spoiled chinese girl

check back in 30.

now it looks like something bit me.

It’s always people who work who have something to say about work. Let’s start there. I feel like I write a LOT about my work and right now I want to get a whole bunch of it out in the open. I’ll probably be writing/ranting about things I’ve already written/ranted about in the past, but I am going to find amusement in the fact that its been written about all at once in one giant mind-fart like senario.

For today, I would like to rant about the policies of the company that I work for.

I was hired, and am officially, as my job title predicates, a CSR. Customer Service Representative.

Now one would normally associate a CSR with someone who can service customers to the best of their ability within the policies and rules of the organization. I don’t mean service in a sexual way, although in my first definition of CSR that would mean that escorts & hookers would also be CSR’s considering they service their customers to the best of their ability. I wonder if a hooker has ever written that on a resume.

Getting off topic.

Back to the topic. When there are so many rules, regulations and policies that hinder the CSR’s ability to actually service customers, I don’t understand how a company stays in business. I thought we were supposed to make the customer happy. I didn’t say the customer is always right. Everyone who is a CSR or works with customers realizes they are quite often very very wrong but you try to handle the situation to make them happy anyways.

But for instance. There is a rule here where if we ship you something, or if you pick up something, you have 24 hours to find out if anything is misplaced, or damaged, and to report it to have it replaced. That sounds fine and dandy, except for the fact that the majority of the customers I deal with purchase in large quantities. Say a skid’s worth? Nay, say a truck-load’s worth (which is anywhere between 18 and 29 skids depending on the customer and transportation weight-restrictions) I don’t know how the company actually expects their customer to go through every box to find something broken.

And of course, if a customer says “Hey, two days ago I received a skid, just got to the bottom of it, and the entire bottom row of boxes have broken product” our typical response to that is “Tough. You should have called us yesterday.” And while I can understand “if they don’t tell us very soon they might have broken it themselves and now they want us to replace it” but I think not a whole lot of breaking can happen, and there needs to be more trust in your biggest clients that order tonnes and tonnes of stuff from you every week. And when I mean tonnes, I literally mean tonnes. When there is one million pounds of product being shipped to a customer… that’s a whole lotta product.

And with the amount of customers I get who are grumpy at me because a lot of stuff was damaged and I can’t authorize to do anything about it… oi. Makes my job a whole lot of not-fun.

The mood to write more will continue I’m sure.

The 30 day challenge at my moksha yoga school… well, not my moksha yoga school, but the one I attend, starts tomorrow.  To kick off, I decided it would be a grand idea to go today as well.  Get one more day in there.

April 15th – May 15th, I will be making every effort, moving heaven and earth, to go to at least one yoga class per day.  I have already been assured the fact that I know full well there will be days I must miss is okay as long as I am making the effort.

I’m scared and excited.  And everyone is encouraging and supportive but skeptical of my abilities.

More about my work. On Thursday, actually right before we were set to leave, everyone in the company got this e-mail.  I won’t copy and paste since I’m writing this from home.

But it basically touched on some points the company wanted us to all make note of.

1. Our break times are as follows. 15 minutes for morning break, 30 minutes for lunch and 10 minutes for our afternoon break.  Now when I was first trained the girl told me “meh take 15 minutes for your afternoon, that’s what everyone does” but besides that, I’m pretty on time, sure a few minutes here and there I’m late, but like 2… or 3 at most.  There *are* people who take 45 minute lunches and no one ever really says anything.

2. The times we clock in.  Everyone started noticing that if they clocked in a minute later than their start time (for us 7am people, we seemingly had a 3 minute window we could clock in at up to 7:03) we would receive a little * beside the day on our time-sheet whenever we got paid.  And the accompanying note was about how we should be at our desks ready to work when we clock in.  Seeing as how the office sometimes opened at 7:02 I didn’t particularly see how this was fair.  Someone had mentioned how we (especially those of us at 7am) should have more time for us to get our coats off, get perhaps something made to eat and get comfortable.  I believe the suggested time was 15 minutes early.  The big “They” made a note in the e-mail saying how we are now opening at 6:55am.  Wow. 5 minutes to get EVERYTHING ready.  Thrilling.

3.  Chatter.  Apparently we should keep chatter to a null and void during the mornings especially since it’s extra busy (it’s not really) and still kept to a minimum the rest of the day.  They then related entering orders to driving whilst talking on a cell phone.  Which I know for a fact the owners of the company have done since I’ve received calls from them.  Heaven forbid we should ask how the weekend was or what’s going on in one’s life.

Besides this, last week they did a big blitz of reading everyone’s e-mails.  How do I know this? Because I request a read-receipt from every single e-mail that is sent out.  And obviously all e-mails that are sent are forwarded to some sort of server for later processing because I did not know about this until I received literally about 200 “not-read” receipts from some “Monitor” person I didn’t even e-mail.

That, and two of my co-workers apparently received “notes” (e-mailed lectures) about how they should minimize the e-mailing between the two that were not business related.

Nothing like the feeling of constantly being watched to make you work faster! Harder? Better?

Whatever.