The glamorous world of advertising take 1....

Before I get into the job and what I learned from my first go round with the agency I want to back track to the dealership again. And it actually sort of ties in more with this new job than the old one.

One of the things I got to do at the dealership was voice over work. I know, it's kind of unexpected and not at all related to the office work at all, but it was pretty close to my favorite part of the job. The used car sales manager was given a budget and allowed to advertise outside of the national advertising that the dealership usually relied on. Part of what he decided to do was radio advertising and he wanted a "voice" that would be the same through out his commercials. I was offered the job and I jumped at the chance to do it, it was something new and different and how cool would it be? It was very cool.

The best part of recording the commercials? Well honestly it was being referred to as "the talent". I loved that. It made me laugh so much. At the studio there was an area with snacks and drinks that was labeled just for "the talent" and when they were ready for me to record my parts they would send someone to go get "the talent". Now after working for the agency I realized that the labeling was just to keep the techs from eating everything and calling all of the actors and voice work people "the talent" was easier to do than learn names, but at the time, it made me laugh. Also, seeing Christopher's face as he made the realization that the voice on the radio was Mom's voice was great. He wanted to know how I could talk so fast during the disclaimer portion. I will let you all in on a recording secret...I can't. I would record those portions at a normal clip and digitally they would go in and remove the pauses that we all take while speaking. Not speeding up the track, taking out the space. It was very cool to watch them do and very cool to hear the end result.

The worst part? Being teased mercilessly by the girls in the office for my bubbly rendition of the scripts! But that's the way the director wanted them done, so that's the way I did them. I was greeted with Imagine!! (one of the lines from the commercial) for weeks every time I walked in the door. I got to do three commercials for the dealership before we moved. It was great and I thought for awhile that working for an agency I would get an opportunity to do more. That didn't happen. Lesson learned from this foray? When your boss says do you want to try "fill in the blank" and it sounds interesting to you, don't hesitate to say yes!

Okay, so back to the agency. I spent the first six months there digging out of the mess that the past year or so had caused. Remember my work at the dealership learning how to do forensic style accounting? Well, it came in handy here for sure. The job was basic bookkeeping. Agency bookkeeping isn't much different than car dealership bookkeeping or wholesale pottery bookkeeping. It's just numbers. Billing was a little more complicated than the billing for the pottery company, but not much. The only difference was in the volume of paper work and money I was handling. At the dealership it was not unheard of for me to be responsible for literally millions of dollars in money in and money out of the door in a week. At the agency the amounts were smaller but no less critical to the running of the business.

I am going to share a couple of stories from the agency during those years and the things I learned from them, but there were so many things I learned working for this company and so many things that tied into when I came back so there will be some overlap there I am sure. But I will start with just a couple of things.

I had been at the agency for a few months and was working very hard at getting all of the old mess cleaned up. Each month there were a series of spreadsheets and reports that Jack wanted to look at. At the end of this particular month I made a mistake on one of them. It was a silly error, I pulled a number from an old report instead of from the corrected version I had been working on and it was something I should have caught before giving the reports to Jack. But I didn't and he did. And then he proceeded to give me a really hard time about it for weeks afterward. Every time I would bring him reports he would question my work. I finally had enough of it. I closed his office door, walked over to his desk and said, "I made a mistake. One. I have been taking the grief over it but now I am done. Either you trust me to do the job or you don't. If you don't then fire me so we can both move on. If you do then let it go." and then I walked out of his office back down the hall to my office, closed the door and fell into my chair shaking so bad I couldn't hold my weight up anymore!

Now, at the time I was 29 years old, and Jack was my boss and just a "few" years older than that. So not only was I standing up to my boss, I was standing up to an elder. That was just not something I was overly comfortable with, but I had had enough and had to do it. And it was the right thing to do. We never had an issue again and ended up with a very close and honest working relationship. I believe he needed to see how far he could push me before I pushed back. How long I would take my work being criticized before I stood up for myself. And I believe he respected me for it. Either that or he decided that interviewing another bookkeeper would be too big a pain in the ass so he let it go!

One of the other lessons I learned about being a boss from Jack turned into one of the main ways I compared every boss to follow. As you can see if you messed up he was going to let you know about it. But never ever in front of a client. Jack would stand in a meeting with a client and take the full brunt of a barrage of abuse that you knew was someone else in the office's fault. But he never threw anyone under the bus, never took the easy way out in front of client, always shouldered the blame and would never ever let someone outside of the agency berate his people. Now if you were the reason there would be hell to pay when you got back to the office, but it was done behind closed doors in private and you were not embarrassed in public in front of the clients. Your reputation was held pristine while he took the hit.

