Considerations

As much as I didn’t like it, I came in to work today, since Friday was one of the days listed on my new work shift.  Workforce isn’t budging, but I’m not really keen on pushing the limits of their patience.  So this pretty much means that, for the near future, I’m going to have to file all my Saturdays as LOAs, meaning that my salary for the next few months will have… holes in them equal to the amount of Saturdays I’d have to miss.  And as much as I value my job, I value my continued education more, and with a very small limit of two absences allowed per term, I’d rather not tempt fate academics-wise.

This shift was no different from the other days this week; my system is still not restored (something I’m glad about in a way), which meant that I took no merchant calls, nor the frustrating CS calls, and spend much of my morning on the usual membership application duty.  Given how the queue would spike at times, I didn’t get as much in-between reading as I’d like, but at least I wasn’t stressed out once the shift ended, and that’s always a plus in my book.

As I mentioned yesterday, I had to watch what I was eating today to compensate for the huge amount of food I took in during dinner last night.  I think I counted enough calories to make it so that I wasn’t starving myself, yet at the same time not as much as I’d usually eat (which already monitored as it is).  I also spent an additional half hour at the gym, though the extra time was more because people were occupying the  treadmills, so I had to settle for the other machines like the stairmaster (I think that’s what it’s called).  Spent thirty minutes on the incline, twenty minutes on the treadmill (about ten minutes doing a 5mph pace, with the rest rounded off by VERY brisk walking), and a rather fruitless thirty minutes on the stationary cycle.

Everything went well enough, until I went home that is.  I tripped in the dark on the way back to the house, and since I used my right hand to break my fall, I ended up with a really nasty gash more than an inch long.  I had to clench my hands shut just to stem the bleeding, and you bet that as soon as I got home I tried my best to wash and clean it, after which I doused the area of the wound with alcohol.  My sister was nice enough for a change to give me some band-aids (becaus apparently tatay had a wound of his own that needed tending), but this means that it’s going to be a little awkward doing any fanart or coloring for the next few days.

Anyway, bed.  As much as I’d love to watch The Philippine Resistance on History, I do have a class tomorrow. 

Just Another To Go

Today was slightly better than yesterday’s shift, if only by degrees.  I think this time around the call queue started to peter off around ten, though the avail times in between calls were still pitifully short compared to the ones we had prior to the Christmas season.  I think the longest one I had today was barely three minutes long, but one could consider even those minor pauses a minor blessing, since you get to rest your throat a bit before the next call comes in.  

This in no way diminishes the stress factor from the calls themselves of course; it’s unavoidable, given how in some ways the business I’m working for seems to be screwing with other people’s holiday in the worst ways possible.  I think my worst case today was where the system declined a check meant for the Christmas presents of a Cub Scout troupe consisting of a hundred kids, whose party will be tomorrow.  Since the company’s system prevented the (valid in my opinion) check from going through, well, I imagine that there’re going to be a lot of disappointed kids tomorrow.  It’s all stupid, but because of how our system is set up, it just ends up happening anyway.

I try not to think about just how awfully screwed-up our check validation system that it seems to turn down more valid transactions than the fraud that it’s supposed to prevent whenever I receive calls like the one above, and divorce myself emotionally from what’s happening, but it’s really hard to.  When you think about how your company is making a lot of people unhappy, well, it doesn’t really make you feel like you’re doing worthwhile customer service.  

I suppose if I wasn’t so used to the generally-cynical call center culture here, it would be just so easy to call it quits and find another place to work at, specifically one where my conscience isn’t bothered, but pragmatism wins out; the schedule I have is convenient for my studies, so until that’s taken care of this company is where I’ll stay in.  Make no mistake though, if there was another place out there that provided the same relative flexibility when compared to my school schedule, pays well, and doesn’t entail anything that keeps me up at night worrying about how I’ve indirectly contributed to the misery of people, then I’d take it up in a heartbeat.

Thankfully I technically only have two more days to worry about this (tomorrow and on Sunday), after which everything  should return to (relative) normalcy.  As an added bonus, it looks like the Scheduling Deities have granted me (and a few others) Monday off.  That extra day will do my soul a lot of good, I think.

