Tag Archives: job

After my job news for one of my day jobs earlier this week, I didn’t think I’d have any other day job updates or changes happening anytime soon. Things have been pretty stable for a while. I know I had the option to add more hours to my old box office job, but I didn’t want to since I was balancing everything with my schedule. I was back to working a similar number of hours to what I was doing before the pandemic and I was making about the same that I was before. That seemed to be a big accomplishment to me and I was happy being back in my routine that felt so familiar.

But then on Tuesday, I got an alert at my social media customer service job about a call with the owner of the company. This was to set up a meeting and the subject was something similar to “Your Future With The Company” which basically sounds like the job version of “we need to talk” in a relationship. Fortunately, I was also messaged that this was going to be a positive talk so I wasn’t too stressed out. If I didn’t know that, I probably would have spent the entire day worried I was about to be fired. I still was a little worried about what the news would be, but I tried to focus on the idea that it was going to be good news and that I didn’t need to worry. It didn’t help that my phone meeting ended up being much later than the expected time, so I had extra time to stress a bit. But I stayed calm and tried not to think too much about it all.

And as I was told, it was all good news. I am very aware that the company is growing at a very fast rate (I see all the new clients come in and add most of them to our database). And because of that, the company is growing as far as staff and workload goes. When I was hired, it was part-time and I knew it would possibly stay part-time. Working full-time was briefly discussed when I was interviewing, but it wasn’t a focus of what we discussed. Also, when I was hired about 7 months ago, things weren’t growing as fast as they are now. So things are changing up and the owner of the company wants me to grow with the company too.

So I was offered the opportunity to work full-time starting next week. The owner of the company is aware of my other jobs (the job I was writing about yesterday isn’t really a concern since those are my own hours) and my schedule with my other customer service job. And I said I wasn’t comfortable necessarily leaving my other job for now. We do have new employees who are in training, so maybe in the future I’d consider it, but for now, I know that I’m needed and I do like my work and my co-workers. So I had a very honest and frank conversation with the owner of the company about not feeling ok leaving my other job, and after discussing it more he said he’d be willing to let me try working both jobs at once during my overlap. It would only be an overlap of 8 hours a week (2 hours a day for 4 days a week), so it’s not like it’s a huge chunk of time. I think it would be possible, especially since I have explained what portions of my job I felt ok overlapping with (for example, not doing both customer service chats but doing the customer service chat for one job and emails or data entry for the other). I know that this will be something I have to try and re-evaluate, but at least I’m being given a chance to try.

And even though I have essentially worked full-time hours before, this is a little different from the past. But I’m really happy with how things have been going and seeing where I could see myself in the future. My focus is still on acting, but I like having a more stable day job situation. And I should still be able to have some of the flexibility I need for auditions and other acting-related things. But this is going to put me in a better spot financially and even though it’s doubling my hours at one job, it’s only an extra 2-3 hours a day when you consider the hours I already work my other job. So not the biggest change ever.

Like I had been told ahead of my meeting, this was all good news. And I think it is just the start with good news for this job since I do see ways that I can grow and change within the company. And for a day job, that is an amazing feeling.

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I don’t know if it’s that this year still feels weird or time flies by and I don’t think about it too much, but there are some things that I seem to just be forgetting about this year that I should have been expecting. It’s not bad, but it’s funny when it happens because I’m surprised and know I shouldn’t be. And I had that happen last week with one of my day jobs.

My day job where I do data entry work is on an annual contract, and I keep getting either new contracts or extensions. Every time a contract ends, I do have a little fear that I won’t get a new one, but that hasn’t really happened. I have had gaps where I was waiting on a new contract, but I know one is coming and it’s just a matter of time before it’s settled. And for the most part, my contracts run from July to June. But whenever a contract is ending mid-year, I seem to forget about it coming up.

And that’s exactly what happened last week. I was submitting my June invoice (this job pays me once a month and I have to invoice my hours to get paid). After submitting it, my boss thanked me and reminded me that was my last day of my contract and I didn’t have a new one just yet. I did panic a bit because I know I’m fine without that job but it’s a struggle. But my boss then asked if we could have a call at the end of the week to discuss what’s next.

