Feel Me Don't You

Since beginning my recent employment, I’ve been tasked with all sorts of duties which, apparently, fall under the umbrella of my job title including, but not limited to: developer, customer service, help desk, project manager/lead, accounting, maintenance, warehousing, and the list goes on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have a job after so long on unemployment. It’s just that there are few limits to what I am allowed to do and some might think that’s liberating. Maybe so, but the flip side is that too many options is also paralyzing as you can quickly find yourself with far too many irons in the fire as it were. One of the first things I’ve tried to focus on is process improvement. Once I can eliminate the pesky parts of the job that keep preventing me or others from doing what we should/could be doing, then I feel the 50% growth in sales over last year can hit 75% or even better.

The first task up was to find a way to minimize customer service calls and with a few changes to some of the website’s pages, it’s gone down at least 5% over the first month. Is that good? Anything that reduces my interaction with an online customer is a good thing in my book. Time will really tell, but that means there needs to be some sort of means to measure it all. So that’s what I initiated – via a simple Google doc – a way to track order issues, shipping issues, product questions, and more importantly volume percentages of emails to orders, order issues to email, derived orders from product questions, and more. It’s a manual process at this point, sadly – don’t get me started on that – and it adds more to my workload. Fortunately, the little things I’ve been able to do on a daily basis have allowed me to become more efficient in taking on these new tasks and more in the same amount of time. The downside to all these numbers and projections is seeing how ineffectual I am.

I have taken a small amount of pride in delivering what seems to be a better customer experience, but that isn’t translating to greater sales. Charting the numbers thus far shows how minuscule my efforts are to the bottom line whether it is to an initial sale or to repeat business. Granted, the time frame for my sample may be too small for an accurate representation, but that doesn’t help my psyche. Throughout my adult life, I’ve tried to adhere (not adhesed, Ash, it’s not a word) to a simple mantra: Always do your best; be the best person you can possibly be and the rest will follow. The disturbing part is that these paltry figures are documented evidence shared with my manager and others in the company. The numbers, staring at me from the Google doc, mock me on a daily basis and I’m just not sure how to reconcile myself with that ineffectual feeling. Oh, if only it was that fresh feeling, but I digress. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I can feel this is spreading to other aspects of my life and I’d really like to nip this in the bud immediately. Maybe I’m just focusing too much on the cold, hard numbers and should try to see how my efforts are impacting in other ways. Any advice?

last day of being a bum. are you PUMPED!?!!!?

– text received today from Joel Weaver (friend who lost his job two months to the day after I did)

Everybody please say it with me – this economy sucks! Having said that, I should inform you that after just over ten and one-half months, I am finally rejoining the workforce. Tomorrow will be my first day at the new job as a Web Marketing Manager. It’s a very small company compared to where I’ve worked over the past decade or so and I’m not quite sure what kind of implications that will hold. I guess we’ll see. I’m hoping that once I get my feet under me I can help them streamline some of their processes to make life a little easier.

The strangest thing about going back to work is that I think my house is somehow aware of this fact. Over the past couple days the AC has gone out and the spring that runs along the track of my garage door snapped. I never realized how heavy the garage door was until I had to try to lift it yesterday just to ensure I could get my car out. Various other things are breaking around the house, but at least I’ll have some money coming in now to fix these things. Hey, do you see that cloud up there? Look, it has a silver lining.

What a splenetic sunrise of synchronicity.

It’s been many moons since I’ve been in a text conversation in the early morning hours. Then, it was with a very special person with whom I was, more often than not, continuing a conversation from earlier that night and I didn’t mind in the least. Today, when I received a text from an unknown source at 6:10am, my first reaction was along the lines of “Who the **** is texting me at this hour?” Context is a fickle friend. Upon reading the message, “We have an opening. Contact [name withheld]. He requested your resume”, I was immediately shocked from irked to piqued by this anonymous texter. Truth be told, for whatever as yet unknown reason, I was pulled from my sleep at 5:45am and I was more annoyed at that fact than I was at the text/texter. As it turns out, the message came from a friend in Illinois with whom I’d been discussing job opportunities last Friday night. He apologized if he’d awakened me and forwarded the job information, so I’m definitely more appreciative than angry. Thanks Sean!

The universe clearly wanted me awake as it infused my subconscious with the susurrus of “Here’s the mutiny I promised you.” Following the timeline…

5:45am – awakened after a few hours of sleep
6:10am – received unexpected job opportunity text
6:20am – mystery solved, first attempt to return to slumberland
6:30am – watch alarm goes off and, for the first time in ages, I actually hear it and wonder why I never disabled it
6:31am – grumble, roll over, second attempt to return to slumberland
6:40am – realize the futility of attempting to return to slumberland as my brain has hit overdrive processing last night’s dream involving Jeni, her mom, and the autographed books I gave her for Christmas
6:43am – receive text from the author of aforementioned books who’s finally able to meet me for lunch to discuss my creative writing endeavors in Morpheus’ Gift (yes, there’s still more to come)

Okay, universe, you win, I’m up. I’m up.

For those who don’t recognize the title, it’s a lyric from The New Pornographers‘ 2007 release Challengers. Again, for no apparent reason other than the simple fact that I haven’t listened to it in awhile, I recently dropped this disc into a playlist and have had it on repeat. I enjoyed it back when I received it, but it has grown on me even more lately and I definitely recommend picking it up if you don’t already have it.