Hmm, speaking of Christmas… I still haven’t wrapped the gifts I bought the other day, so I better start on those tomorrow.  It’s just that the past few days have been so exhausting, well, I just tell myself before I go to sleep for the afternoon that, “Ah, I’ll just start on those when I wake up…”  only not to do it in the end.

Well, hopefully I can remedy that tomorrow after my work shift ends. 

P.S.

I couldn’t sleep, so I finished this segment of that long-term hobby project I mentioned before, the Puella Magi stampede.  Just the three main Pleiades this time (Kazumi, Kaoru, and Umika).  Had to redraw Umika from the ground up though, which kind of sidetracked me from what I was supposed to be doing (redrawing Yuuri from the ground up…).

Haruhi forbid, the redrawing process took me the good part of 3 hours. And this is just THREE Puella. *shudders*

Atmospheric Actions

Today was yet another stressful day in a recent string of stressful workdays.  Talk about working with a heavy work queue: even if the customer service side was almost completely in evidence this time around, I still had to take care of several customer service calls, on top of the merchant calls that I had to handle (mostly for Toys R’ Us), the latter of which I answered on the average of at least a call every two minutes for about five hours.  I’m surprised that I haven’t talked myself hoarse yet, but I suppose always having something to drink ready on hand helps, as well as not actually doing much talking at home…  Ah.

The obvious result of this was that I was (again) tired once I got home.  After partaking of a slice from one of the opened boxes of Bauducco Panettone cakes currently stuffing our fridge (it’s still mind-boggling why our mother would send several boxes of what amounts to perishable food along in these packages of hers), it was off to bed.  I think I slept for about almost six straight hours, since it’s already past nine in the evening now, and I went to sleep at around five-past-three in the afternoon.

So here I am, eating another slice of Panettone cake, fully rested again.  Hmm.  I think I’ll use the evening to finish that quick sketch I did of Yuuri (from Kazumi Magica) earlier today.  I’m not really happy with how the first one went, and this looks like it’s going to be an improvement… Ah, we’ll just have to see.

Unwelcome Shifts

It was yet another stressful and exhausting day at the office today.  It’s hard to believe that it was a Monday, since the enormous call queue made it seem more like my usual pre-Christmas Saturday shifts.  I believe the call queue started letting up around eleven this time around, which was highly unusual as Mondays was normally the slowest day of the week. Ugh.  In all evidence it shouldn’t have been that bad, if not for the fact that the team was missing three people today, on top of the people on temporary LOA on the Customer Service team that was on duty.

And since Tuesdays normally have the heaviest concentration of calls, well, I’m really not looking forward to my shift tomorrow.  Might have to bring along some headache medicine tomorrow…

Nothing else to talk about today, really.  I was so exhausted that I barely got changed before I flopped unto my bed and went to sleep for the afternoon.  This season… Isn’t making me as happy as I should be, like at all. 

On to stuff not related to my personal issues… A lot of the provinces down south were hit hard by Typhoon Washi, something that no one was expecting, especially given our local weather bureau’s reassurances that the country wouldn’t experience any major typhoon’s at the end of the year (shows what they know huh?).  At this point the death toll is still rising, and the flooding caused by the typhoon has displaced countless people on top of destroying their homes.  It’s a terrible, terrible way to start what should be ostensibly the holiday season.

At this point the only thing I can really offer to those who’ve lost loved ones and their homes are my prayers.  

As Expected

Well, suffice to say that my shift today at work was as stressful as I expected, if not more so.  Indeed the call queue only started to let up a little around sometime past eleven in the morning, which is four hours into my workday.  It’s no surprise that I got a splitting headache barely past nine, and had to excuse myself to grab some paracetamol (and some decongestant on the side too) from our office’s clinic.  I really hope the next few days won’t be like this, but given my luck at these things it’ll likely be more of the same.  Way to take the fun out of the Christmas season, huh?

I finally got around to buying a replacement for my room’s office chair.  It’s a nice, high-backed affair, but this time around I made sure that its roller column wasn’t made out of plastic.  It came with a relatively hefty price tag though, and I pretty much had to lug the thing (in pieces!) on my own to the mall’s taxi stand, then part of the way home, never mind having to assemble the thing once I got home.  But hey, at least I no longer have to worry about tipping over randomly whenever I move around in front of my desktop now.

