Well, It's Been...A Week
Jun. 14th, 2020 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teddy_radiatorI finished my first week of training in my new job, and it was an ass-kicker. It's difficult to train 20 different people from all over the country, and I think my trainer did it with varying degrees of success. I have three more weeks of it and I'm going to need every single minute of it.
The week started off with the usuals - some couldn't log in, some couldn't figure out how to set up their pcs, some didn't receive their pcs, some showed up 1/2 a day late, some didn't show up at all, and to top it all off, they had a major system crash over the weekend and half of the systems we needed weren't back on line yet. The results were that we spent most of the first three and a half days wasting enormous amounts of time trying to get this or that person logged in properly or their equipment to work properly or the system to work properly. In the end, she hopscotched around on the stuff she COULD talk about, which meant that by Thursday, when we were supposed to be 4/5ths through the first week's training modules, we were still on Day 2. And this job involves a very rigid procedural flow, which we couldn't really follow because parts of it were inaccessible.
Most of my fellow trainees kept up for the most part, but you know there's always the one on a two-minute delay who writes nothing down and interrupts to ask the answer to the question she just answered a few moments before, and who asks to be given her work id every time it is needed to log into a different part of the system because she obviously has written nothing down. My notebook looks like something you'd see in the control room of Chernobyl.
It has made things a little stressful, and damn intimidating, because there is so much detail to remember. And they evaluate us rather stringently, so on top of remembering everything, you're being graded once a week randomly on it as well. I have faith that I will eventually get it al down, and I want to believe I'll be good at it. It's a nice job, and I need it desperately, so I'm determined to be a hit at it. I wrote myself a flow chart of hit points I have to touch in order to pass my evaluations, and I actually feel a little better about it now.
TheHubs has been an absolute angel this week. Each break is met with a cuppa and some biscuits, each lunch is a delicious salad, and each dinner time I sit down to a hot, home-cooked meal. I'm sure the fun of it all will wear off eventually as he discovers what a drudge trying to come up with different meals every day can be, but for now he's enjoying being a house husband. He also made me a lovely potting table this week for my modest little gardening ventures. We have some very handsome green pepper plants and five young lemon trees doing well. I also bought some basil, rosemary and mint in small pots and repotted them, and they are doing well. Of all things, my aloe vera plant looks awful. I've got to really get busy with it next weekend. We also ran by my mom's house and picked up her old wheelbarrow, which needs a new wheel but other than that looks pretty good. It's been sitting upside down in her back yard since we moved here in 2008, so I asked if we could have it. She happily passed it along to us.
Yesterday we were a bit naughty and went to a produce stand to buy some fresh produce. Of course, we and another couple of older ladies were about the only ones wearing a mask, and we were just cringing away from people who have NO concept of social distancing. We went to two, which were pretty much side by side one another, one small and one large, and I'd say about 10% of us were wearing masks. I got some lovely fresh fruit and veg, some local chow-chow, preserves and pickled beets and some blackberry cinnamon bread that was so good I'm glad I didn't taste it before we bought it or I would have bought every loaf of it. Again, just shying away from folks, especially the check-out girls, who were wearing no protective wear and didn't care who gave them cash or how close they got. I was drinking hand sanitizer by the time we got back in the car.
It was nice to get some local home grown stuff, because our palates are crying out for fresh stuff, but I'm done with it for awhile. Until people show a bit of sense, it's just too risky. The arrogance here is unbelievable. SC is now one of the top states in the country for COVID numbers on the rise, and the higher they go, the more people here treat them as if they are a joke. I swear, so many people here have been drinking POTUS' kool-aid for so long, anything they are told they don't like the sound of they just stuff their grubby fingers in their ears and yell, "Fake news!" at the top of their lungs.
One of the joys of the weekend, besides still watching Gardeners' World, is art by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theimpossiblegl. She created art for my fic Lemon Squeezy, which is my guilty favorite, and Impossible's art just gave me the happyness I needed. It's called A Grief Observed, and it's wonderful, just like Impossible herself.
