I’m sitting at work right now, using one of the internet computers that they’ve nicely distributed around the building to allow us to do stuff like this.

In almost exactly 55 minutes (8pm) it will have been 3 years (to the minute) since I asked Laura out over the phone in my bedroom. Since then I seem to have done so much and changed quite a lot too. I’m definitely a very different person because of that one decision, and I’m glad of it. It’s just a shame things didn’t work out quite how I wanted.

Who knows what the future holds?

Today was going really well until about mid-day. Some of my co-workers had been playing various games written in VBA running in Microsoft Excel. I’ve seen plenty of other people doing the exact same out on the sales floor. We received an email telling us that we might want to spend more of our time working on developing our technique, then about 2 minutes later we got a big email from our manager, we’ve only met her about 4 times so far, and she said she was very disappointed and would be talking about it in our meeting.

In the team meeting it was like being back in school. She treated us all like children and criticised every part of what we’ve done so far. What is most annoying for me is that I wasn’t even playing games anyway.

Later that day I was sitting at my desk and the manager was walking around. I had nothing to hide and I’d finished a call a couple of minutes ago so I was just sitting waiting for the next call. She walked up behind me, pointed out to me that I was in “available” on the telephone system and then had a go at me and warned me that there would be trouble if she found me in available again if I wasn’t reading through the helpfiles. The helpfiles are basically an intranet with a shitload of information on them. There’s a lot of irrelevant stuff in there. I do know 80% of the things I’m likely to need for the next month already, so I don’t need to spend 4 hours a day reading through random facts. My time would be much better spent contemplating my call strategy, but now I on’t have a choice. I’m going to be stuck with a head full of useless facts and no way to deliver the things I do need.

Grr.

Lots of people are very annoyed at the moment because she’s having a go at everyone for something or other.

So yay, that’s my first rant about my new job, hopefully there won’t be too many to come though. I’m sure that once I know what I’m doing a bit more I’ll be completely fine again.

My bed arrived today so I’m about to go spend about ten thousand hours putting it together 😀

The first week on the phones is over, as of this coming monday we’ll start to have targets to meet. We’ll also be rated on our call quality. It’s going to be a bit less fun I think, but hopefully I won’t have any problems with it. I’m certain that my call quality will be high, even if I’m not hitting targets quite yet. Just have to work on my transition statements and objection handling a little.

I’ve now been on a couple of nights out with workmates, and they’ve both been great so far. We all went out on tuesday and had a few drinks and some food, but I had to catch the last train at 21:05 so I left a bit earlier than the last few people.

Thursday was the second night out and I lasted the entire length and ended up staying at Craig’s flat. I slept on 2 sofa cushions on his bedroom floor without a blanket or pillows. I think I woke up roughly every half an hour because I was cold :\ We got in at about 1:30 and we were asleep at around 2, and then back up at 6:30 in time for Craig to get back to work at 8. I didn’t actually feel that bad really.

The night itself was great. It started in the same way as tuesday, but then we went off to a couple of karaoke bars and such. I took quite a few pictures which I’ve uploaded to my Random Phone Pictures directory. There are also a couple of videos, but I still haven’t found a decent way of converting and uploading camera videos into a useful computer format, so they’ll just be saved for a while. One of them is just Craig recording an extreme close-up of my eye. The other is Chelsea and I arm-wrestling at the bar 😀

It was a good night, all said. I look forward to many more nights like that over the coming weeks and months.

I’ve actually got quite a lot of things I should be doing this weekend. I don’t know how many of them I’m actually going to get around to doing though. I have bedding to buy, a keyboard to return, birthday cards to buy, packages to send, food to buy, and then perhaps even a Playstation 2 with a couple of games.

I love having money again 😀 😀 😀

I wish NTL would hurry up and send a letter to my mum so I could switch the internet connection over to my house instead. I’m sick of the unreliable connection next door. I mean obviously it’s better than nothing, but I don’t want to keep abusing it if there is another viable option out there.

I guess I should go take a shower and get some stuff sorted instead of just typing about it 😉

I’m finally on the phone taking actual calls from customers all day now. Friday was alright, but I only took three calls and I had someone sitting beside me making little notes the whole time. Monday was better, but we still only had half a day taking calls. Today was the first full day of calls and I sold some insurance to a customer 😀

I went out with a bunch of people from work afterwards and it was quite a lot of fun. We just went to one pub and then when it got to about 8:30 they were going to move onto some others, but I had to make sure I caught the final train home at 21:05, so I just made my excuses and waited at the station for half an hour.

When I was sitting on the train a guy I used to go to school with called Richard got on. He also works at Capital One, so we spent most of the journey talking about work and school friends and general stuff like that. He’s engaged and his fiancee is pregnant. It’s so weird to think back to him in school and imagine him being a dad. Yikes.

My mum called me while I was on the train because she’s having one of her paranoia nights again, so it’s looking like she might be driving over and staying at my house tonight. o_O I did invite her, but I kind of hope she doesn’t. She should be able to sort things out easily enough at her house. She thinks someone has a key to her house. I don’t think anyone has actually got a key, but there’s just no convincing her about that.