I tried to stay positive and not worry about things, but the few days between knowing my contract ended and my meeting happening were a little stressful. Fortunately, my stress was for nothing because the meeting went well.

First the good stuff, I will be getting another contract and hopefully it will be ready for me to approve and sign within a week. It will be backdated to the 1st, so I’m able to work now and invoice it for the end of the month. And my job will be switching up a bit and focusing more on social media where I will have the chance to be creative and add some fun to things. I also might be getting trained on a new part of the job doing more website maintenance and QA type stuff. That will possibly come a bit later since I will need to be trained on a different section of the backend of the website than I’ve ever used. But I do like to learn new things and I think this will be a job I’m good at!

For the not so great news, my contract for now will only be until the end of 2021. This is not about me but because the funding for the service is only approved so far through 2021. They will probably get the rest of the government funding and then my contract will be extended through June like normal, but that’s not a guarantee (but I feel like it’s very certain). And I won’t be doing my event data entry work anymore. The site was glitching a lot and we discovered that several weeks of my work was gone. I was upset to hear that because I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t working. But I wasn’t the only one experiencing the issues, so the way events will be posted is probably going to change. We discussed some ideas in my meeting, but I’m not sure how involved in that process I’ll be moving forward. And maybe when the site is less glitchy, I’ll go back to that work. But it does feel odd to not be doing something that has been a part of my job since they hired me.

I’m not sure yet how many hours a week I’ll have, but even if it’s only 5 hours a week (so 1 a day), that will help me with my budgeting and making sure I don’t have to start only paying part of my credit card. And I do enjoy the work and the people I work with, so I’m glad that will continue. While I do like my other jobs where I don’t have to worry each year if I’ll get a new contract, if this is the worst part of the job I think I’m a pretty lucky person!

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For so many of us, this past year has been a crazy one for work. Some of my friends went from going into an office every day to working at home. Many of my friends lost their jobs and either have been working hard to find a new one or have made major adjustments in their life (like moving to where they could find work). My job situation has been a lot of ups and downs over the last year.

When the pandemic hit, neither of my jobs were affected at first. Then, my box office job cut back my hours. Then the box office job cut back the hours even more. And in August, my box office job had to let me go. I was still working my data entry job, but it wasn’t enough work to cover my expenses, so I had to balance how many hours I worked at that job with my unemployment (so I wouldn’t lose my unemployment). And I was very lucky that job was willing to work with me and understood the situation that I was in.

Then at the end of last year, I got my new job doing customer service with the social media company. I was so grateful to get that job and it’s been great working with them. Once I started working with them, I increased my hours with my data entry job and switched my job responsibilities to fit my skill set better. And more recently, my hours at my new job are being reduced a bit (partially due to something that was my choice and partially due to new employees being added to the schedule). But even with the reduced hours, I was still able to make everything work for me.

And then last week, I started back at my old box office job! I have known this was coming for a while, but I wasn’t sure of the exact start date. A lot of it depended on how safe it was to do shows in different locations. And when they asked if I wanted to come back, they asked me about my availability. I let them know what hours I could do around my other jobs since I don’t feel I could overlap my 2 customer service jobs. So they worked with that and asked me to start back with 2 weekday afternoons as well as the Saturday shift.

Going back to my box office job was a little odd. Things are familiar since I worked that job for so many years. But they are also different because some of the backend systems have changed and there are different rules to be aware of with new safety and health guidelines. I don’t feel like a total newbie at the job, but I had to ask questions about a lot of things that I knew before. Sometimes I had a complete blank on something simple, like accidentally forgetting the work phone number. But I know it’s just a matter of time before things come back to me and it’s easy again.

I know the long plan is for me to be working every afternoon plus on Saturdays, but that might take some time to get to that point. A lot of the locations aren’t open yet or can’t be open to full capacity. There are a few that could do that because they were doing the shows outdoors or for other reasons. But it hopefully will just be a matter of time before everything is up and running again. For now, I’m just glad to be back at work so I can ease into things as they get busier.

