Some Catching Up About Work
I have a really cool new signature graphic (at left) for my company e-mail. That's just some of the good news from work.
My third day back at work today and I spent half of it talking to customers. I've managed to avoid 2½ days of productivity but the honeymoon is over. I guess the job isn't all that hard, I suppose, but I still don't like it.
Part of what I don't like is that it is now a condition of my employment at Cingular that I give 1.3% of my paycheck to the Communication Workers of America (CWA) labor union. In other words, even if I don't belong to the union, they get part of my paycheck. A union rep distributing the deduction authorization form told me that if I didn't like it I didn't have to work there. Oddly, she doesn't work there.
Here's another part of my job I don't like. Customer A cancels 4 lines of service because it "sucks" and they will "take out a full page ad in the local paper to tell everyone!" Customer B calls later that day and sings the praises of the exact same service in the exact same area. Some 90% of the time the problem lies in a cruddy phone (everyone wants the free phone without thinking "You get what you pay for!"), misuse ("So I have to turn it off once in a while? How do you turn it off?), location (common window glass can cut signal by 2%), or just plain not thinnking ("Why isn't it perfect all the time?"). I could be more detailed, but FLSA rules mean I can't think about work unless I'm clocked in. The union plans on enforcing this.
