Monday, January 14, 2008

Even More Bureaucracy

After the multiple confirmations last week of my acceptance of the job offer, I got an email on Saturday with even more paperwork to fill out electronically. It took about an hour to go over the stuff, which I decided I should print out. But it was helpful in getting the W-4s done, setting up direct deposit for my pay, etc.

Today was the first day of training, and we were all presented with a thick packet of more paperwork which included a number of forms we had to sign and date. That place certainly believes in paperwork! Our trainer went over it all, and some of it was rather repetitive, then later in the day we watched some videos which further repeated a lot of the same information.

During the day, I ran into several people I'd worked with before, including my previous supervisor, a supervisor I'd worked with on Sundays, and the trainer was one I'd had during the far-too-abbreviated customer care training that led me to leave. It wasn't the trainer's fault, it was the company's for deciding that people who had never handled billing or quite a few other customer care functions would be just fine with four days' training.

We get three weeks training before we go into another training area where we take calls. In that area, there will be more people available to help us if we need it, although experience tells me that we'll frequently have to figure things out ourselves. I not only have the advantage of having worked there before, I also used many of the same systems at Cingular/AT&T.

There are several teams at this center that are set up as elite units. They make more money because they get commissions on every service or phone they sell. The claim was made that people on those teams typically make $15-19 per hour, which is pretty decent for a call center. It's something to consider because attendance is one of the keys to getting on one of those teams and when I was there before, I worked from September '04 to February '06 before I had to take a couple of sick days, and I was only late a very few times, and part of that was due to delays from trains crossing the bus route I used getting to the former job location nearer to downtown Portland.

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