Even though my main day job is still a day job, that doesn’t mean I don’t work hard at it. If anything, I think I work harder because I want to show my value in case I have to take time off for booking acting work. I’ve heard of so many friends who couldn’t get time off that they needed and still have their job, so they had to quit in order to take a role they were offered. I never want to be in that position, so I really want to make sure that I’m always working hard and making sure that I do all my work to the best of my ability.
In the 2 years that I’ve been at this job, things have changed quite a bit for me. I started working part-time and my responsibilities changed frequently as I got more and more familiar with the company. Then I became full-time and got more work. And my biggest and most recent change was transitioning out of direct customer care work and more administrative and systems-based work. While my background has always been in customer care work, I’m really happy with the new type of work that I’m doing and I feel like it’s a much better fit for me. I also like that I don’t have the same time restrictions as I did before to do deep dives to figure things out. It’s nice to be able to look really hard at all aspects of a problem you are trying to figure out and get a full picture. Then I can share my findings with my co-workers who do the direct work with customers so they can provide the best answers possible.
There have been people who have been hired and left in the 2 years I’ve been working. And now, I’m one of the most senior employees in my department. That’s a bit crazy to me because it feels at times that I’m still new at all this. But I also know that I am familiar with what I’m being asked to do, especially since many of our systems are things that I have designed or created for us. It still feels weird to be in charge or this high up, but I know that I’ve taken the steps to get there and I wouldn’t be thought of this way by our executive team if they questioned my abilities.
Because I have senior status, that also means I sometimes have to do more work. We had a bunch of changes that happened in the past week, and there was a lot of extra work that needed to be done in order to make sure we stayed on top of everything for the month. There were some nights I worked later than normal and I had to work over the weekend even though I have weekends off (and this was a holiday weekend). I was paid overtime for doing all this extra work, so I didn’t mind it too much. And I didn’t have any plans for the weekend so I wasn’t missing anything that I was looking forward to.
I know that putting in those extra hours was appreciated by the executive team. And I know I don’t have to prove myself to anyone, but I also know that this showed how seriously I take things even if this isn’t the career that I am working toward. I know that many people with day jobs aren’t as lucky and either don’t get a chance to prove themselves or it doesn’t help if they need to take time off in the future. But I’m grateful that I have been in a good job for these past 2 years. And if I have to give up a weekend once every few years, I think that’s worth it for everything that I’m getting in return.
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