Last week, I wrote about my new job and how I now have to work on maintaining a schedule again. And last week was a big whirlwind. Just from the time that I interviewed to the time that I was hired was crazy. And jumping immediately into the job was a bit overwhelming.
I told the people training me that’s how I was feeling and fortunately they understood. It’s a lot to take on and I had some assumptions about the job that were wrong. Most of the work in customer service is very similar to things I’ve been doing before, it’s just the method of the work that is different. For example, I’m used to helping customers on a chat system that runs through a website. It’s like instant messaging and the type of customer service chat that I think most of us are familiar with. But the new system is actually a text-based system. This does have a lot of benefits to it, but it changes how I will work and I will have to adjust to the idea that I won’t have customers sitting on a website as I help them. The assumption that the chat system was based on a website was completely on me, so it’s not like I was misled. I just didn’t think to ask and it’s been a bit switch in my thought process.
And of course, with any new job, there are new systems to learn and new protocols to follow. I’m very grateful that everything does seem to make sense and they are based on sites I’m familiar with. Even if it’s not the exact website I’ve used before, they have a lot of the same elements that I’m used to. That has made my training a little easier. At this point, I feel like I understand the job much more than before. I’m just working on putting together the pieces and the workflow of how things go. But that’s possibly something that I just have to jump into (with supervision) and start working through. And that will likely be happening this week.
I also got trained at the end of last week on the other part of my new job doing outbound engagement. Again, this is similar to something I have done before but different enough that I have to remember specific things. And it can be a bit scary starting something new that doesn’t have as much of a chance for starting with supervision, but I also feel confident that I can handle it. I know that I will likely be getting feedback and need to make some adjustments to the work I’m doing, but I’m expecting it so hopefully it will be easier when it happens. I just want the clients to be happy with my work and to have my work seem similar to what others do so they don’t realize I’m the new one doing this.
Because I’m still training for the customer service part of my job, my schedule is still not completely stable. Each day I work different hours as I learn different parts of the job. But this is just for training and soon I will be doing very steady hours for this work. It will likely be about 3 hours every morning, which might increase eventually but I accepted the job knowing it was probably only 3 hours a day. But I do also have 90 minutes of work for the outbound engagement side to do every day and I still have my data entry job that I do a few hours a week. I will eventually figure out how I want to schedule all my time, but for now, I’m just taking it day by day. I’m hoping once my schedule is regular, I can split up my outbound engagement to be partially before my customer service shift and partially after (doing 90 minutes in one sitting is actually harder than I expected). And I will try to fit in my data entry where I can. And if I find out that I can return to my other customer service job, I will figure it out at that point. But for now, I don’t expect to be asked if I want to come back for at least a few more months.
Right now, I am not making what I was making before, but it’s much closer than what it’s been for most of this year. And making any money is good these days. I will be losing my unemployment because of my work, but I’m ok with that. When we had the supplemental unemployment, things were different and I was doing ok. But since that ended, I was making only a fraction of what I was before. And if you make more than what you would get in unemployment, you don’t get it anymore. But I’ve been working with less money for most of this year, so I will be fine without it.
I know that the world is still far from normal, but things are finally starting to feel a bit more normal for me. I know that it’s not completely there and I cannot live this way the rest of my life, but having a regular schedule is something that I know I’ve needed. As much as I’ve tried to do this on my own, it’s nice to have something to actually work on every day. And any issues I’m having with figuring out how to schedule things are not that bad. It’s more about just getting adjusted to the new schedule and I know I will be ok before I know it. And because this is how things always work, as soon as I’m used to the new schedule I bet things will change again (hopefully, a change because I get my other job back). And then I’ll be back to figuring out my schedule again and I’ll have to just do it.
But for now, I’m just getting through my training and being really excited about my new job. I know I jumped right into working and it was a little much at first, but also I think I started at a good time because soon I will have shortened weeks because of the holidays. So hopefully that little break will be time for me to relax and be prepared to fully jump back in and make 2021 a much better year for me.
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