One day while walking past my office he heard the voice of a screaming client on the other end of the line. Now this particular client was just a crank. Everyone who ever worked with him knew he was, and you just dealt with it. When he called with billing questions I would listen to him rage for the first five to ten minutes of the call then once he got it out of his system we could talk rationally and deal with his questions. It's just the way he was and it really didn't bother me. But this particular day, Jack over heard it and it bothered him. He knew who it was and once I was off the phone with the client he called him up. Told the gentleman that he was never ever to speak to a member of his staff like that again. If he wanted to yell at someone he was more than welcome to call Jack but never to call and yell at his staff again. This was impressive on a few levels. One, I hadn't complained, it was just something Jack saw that he didn't like and took care of. Two, this was a new client in a precarious position and we could end up losing them for any number of reasons let alone the head of of their co-op being chastised by the head of our agency. But Jack didn't hesitate for a second to take care of what he saw as an unforgivable offense.

Sometimes being the boss is great. Sometimes it isn't. But you are always the boss. Always the face of your company and Jack never forgot that it was his name on the door. He got the bigger rewards for that privilege and he also took the greater hits for it as well. He had worked his ass off for years to get into the position he was and he could have slacked off and let the rest of us be the cannon fodder for him, as we all witnessed other agency principals doing, but he never did. I measure all of my bosses and other people's bosses against that yard stick. And let me tell you most of them don't measure up. It's much easier to side step and let someone else shoulder the blame, especially if it is truly their fault than it is to stand there and take the abuse. But you don't get to be a success by doing to the easy thing. You get to be a success by working hard and doing the right thing. At least that's what I felt I learned from working for Jack.

Back to work!

Okay, when we last left off on the work history blog series we were on our way to Oregon from our brief experiment of trying to live in New Mexico again. Instead of talking about the job in this blog I am going to talk about the job interviews. I will devote a blog to the job itself tomorrow. I am thinking I have three more after this one to complete this series...yikes!

So as you can imagine the last place I wanted to work when we moved to Portland was a car dealership so I started looking for anyplace else. Played up the full charge bookkeeping and office manager aspects of my resume, down played the auto specific items and started the search. In the end it came down to two choices. One was a temporary agency, but not working as a temp, working in their office as one of their in house bookkeepers. The other job was working for an advertising agency as a full charge bookkeeper/office manager. In one week I had first and follow up interviews with each company. I am going to describe them as they happened.

First off was with the temp agency. They decided that even though I was going to be in house they would put me through the same screening tests that they do for all of their clients. Basically they wanted me to understand what they do as a company, how the system worked and to show off a little how effective they were at placement. So I had a preliminary interview with the company owner and she explained their great system and their success rate. She briefly talked about my resume and experience but really wanted to save that until after the testing. Then I proceeded to take 3 hours of psychological and skill based tests. I met again, briefly with the owner who said they would call me for my follow up interview to go over the results and how excited they would be to show me the findings and how great I would find it all to be. All told it was over four hours of testing and interviews. When Brent got home that night and asked me how it went, I had to tell him I had no idea. I had never left a job interview feeling less like I had been interviewed before.

So the next day I have an interview with the ad agency. I meet with Tracy who is currently doing the job I am being interviewed for. We sit down in the conference room at this gigantic table and I have a copy of my resume and she has a copy and I wait for a beat for her to start asking questions or talking about the job or anything. Anything at all. And nothing. So I ask if she has any questions for me. And she thinks for a second and then says..."I don't have any idea what I am doing here. You are better equipped to ask the questions than I am" So I was a little taken aback but thought...okay...well...here we go. So I start asking about what accounting system they use, when she would be leaving, how much training I would get before she went. And what I found out was on one level hilarious and on the other level a little frightening. Turns out Tracy was a kick ass media director who happened to be married to the last bookkeeper that the agency had. When her husband James finished up his CPA license and went to work for a big CPA firm in town and Tracy came off of maternity leave the owner of the agency needed a bookkeeper more than a media person so he put Tracy in that position. The logic being media is just numbers, bookkeeping is just numbers and anything Tracy didn't know how to do James could teach her.

Well, yes, media is numbers but they are completely different numbers than bookkeeping. Buying a TV schedule is nothing like billing a client. Having lunch with media reps is nothing like listening to your receptionist cry because she is having a bad day and can't focus and the phones keep ringing and no one understands. Tracy was in over her head and sinking fast and she knew it. She had convinced the owner that she needed to be back in media and he needed a real bookkeeper. The ad went out in the Sunday paper and my resume was the first one on the fax Monday morning so she took it as a sign. And she decided right away that she liked me in the interview (Really still not an interview) so she was recommending me to the owner and would I like to meet him? Umm...okay...

So I am introduced to the owner and I think, now the interview will start. I go into Jack's office. Shake his hand start to say something like, "Pleased to meet you.." and he cuts me off. Tells me Tracy likes me so that's a good start, but he has no clue what I need to know to do the job, gives me a phone number to call to meet with his accountants and tells me if they like me and think I am qualified THEN he will talk to me, but doesn't want to waste his time now if I am not the right person. And I am dismissed. When Brent got home that night he asked me how it went. I had to say again that I had no idea. I told him I wasn't sure if there was something in the water but Portland job interviews were the strangest things I had ever seen.