Now I can wander again in Skyrim in (relative) comfort.

Or not.  I’m pretty much drained for the day, and the only thing keeping me up has been a near-constant infusion of iced tea from the moment I got home…  And I think I’ve tapped out my supply for today.  So it’s off to bed, this time with the knowledge that I managed to actually accomplish something.  Now if I could only find my sketchbook so I can get back to drawing Puella again…

Turning Skies

Although a good part of the country is well into the Christmas season (I never commented on it before, since I kind of take it for granted, but ask any Filipino, and they’ll likely tell you that, yes, the Christmas season starts around October), that fact never really registered until today.  No, it’s not all the songs and the decorations popping all over the place, but the fact that our center has started to receive a surprisingly large amount of calls during a Monday (usually the slowest workday in the week), most of them from Toys R Us stores.  It made for a surprisingly stressful start of the week, and I’m actually wary now of how things will be tomorrow.

Finally was able to visit the bank today, and deposit part of the salary I received on Saturday.  Since that payday bundled in my 13th-month pay as well, this meant it was a substantial amount compared to what I usually received every payday, but the bulk of it went to paying off my credit card bill.  Some people might find it strange for me to do so, but with the bill paid off in full it means that I’ll be (hopefully) starting off the new year without any kind of debt for a change.  The left-over pay is still comparatively large, and likely enough to cover the expected Christmas spending, as well as make up for the hit I’m expecting on my next payday (I did take a leave of absence to finish my Screenplay Writing project after all, which means I didn’t come to work for five days).

I was planning on going out today to look for a possible replacement for the office chair I’ve been using for my computer table –one of it’s five legs finally broke, and while it’s still possible to sit on it, I have to be careful to keep the gap facing the direction of my keyboard, else there’s danger that it might tip over–but I was so tired from work earlier that as soon as I lay down on bed, it was lights out until I finally woke up early tonight.  I’ll have to see about that after work tomorrow, though this time I’ll have to look into chairs with steel supports, since this is the second time I’ve lost an office chair due to one of its (plastic) roller legs breaking.

Hmm, since I’m not tired due to the nap I had, I think I’ll catch up on some of my hobby backlog.  So anime for a bit, and maybe some sketching for the Puella Stampede, which some might recall I had to put on hold due to the start of classes.  We’ll just have to see.

Because like men who like to RP as girls, girls also get the urge to RP as manly-men

Well, that, or Skyrim.  Yeah, I couldn’t resist getting the new Elder Scrolls game, and I have to say that it’s fairly addictive.  My first character so far (a Redguard who’s mostly Neutral aligned, but with Good tendencies) is already level 72, and while I should already think of finishing the main quest, I’m putting it off for as long as possible (especially since Skuldafn temple is pretty much a one-way-trip to the Endgame), since there are more than a few Sidequests I haven’t done yet… Besides, Alduin doesn’t scale with the player’s levels, and with Dragonrend I think facing the big guy will go very quick.

The Usual Delays

Okay, now that was a terribly exhausting workday.  To give one an idea of just how bad it was, I normally get twenty-five odd customer service calls over the course of my six-hour workshift, but I was barely an hour into the shift and I’d already accumulated fifteen.  It was crazy.  This continued until around nine, which was around the time my supervisor noted that I was given priority on the Customer Service queue, and only the Customer Service queue (normally my duties are split between the Merchant and CS call lists).  That was remedied, but by that point I already taken in twenty-five calls. Sheesh.

Needless to say that I was dead-tired once I got home. I just didn’t care anymore, I just set up some downloads, then went to sleep… Five hours later though, I’m still feeling tired, and even now I just want to jump back into bed.  Sleep debt again? Very likely, given the disastrous last few days fueled by bottles of energy drinks, all for naught.

Anyway, the rewrite of the twenty-pager starts in earnest. I can’t afford to delay its submission for longer than necessary.  Five pages a day. I can do it, right?

