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Monday, 13 October 2003 06:41 pm
I feel like... words fail me. I feel like a very small squishy thing somebody stepped on in the street.
I went to my new temp job. It is working a switchboard in an office in the town centre. I got there on time and everything. I can just about do the job. I had a really nasty headache all day, which has still not gone away. I used to say that after my first lot of work experience I would never work a switchboard phone system again, and now I remember why. I have spent the entire day unable to relax for a moment, apart from the hour I took for lunch. I am constantly on edge, because the next call I take could be the one I can't deal with, the one I mess up hugely, the one where someone gets angry or upset with me. I am stressed Out Of My Mind. I can cope with a job where I answer the phone and transfer it among three, four, six people, where I also have other tasks. I can cope with a job where I can deal with thr calls myself and not have to transfer them. But this, I'm not sure I can do.
The one thing that is the worst aspect of this is the out-of-date phone list. People, if you work in an office and you are ever involved with engaging a temporary telephonist, GIVE THAT TEMP A CORRECT, COMPLETE PHONE LIST and for God's sake list it by surname, not department. I am getting better at putting the caller on hold, flipping through every department in the company, finding the name, taking the caller off hold, dialling the extension, speaking to the person, and then transferring the call, but it's only a matter of time before something goes horribly wrong. Actually, something did go wrong today but there was no comeback because the guy didn't call back. He wanted a person and I put him through to an automated system which was marked as a real person on my phone list. It's the kind of thing which makes people angry.
I earnt about £45 today, which I need because I have £10 in the bank. I don't know whether the stress is really worth £45 per day. It might be. But right now I feel like a damp dish-rag and I'm supposed to go to Japanese in about twenty minutes and I haven't done my homework.
I don't know whether I can actually manage to go back tomorrow. I am not certain I can handle feeling like this all the time. And the person who's supposed to show me the ropes gives the worst instructions I have ever heard. I had to find out a number of features of the switchboard terminal the hard way. She was hardly ever even there to speak to. She spent at least an hour on the phone about some bizarre personal problem while I was struggling to find people who did not exist on the list, or whose phones were forwarding straight to voicemail (to which I then could not transfer their callers), and was just generally way too harrassed to be any use at all.
I want to go to bed in nice clean bedclothes, be brought a delicious light supper on a tray decorated with a fresh flower, and then just sleep for about two days - and wake up to the delivery of a mystery gift of several hundred pounds. (The bedclothes need laundering, we don't have a tray in the house or even much food, and the only person who'd give me even one hundred pounds is my mother, which wouldn't be a mystery and would be otherwise difficult to deal with.) Hmm.
I went to my new temp job. It is working a switchboard in an office in the town centre. I got there on time and everything. I can just about do the job. I had a really nasty headache all day, which has still not gone away. I used to say that after my first lot of work experience I would never work a switchboard phone system again, and now I remember why. I have spent the entire day unable to relax for a moment, apart from the hour I took for lunch. I am constantly on edge, because the next call I take could be the one I can't deal with, the one I mess up hugely, the one where someone gets angry or upset with me. I am stressed Out Of My Mind. I can cope with a job where I answer the phone and transfer it among three, four, six people, where I also have other tasks. I can cope with a job where I can deal with thr calls myself and not have to transfer them. But this, I'm not sure I can do.
The one thing that is the worst aspect of this is the out-of-date phone list. People, if you work in an office and you are ever involved with engaging a temporary telephonist, GIVE THAT TEMP A CORRECT, COMPLETE PHONE LIST and for God's sake list it by surname, not department. I am getting better at putting the caller on hold, flipping through every department in the company, finding the name, taking the caller off hold, dialling the extension, speaking to the person, and then transferring the call, but it's only a matter of time before something goes horribly wrong. Actually, something did go wrong today but there was no comeback because the guy didn't call back. He wanted a person and I put him through to an automated system which was marked as a real person on my phone list. It's the kind of thing which makes people angry.
I earnt about £45 today, which I need because I have £10 in the bank. I don't know whether the stress is really worth £45 per day. It might be. But right now I feel like a damp dish-rag and I'm supposed to go to Japanese in about twenty minutes and I haven't done my homework.
I don't know whether I can actually manage to go back tomorrow. I am not certain I can handle feeling like this all the time. And the person who's supposed to show me the ropes gives the worst instructions I have ever heard. I had to find out a number of features of the switchboard terminal the hard way. She was hardly ever even there to speak to. She spent at least an hour on the phone about some bizarre personal problem while I was struggling to find people who did not exist on the list, or whose phones were forwarding straight to voicemail (to which I then could not transfer their callers), and was just generally way too harrassed to be any use at all.
I want to go to bed in nice clean bedclothes, be brought a delicious light supper on a tray decorated with a fresh flower, and then just sleep for about two days - and wake up to the delivery of a mystery gift of several hundred pounds. (The bedclothes need laundering, we don't have a tray in the house or even much food, and the only person who'd give me even one hundred pounds is my mother, which wouldn't be a mystery and would be otherwise difficult to deal with.) Hmm.