Even with working 3 jobs right now, my work schedule isn’t too overwhelming. I’m very lucky with the hours I work and how nicely my schedule fits together. And I’m grateful for any and all jobs I have. I would love to get myself into a better financial place so I don’t have to have the stress and worries I had before. There are some more expensive things that I’d like to be able to save for, like a new computer in the next year or so.

Every time something from before the pandemic is back in my life, I feel a bit more hopeful that things are finally normalizing and that this time will soon be in the past. And getting back to my old job, even if it’s not the same schedule as I worked before, is a big sign to me that we are getting back to normal again and I love that feeling.

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It’s been just over 3 months since I started my new customer service job. While I’m still learning things, I’m feeling more and more settled with work these days. At the beginning, it was a bit overwhelming with everything that I was trying to learn. But it did eventually sink in and now I’m feeling pretty comfortable with most things customers are asking me about.

I haven’t worked too many jobs that have set check-in points, but with this one there was. I had a check-in about a month in (which was a little bit past a month because of the timing of holidays) and that went really well. But that one felt a bit more casual than what I was going to be expecting with the 3-month review. I had no reason to be nervous or worried, but I always feel that way about work. It’s been a long time since I’ve been let go from a job for a reason other than the pandemic. I shouldn’t be worried about that, especially when my manager has been very open with communication about my job performance. She hasn’t been hiding things as she sees them. If I make a mistake or do something that could be better, she lets me know. That can be a little scary, but I appreciate it so I can improve on my performance. But even with all that, knowing I was having my 3-month review coming up made me worried that it was all going to change.

But as I think anyone could have guessed, that wasn’t the case. I had my review last week and it went pretty much how I expected it to go. And we covered quite a few things in the meeting.

The first thing was something that I asked for. For the past 3 months, I’ve been doing 2 different jobs at the company. I’ve been doing the customer service work as well as outbound engagement work. And while I could continue doing both, I knew I was experiencing burnout with the outbound engagement work as I have been doing that for other jobs now too. And when I was hired, they were very open to me saying if I was feeling overwhelmed by both jobs. So I wasn’t afraid to mention it to them. I’m going to still be doing that work until a replacement is hired, but it probably won’t be too long before that happens. I also wanted to take this part of my job off my plate because I’m hearing more news about when I might be asked back to my old customer service job. I won’t be doing both jobs at the same time, but I don’t know when I would have time for the outbound engagement work when I’m working with my old job again too.

We also went over what has been good and what could be better. And for the most part, things have been awesome. I have previously said how things might have been harder for me than for most new hires because I started and then had time off for the holidays. That made things tough on me. Also, because of the holidays, the typical schedule for how things go each month has been a bit different. So the way things went while I was in training isn’t exactly how they normally go. It’s not a bad thing, but something I’m very aware of. And the only other thing that could be better was something we were able to fix on my check-in call. There’s something within our system where we enter new clients that wasn’t working the way I thought it should. We had to copy and paste things from old forms when I thought there was a way to make a template. And there was a way to make that happen and it was fixed at that moment! It wasn’t a huge problem, but it would make us much more efficient when we work. And efficiency is important.

And at the end of the call, I was told that I would be getting a raise! It’s not a huge raise, but it’s not insignificant either. And having that raise is going to make things a bit easier as I won’t have as many hours of work when I’m not doing the outbound engagement work anymore. I’m not sure if my hours will increase in the future right now, but I’m open to the possibility. And I am very happy with this job and feel like it’s a great fit for me, so I’m hoping that I will continue to grow with them!

I don’t know when I have another check-in call like this one, but I also know that I can always reach out to someone if I’m having concerns or an issue. I don’t need to wait for an official check-in to see if something can be fixed or changed. And knowing that is a great feeling and something that I haven’t experienced with all the jobs I’ve had before.

I’m still so grateful for my friend who helped me get this job. It’s been better than I could have expected and I’m excited to see what will be in my future with the company.

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