American Dreaming - 1990's / Part IV

When I returned home I told my (soon to be ex) wife about the salary change and some of the odd characteristics of the interview’s experience. She was thrilled with the prospect of the extra money. I’m not sure whether she saw this as a means to finally be rid of me or not but, she was pleased.

I began the planning for the transition out of my current position within my role in Civil Service. I informed my supervisor and manager of the resignation. They were none too pleased as I was going to be somewhat difficult to replace. I had been holding a driver’s position but, basically had wheeled my way into managing the maintenance of the motor pool as it pertained to the inventory and ordering of parts and the keeping of all the pertinent vehicle records. I had in the course of my last year within that organization digitized some ten years of maintenance records, automated the tracking of the fuel expenditures, developed management reporting for the costs and usage of each vehicle. It looked like my supervisor was going to have to take on many of those tasks in my absence.

I was also very conscious of the changes that this job was going to be facilitating within my role with my present family. I was somewhat guarded in what my expectations wee with regards to a change in living arrangements but, in my heart, I knew that it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to be leaving this home very soon.

The worst aspect of this lifestyle change was that I knew I was about to become an absentee parent to my seven-year-old son. One of the hardest things that I think I ever had to face was the look of abject terror on my son’s face as we (his mom and I) were attempting to explain the rationale for the “trial separation” (that neither of us believed was a trial of any type).

For the first few weeks in this new position, I had some interesting tasks assigned to me. Because this was very much a startup operation, there was no infrastructure within the office. Since I was hired three weeks in advance of the office “going live”, I was given the enviable tasks of overseeing some of the deliveries that the office was taking, I worked with the telecommunications vendors to establish the installation of needed data and voice circuits into the office space that would soon house are “new home”

There was also no computers on any of the desks but, the organization was moving forward with training the “phone folks”. The organization first needed to establish both customer service staff along with a provider relations function. Since there was no data or a computer to begin to work with it, I was put through the same training that was being offered to the folks that would soon man our telephone banks in support of both the patients who would be using our service and the doctors and medical professionals who we were looking to add to our provider network.

The phone training was a complete switch for me. I had never really had any kind of job where I was a front line customer service type. I learned about the functions and procedures that the organization was to deploy with our eventual front line staff. Two weeks before we were to start up our business function, we agreed to provide customer service calls into our organization even though we had no computers on the desktop and no real scripts developed for this specific book of business. It was really a “fly by the seat of your pants” type of experience. We were told to field questions the best way we could, jot down questions that we would then have an opportunity to do a “call back on” and to refer any “difficult” calls to the two experienced trainers that were serving temporary duty at this location (on loan from “Corporate”).

I remember fielding one call from a very polite and soft-spoken gentleman who expressed gratitude in our organization’s promise that we would provide them with medical assistance that was within 25 miles of his home. Apparently, he currently drove his spouse to counseling at a location that was an hour and a half’s travel one-way. I was touched by his story and told him that I would verify the fact that we had a professional with the expertise that his wife’s condition called for and give him a call back. Fortunately for me, the computer equipment arrived before I actually completed his call. I did take the time to hand off the detailed notes I took during his call to one of the “real” customer service folks and instructed them to do the actual call back with the requested information. I then turned my attention to setting up the desktop equipment and loading software that would consume the next two weeks worth of my time.

---Jim