The week started off with the usuals - some couldn't log in, some couldn't figure out how to set up their pcs, some didn't receive their pcs, some showed up 1/2 a day late, some didn't show up at all, and to top it all off, they had a major system crash over the weekend and half of the systems we needed weren't back on line yet. The results were that we spent most of the first three and a half days wasting enormous amounts of time trying to get this or that person logged in properly or their equipment to work properly or the system to work properly. In the end, she hopscotched around on the stuff she COULD talk about, which meant that by Thursday, when we were supposed to be 4/5ths through the first week's training modules, we were still on Day 2. And this job involves a very rigid procedural flow, which we couldn't really follow because parts of it were inaccessible.
Most of my fellow trainees kept up for the most part, but you know there's always the one on a two-minute delay who writes nothing down and interrupts to ask the answer to the question she just answered a few moments before, and who asks to be given her work id every time it is needed to log into a different part of the system because she obviously has written nothing down. My notebook looks like something you'd see in the control room of Chernobyl.
It has made things a little stressful, and damn intimidating, because there is so much detail to remember. And they evaluate us rather stringently, so on top of remembering everything, you're being graded once a week randomly on it as well. I have faith that I will eventually get it al down, and I want to believe I'll be good at it. It's a nice job, and I need it desperately, so I'm determined to be a hit at it. I wrote myself a flow chart of hit points I have to touch in order to pass my evaluations, and I actually feel a little better about it now.
TheHubs has been an absolute angel this week. Each break is met with a cuppa and some biscuits, each lunch is a delicious salad, and each dinner time I sit down to a hot, home-cooked meal. I'm sure the fun of it all will wear off eventually as he discovers what a drudge trying to come up with different meals every day can be, but for now he's enjoying being a house husband. He also made me a lovely potting table this week for my modest little gardening ventures. We have some very handsome green pepper plants and five young lemon trees doing well. I also bought some basil, rosemary and mint in small pots and repotted them, and they are doing well. Of all things, my aloe vera plant looks awful. I've got to really get busy with it next weekend. We also ran by my mom's house and picked up her old wheelbarrow, which needs a new wheel but other than that looks pretty good. It's been sitting upside down in her back yard since we moved here in 2008, so I asked if we could have it. She happily passed it along to us.
Yesterday we were a bit naughty and went to a produce stand to buy some fresh produce. Of course, we and another couple of older ladies were about the only ones wearing a mask, and we were just cringing away from people who have NO concept of social distancing. We went to two, which were pretty much side by side one another, one small and one large, and I'd say about 10% of us were wearing masks. I got some lovely fresh fruit and veg, some local chow-chow, preserves and pickled beets and some blackberry cinnamon bread that was so good I'm glad I didn't taste it before we bought it or I would have bought every loaf of it. Again, just shying away from folks, especially the check-out girls, who were wearing no protective wear and didn't care who gave them cash or how close they got. I was drinking hand sanitizer by the time we got back in the car.
It was nice to get some local home grown stuff, because our palates are crying out for fresh stuff, but I'm done with it for awhile. Until people show a bit of sense, it's just too risky. The arrogance here is unbelievable. SC is now one of the top states in the country for COVID numbers on the rise, and the higher they go, the more people here treat them as if they are a joke. I swear, so many people here have been drinking POTUS' kool-aid for so long, anything they are told they don't like the sound of they just stuff their grubby fingers in their ears and yell, "Fake news!" at the top of their lungs.
One of the joys of the weekend, besides still watching Gardeners' World, is art by
theimpossiblegl. She created art for my fic Lemon Squeezy, which is my guilty favorite, and Impossible's art just gave me the happyness I needed. It's called A Grief Observed, and it's wonderful, just like Impossible herself.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 03:20 am (UTC)I haven’t been through job training in many years, but I can still remember how painful it is and your story of it sounds dreadful. Especially the non-note takers. I just want to strangle those folks.
I’m glad to hear the gardening is going well for the most part. And that theHubs is taking good care of you. Sounds like you may need it in the coming days.
The mask thing is so terribly ridiculous. Just wear the damn things! Sure, it is not ideal, but trying to make it political is absurd. I don’t know what is wrong with people these days.
I’ll have to check out the art. Lemon Squeezy is one of my favs ❤️
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 06:02 pm (UTC)