I’ve had three interviews within the past week all with different roles and responsibilities as well as geographic locales. The first interview was for a Web Marketing Manager position, the second was for a Tech Support position with some web development possibilities, and the third was for a Quality Assurance Tester position. All three interviews seemed to go well in varying degrees from pretty well to very well. Naturally, there are pros and cons to each of the positions and I sincerely hope that by the end of this week I’ll be able to choose from multiple offers or at the very least one. Feel free to join me in crossing your fingers, legs, or anything else you feel comfortable crossing – just please don’t hurt yourselves as I don’t want that on my conscience.

Perhaps it’s simply the worry over the uncertainty of income, but I am no longer sure if I could work from home on a consistent basis. Sure, there’s the convenience factor, the gas and auto maintenance savings, and other benefits, but there’s also the trade-off of other distractions in addition to the feeling of cabin fever. It’s highly possible that the cabin fever feeling would dissipate with better weather and a laptop. I can certainly imagine doing some writing or other job-related function while sitting out on the back deck (which, with luck, will become the back patio later this year) with a cold beverage close at hand. Hm, on second thought, perhaps I should give a teleco job more consideration.

With the way 2009 ended so dismally, I wasn’t very optimistic regarding the job market. With the holidays, no one was really interested in interviewing for positions let alone posting them on any of the usual job sites. For someone on the verge of desperation, it was quite depressing especially in light of these statistics. After getting past the first week of the year, however, things have definitely picked up and may even point to this recession beginning to turn around – at least for IT positions. So far I have interviewed with two new tech recruiters and had 3 others contact me. One of those “out of the blue” recruiters even landed me an interview with a telecom this past Tuesday.

The interview seemed to go well as we discussed various points of the job as well as what I would bring to the position. We discussed the interviewer’s managerial style and philosophy which included some, shall we say, uncharacteristic phrasings. It made me feel like he was quite comfortable with me during the interview and I took that as a positive. He had a few more people to interview and is making a decision very soon. So, hopefully I will learn on Monday if I will be working for one of the nation’s largest telecoms or striving for an interview and job with someone else.

/fingers crossed

For those of you with unfulfilling jobs, you might check this article out.

[caption id="attachment_2325" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Festivus Time Is Here!"][/caption]It’s nice to know that even though I am no longer physically at HWI, I am still in the hearts and minds of those that remain. As you can see, my legacy lives on as PTM retrieved and assembled the aluminum pole in its base signalling the beginning of Festivus. Naturally, the grievance wall was quick to follow. Typically, the grievances start slow, but by the end, that wall is usually covered and sometimes overflowing with the ways people have let you down over the past year. I realize the quality makes it tough to read the Post-It Notes so here are some of what’s been posted so far:

Silverlight
Paul
Taxes
Copy & paste
Paying more and getting less
KU
IT-Acct Love Affairs
Gross ties
www.feelmedontyou.com

See? They really miss me! I’m sure the Festivus Nazi will soon be on patrol and will likely take down things of “questionable nature” – usually a couple get removed each year.

Sorry for the back to back YouTube posts, but as I was watching the first season of Scrubs again, this song came up in the episode “My Blind Date” and it appears to be a bit of an enigma. The lyrics are simply a repetition in a slightly altered form of “Why can’t you break down the walls”. The thing is, when this episode first aired, the song accompanying the scene was originally done by Five for Fighting entitled Easy Tonight, but they wouldn’t give the series permission to use it upon the DVD release. So, this sub-two minute song was incorporated. It, thus far, has never been credited and people all over the internet have been clamoring to know who performed it and if it was from a larger piece of music.

The song resonates on multiples levels for me as I continue to strive for the “perfect game”.

I finally have another interview tomorrow (Fri. 11/6) with SMG and I will admit I’m a little nervous. It’s a two hour long event – the first hour with the team lead and the second hour with the team itself. My tech recruiter keeps telling me what a good fit I am and I truly hope he’s right. I don’t want to get my hopes up like I did on my last interview – which, by the way, went about as perfectly as one could go without, you know, actually getting the job. I hesitate to say that something must not have been right with that job which is why I didn’t get it. When discussing being let go at HWI, Jeni once wrote to me “Things are going to be okay. Every down has its up, and there is a reason this happened that transcends company downsizing.” So, are these two separate instances linked together by destiny?

Regardless, tomorrow I will get up and put on my confident face and march into that interview with the purpose of proving to them that they want – no, need – someone with my skills, potential, and work ethic.

“Everybody’s got a hold on hope; It’s the last thing that’s holding me.”

AKA Get A Job (The update)

A little more than a week after losing my job at HWI, where exactly am I?

Signed up for unemployment.
Sent out resumes.
Spoken to several recruiters.
Got a potential job offer from IBM in Dubuque, IA.
Got a potential job offer in Omaha, NE.
Investigating other job possibilities here.
Investigating job opportunities elsewhere.

I’m thinking I may just do a little studying and spend the money for the couple tests it would take to get an MCDST certification in case I can’t find anything in the ColdFusion Application Development, QA Testing, or Technical Writing areas. With my experience in improv, specifically corporate training, I’m also investigating opportunities in software training. There are many different paths that I can take and, like a jazz soloist, I’m investigating all my options. Thank you all for your support, well-wishes, and assistance in resume tuning. I appreciate it all more than I can say.