I’ve had my first 2 graveyard shifts this week (my third might be tonight but I won’t know until a little later today). The graveyard shifts are for training for a survey coder job. Once I’m trained, I’ll be working from home and during daytime hours. But since all the good coders work the graveyard, that’s when the training is.
I’m pretty lucky that I live close to the office. It’s only about a 10 minute drive and there is metered parking in front. But since the meters only charge you from 8am-8pm, I get to park there for free!
I was pretty nervous going into my first shift on Monday evening. The shifts start at 11pm, which is my normal bedtime. And they could go as late at 6am, but we were guaranteed at least 4 hours of pay even if we were there less time. I tried to sleep in a little on Monday and take a nap to prepare for being up so late, but my body just didn’t want to. So after working 4 hours of my virtual assistant legal recruiter job and getting in a workout with Orangetheory, I waited it out in my house until about 10:45pm to go to work.
On the first day, we pretty much jumped right into the job. There are 5 new people being trained right now and we all worked with one experienced recruiter. My recruiter went over the basics of the job. It involves reading surveys that were filled out after people see a movie. You look at the responses to the questions and try to create categories for those responses. The first few questions I worked on were pretty easy. The answers were either one thing or another. There were no variables really. Then we moved on to some more subjective responses. Those were harder to create categories out of, but I learned how to do it.
That first night, I was done at about 2:30am and was in my bed by 3:00am. It was pretty uneventful getting home and I got to sleep pretty easily (I was exhausted).
On the second night of training, we started doing some of the same as the night before. We worked on slightly harder questions so I had some trouble, but it’s not a super hard job (the supervisor keeps telling us that). After coding the questions, we learned how to imput all the information into an Excel sheet. That part was pretty easy for me since I’m a fast typist and they had a keypad for us to type with (when I start working from home, I totally want to invest in a keypad to use). There were some minor errors when I finished, but the coder I worked with said that those were to be expected for someone’s first time trying the job.
Overall, I’m feeling pretty comfortable already with the job. I’m not comfortable with the hours, but I keep reminding myself that that is a temporary situation and hopefully this job will be long-term. While this job won’t have enough hours for me to have it be my only job, there’s nothing wrong with creating a collection of jobs if that’s what it takes for me to pay my bills.
If I don’t have to go back in tonight, I’ll be working again next week. And hopefully I’ll be fully trained within or before 2 months (which is how long they told me training might last).
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