Calm Before The Panic

Today was another relatively calm start to the week. Nothing really out of the ordinary, but given my current situation at the office I couldn’t afford to lower my guard. With the looming threat of the hearing over my head, it was really hard to relax like I would normally do during a Monday. Tsk. There’s no word yet on when it’ll happen, but it’s likely that the email I’m dreading will pop up over the week.

Am I ready for it? I’m not sure. Expecting something isn’t really the same as being prepared for something, and how can one be prepared for an office inquisition anyway? I guess not panicking would be the best I could hope for.

Still, all this anxiety isn’t doing me any good. I came home drained earlier, and I couldn’t even muster the urge to watch the shows I downloaded over the past few days. I just came home, then jumped into bed. Really.

Can’t afford to be idle though. There’s the submission I have for my class at the end of the week. Need to work on that ASAP.

Tear Out My Heart

One of the first thing one learns in the BPO/Outsourcing industry is the fact that one can’t afford to be soft-hearted, at least while taking in calls. If not, the usual complaining American/British/Australian/what have you jerkass will eventually get to you, which will lead to much stress and frustration. It’s the only real way to stay long in the business really, kind of a weird Nietzschean way of adaptation: listening to complaints of frustrated callers for days on end, generally being douches to the poor sods who have to answer their calls, the agents/analyst eventually become douches themselves to cope.

Then again, I suppose hardening one’s heart is the only way to be able to take in the other types of calls: those customers who are generally in very real need, and yet couldn’t do anything because, in one way or another, your company is preventing them. Like the matron who needs the money to buy anti-stroke medicine, but couldn’t do so because her apparently-valid ID wasn’t being accepted by the company’s identification system, meaning she couldn’t use her checks, and her kids and husband weren’t there to buy the medication for her. Stuff like that. Totally unfair, yet there’s nothing the agent could do on their end but apologize, even if they sincerely want to help. 

While one is at work, acting like that, can be rationalized as just doing your job. But afterwards, once the business face drops and the agent in question is alone in their room, with nothing but the experiences of the workday to keep them company… Well, I don’t think anyone can’t claim to be unaffected by those kinds of calls in some way.

Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. It’s been bugging me for a bit, and if I kept it in any longer, I don’t know, I might have ended my workweek depressed, which won’t do really. Especially with that assignment hanging over my head. Ugh. I don’t really write well while feeling down… Okay, that’s not quite right, I rarely right well on a good day, but feeling blue makes me suck more, so yeah. Happy thoughts.

Speaking of which, I’m making some headway into Screenplay, though not as much as I’d like. I should be finished reading all five chapters by tomorrow though, but actually digesting all that information might take a while.

On to other topics… It looks like my order from Games Workshop should arrive here by around five in the afternoon tomorrow. Barring hiccups in the actual delivery (the couriers sometimes have problems finding the house), I should have those parts by then, or on Friday. Gotta love their promptness. Say what you want about the prices associated to the company’s products, but when it comes to the delivery of those products they do really well. And, judging by the many positive mentions from the folk at Bolter and Chainsword, their customer service ain’t half bad either.

Hmm. I’ve run out of stuff to say, as usual, so it’s off to bed. Can’t afford to break the ‘no-late’ streak that I’m on, after all.

Another Descent To Heck

It was a very slow day at work. Slower than usual actually. I think, out of the whole shift, the total amount of calls I received barely came up to ten. It was that laid back, and it came to the point where some of my officemates were dozing off in their workstations. Of course this probably means that, to balance things out, tomorrow will probably be hellish again, but I suppose it’s just something we’ll have to accept for the free time we got today.

Aside from that, it was yet another day of indolence at home. I planned to jog earlier, but that got sidetracked rather quickly due to my sleepiness this afternoon. Let’s just say that, between the choice of napping for most of the afternoon and exercise, the former won out. Which in some ways is bad, as the amount of food we still have means that I’m gaining poundage without shedding anything in return. Yeah, will hate myself even more by the end of the week.

And… That’s it actually. Nothing really exciting happened to me today. Then again, this is just normal for my life, I suppose.

P.S. I can access the Animesuki forums again. A technician at PLDT fixed the problem by resetting something on their end. I have to say, it was really weird how it was the only site I couldn’t access at home.