work, the kind of person who just wants to be left alone to do their job.  There are a couple of things that that gets me. One is that it doesn’t get me promoted because I don’t socialize with the right people, which is okay because I would never want to be a supervisor in the place I work now.  And it leaves me in a position where there is someone crawling up my ass every second that I am there. 

Where I work you have to sign out to go to the bathroom, and if you do sign out to pee there is someone there to tell you that you need to sign back in and take some calls.  I just say no what I need to do is go pee and walk away.  When you have a twelve year old who has been promoted to supervisor it really goes to their head and all of a sudden they think that they control the world.  I could truly care less about anything they say to me because the threat of being fired or written up just doesn’t have any affect on my life at all.  The problem is that there are other people who work there that this is the best job they have ever had and the supervisors are up their asses every second because they know that they need this shitty job.  Now I am not trying to suggest that I do an inadequate job for this company, because I don’t.  I understand that they are paying me to do a job and I do that just to the best of my ability every hour I am there.  I just question the stupid decisions I have made in my life that led me down the road to work in such a crappy environment.

I am sure that everyone questions the choices they have made once in a while.

I being a person, who has been around the block at least a couple of times, have never worked for a company that tracks your time as vigorously as the company I work for now. I do understand that with the sheer numbers of employees that they must control that certain expectations have to be met, but blanket policies that are strictly adhered to never work out in the long run. When you have a 40% turn over of your employees it’s hard to figure out why the company would continue to set and stand by policies that don’t really work in their favor. When you lose 1 good person and have to hire 500 more to find one just as good then it is a losing proposition for the company.

A good employee doesn’t necessarily mean one that shows up on time every day or doesn’t ever get sick; a good employee should be measured by the quality and quantity of work they perform while they are there. And a good employee would gladly work an extra few minutes to make up the time they were late. Alas when you have bean crunchers setting policies then employees just like equipment can be replaced at certain levels before it starts to affect the bottom line and things need to be changed. Never mind that employees are people with families who may be dependant on this job to stay off of the streets.

These directive are handed down from people I will never meet, and who would never take the time to want to meet someone as far down on the food chain as me. I will just do everything that I can do to make sure that I am in a position that I don’t have to rely on a company that doesn’t really care about me or anyone else who works for them.

Describe a situation you are familiar with in which people based their actions or opinions on false information. How would the situation have changed if the facts were researched and presented more carefully?

In my job, customers rely on the information they are given by us, and sometimes the information given out by us is not exactly reliable. When new representatives are giving information to customers sometimes they feel like they can just wing it or maybe they feel the information they are giving out is accurate just because they think, that’s the way it should be.

Almost every day I get a call from a customer who says “but I was told”. And every day I have to fix the problem for the customer. With our billing system if things are not done a certain way then the things that follow will not be reflected accurately. For instance, if we give a customer bonus airtime during the month after they have already gone over their allotted minutes and the bonus airtime is not backdated to the beginning of their billing cycle, then the bonus minutes will not cover the overage the customer already has. The customer is told that they are covered by the bonus minutes but the reality is that they will be billed for the overage they already have.

If our representative would research the standard operating procedures then this misinformation and confusion could be avoided. While not exactly an earth shattering event if correct information or procedures were followed in the first place then customer call backs and irritation would be limited.