I should get going now anyway, I’ll give my mum a call so I know if I can go to bed or if I’m going to be up all night dealing with shit :\

I’ve been enjoying my classroom training for almost 2 weeks now. It’s gone by pretty quickly. Next door’s Internet connection has been a bit shaky recently, and my keyboard randomly stopped working 🙁

Quite a bit has happened since my last post. I lost my wallet the other day. I realised I didn’t have it as soon as I stepped off the train, but the doors closed behind me and I had to watch the train pull out of the station knowing my money was on there. I’d just withdrawn £50 as well, so I was very pissed off. I managed to get my wallet and cards back, but the person who handed it in decided to keep all of the money. :\

I got my new mattress today 😀 It arrived while I was at work and I just had to drag it upstairs by myself to my room. It’s a king-size one, so it was quite a task. Unfortunately I still have to wait a couple of weeks for my base to arrive.

Tomorrow is my first day taking live calls at Capital One. It should be quite a lot of fun really. Once I get over the initial nervousness I’ll be fine. It’s a bit annoying that we haven’t had a lot of chances to practice things in close-to-life situations, but I’ll manage.

I should get paid tomorrow 😀 I realy hope the salary advance goes through. If not I’m pretty much screwed, money-wise.

Hmmm, what else?

I decided to decorate my stapler (not a red Swingline stapler) at work. It now has a face and stuff. Amy, who I sit next to, decorated hers too. It’s now a bunny. It has post-it ears and everything 😀

I can’t really think of much else post-worthy at the moment… Not that I usually take notice of what’s worthy or not, but I will for now.

I’ll probably get around to updating again next week or something.

I’ve completed my first week of training now 😀 Feeling pretty damn great about the job still. Looking forward to starting some real work too.

We have a policy that if you’re late to training you have to wear a big sombrero. If you’re late twice you have to wear a feather boa type thing with the hat, and if you’re silly enough to be late three times then you have to wear some flashing devil horns and bounce around the call centre calling “I’m a naughty devil and I won’t be late again!” Unfortunately nobody was late enough for that to happen 🙁

I did decide to just go ahead and wear the hat and flowery necklace thing anyway. I was chatting with the girl I sit next to about a grass skirt and a coconut bra (can’t remember how we got onto the subject) but we decided that one of us would be wearing them at some point. She claims I would be wearing it, but I hold that it was intended for her. Anyway, on thursday night I stopped off at the supermarket to buy two coconuts. I bought a hacksaw, some string, and spent 4 hours making a coconut bra. Stacey was quite helpful too, so that was nice.

I took it in yesterday and I actually got Amy (girl next to me) to wear it 😀 I also ended up wearing it, as did about 3 other people once the novelty had worn off. I did take a couple of pictures, but they’re not particularly fantastic. They’re uploading extremely slowly at the moment too, so I’ll have to add the picture later.

After work yesterday I found I had a message from Jo seeing what I was up to. I replied, and called her a couple of times because she wouldn’t reply or answer. Then I realised I’d missed my usual train home, so I went for some dinner at Subway. Eventually I got a message back from Jo and we arranged to meet on the old market square at 7pm. I wasted an hourwalking around, reading a copy of Scientific American, and then Jo arrived. We headed down to the train station because there was a shop there for her to buy cigarettes from. After that we went to a pub with no seats and had a coke each.

We walked around Nottingham for a while and then sat on a bench and talked a bit. Jo asked what time my train was at and I looked at my phone for the time and said “12 minutes ago.” Yep, I missed the last train back without even thinking about it.

Jo caught her train home and I called my sister to see if she fancied driving to Nottingham to pick me up. Luckily she did, so I waited around until she arrived and then came home 🙂

Today is the day of the housewarming, as decided by David. I guess that can only really be expected though since it’s almost entirely just his friends coming over anyway. Admittedly that’s mostly because I don’t have that many friends, but still, it’s going to be a bit lame I think. I can imagine that they’ll all come over, listen to the 2 or 3 bands they’ve deemed to be cool this week and slag off the bands they said were cool last week. When they’re not listening to the music they’ll be talking about all the local bands they’re part of, or which of the local bands are shit and which are good. Then they’ll proceed to talk about parties and stuff that they’ve been to, potentially several years ago. They’ll talk about people that only they know, events that only people who were there will find funny, and then knock over and break something expensive.

I might be entering this thing with the wrong attitude. I’m definitely a bit pessimistic about tonight.

We’ll see how right or wrong I was in a few hours I suppose. Wish me luck :\

I finished my second day of training today. It’s a very cool place to work. I have a feeling I’m going to like it there. I’ve been very social and confident so far. Made a few new friends and such. I’ve even been out after work for a drink 🙂

There’s a PS2, an Xbox, several plasma TVs, giant jenga, table football, pool/snooker just sitting there begging to be used 😀 Free tea, coffee, hot chocolate, orange, etc. I have medical insurance, I can set up a nice pension, get books shipped over from the American Capital One library for two weeks… Loads of other things that I can’t remember right now. It’s nice.

I’ve got a bit more of my bedroom sorted out, all I really need now is a bed. I should receive that within the next 7 days 🙂

I went to Craig’s house after work today and hung out in a cafe/bar called Fade with Craig, Marianne, Virginie (the two French girls (I don’t know how to spell their names for definite)), Danny, and their new housemate Ste. They’re all pretty cool folks (except Craig ;))

When I got off the train I saw Richard Bagshaw, who also works at Capital One. He used to go to school with me.

Ummm, yeah, I don’t really know what to say. I’ve been very busy, as usual, and I will be for quite a while longer.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to speak to all of the folks I used to speak to in the next few weeks.

Until next time… ta ta.