So the next day I had an interview with the CPA firm from the advertising agency in the morning and a follow up with the temp agency in the afternoon. So I meet with the CPA that handles all of the agency monthly items. And this is a real interview. How long have I been a bookkeeper? Do I enjoy it? They checked my references and they all came back very positive. She detailed what I would be doing in my daily work and what they would need from me monthly. They handled all of the tax issues so I wouldn't have to worry about those items. They would give me the adjusting entries every month so I wouldn't have to worry about anything other than posting those either. She was pretty sure the software they used was agency specific and would be easy to learn. She asked me what I thought about Jack and I had to answer that I really didn't know yet. She said that was a great honest answer and shook my hand and I left.

Great, feeling a little more confident I head down to the temp agency for my follow up with them. And things got really weird. I walk in and the first thing that happens is the owner introduces me to the other bookkeeper in the agency who I would be working with. And he says, "Oh is this the anomaly?" Pardon me? Is this the what? Well it turns out that I am not a bookkeeper at all. That's what all of their tests showed. Psychologically I do not have the right personality to be a bookkeeper and I would be a miserable failure at it if I were to choose it as a career. BUT...and here is the part that is freaking them out, I am a bookkeeper. An excellent one, with outstanding references who also aced all of their skills tests for the job. So what are they supposed to do? I have just taken their entire belief system and trashed it. Everything they have put stock into says that I am not a bookkeeper, yet my resume, education and job experience says that I am. So what they want me to do is explain to them why I am a bookkeeper.

Seriously. They want me to justify my career choice to them. So I do. I tell them I got a practical degree that would ensure I could get a job no matter where we were transferred while Brent was in the Navy. And...and here the owner interrupts me to tell me that I am wrong, my test scores show that I should have chosen a career path in the creative arts, or public speaking NOT bookkeeping. I told her that though those would be very interesting choices and probably a lot of fun, they weren't as practical and likely to be available no matter where we lived. She again let me know that I couldn't have made the choices I did based on my psychological profile. But I did make those choices, I pointed out. And she said, well yes, she knew I had, but I shouldn't have been able to!

This went on for another hour. Them questioning every step I had taken that led me to this interview. My answers on their tests. The fact that they have never had someone skew so drastically different from what they "should be" doing to what they were doing. And they just couldn't understand how I could be successful, even though apparently I was. So after awhile we pull the interview to a close and they let me know they will be back in touch. I am thinking, oh no you won't, and I really don't want you to anyway!

As I was leaving there my cell rang and it was Jack from the ad agency wondering if I had time to come for another interview right then. Well I was already downtown and my day couldn't possibly get any weirder so why not. I go in to meet with Jack, the receptionist had to leave early that day so he actually greeted me at the elevator when I got there. Shook my hand, told me how impressed his accountants had been with me and ushered me into his office. So much different than the brusque guy I had met the day before. So his main concern was with my resume. He pointed out that I had had a lot of jobs, but had never just quit or been fired, it was always because we moved. He wanted a guarantee that if he hired me we wouldn't just turn around and move. I told him I couldn't promise much but Intel had just moved us up there and I didn't see them moving us again anytime soon. I said, I will give you two years for sure. He warned me that it would be a lot of work, a real challenge, there hadn't been a consistent bookkeeping presence in there for over a year and things would need fixed and that no one in the agency knew enough about it to be able to help me. Then he told me he was going to think about it, wanted me to think about it as well and he would get back to me.

So that night I told Brent well...the jobs are down to one I couldn't possibly be qualified for and can't possibly do successfully even though I had been for years, and one where no one would be able to help me out or even understand what I was doing and the biggest concern is that I will leave. And honestly I hadn't even gotten solid offers from either of them so I would start over again tomorrow. I was just a little rocked. It had been such an odd day. I thought it couldn't get weirder. I was wrong.

The next day the temp agency called me back in for another interview! This time they made an offer. They wanted to hire me so they could watch me do the job and try to understand how I could possibly be a success at it with my test scores. I said, you want to hire me as an experiment? The owner said, "well no..."then she said..."well sort of yes. We can see you are good at this job, but we also can see that you shouldn't be so we would like to watch you work and see what coping mechanisms you utilize to make yourself good at the job and accommodate your personality discrepancies." I remember just laughing...I thought...you think I have personality issues? Oh my...She gave me the hours, benefits, salary range and told me to think about it and get back to her on Friday. This was Thursday. I left there thinking, this is just nuts.

Friday morning comes and I am thinking, do I take the offer from the temp agency? The pay and benefits aren't bad. Do I wait to see if I hear back from the advertising agency? Seemed semi-promising when I left, but I hadn't heard from them since Wednesday. Or do I just start over again with the Sunday paper? Then the phone rang. It was Tracy from the ad agency, she was so sorry that she hadn't called me before, but her baby had gotten sick so she went home early Wednesday and wasn't in Thursday, but Jack really liked me and she really liked me and could I possibly start on Monday? The pay and benefits were fairly comparable. The temp agency paid a little more actually so there was that to weigh.

But it came down to did I want to be someone's freak show or did I want to be someone's bookkeeper? I had a chance to make a difference for the ad agency, I had a chance to be different at the temp agency. As you all know I chose the ad agency and that ended up leading me down many different career paths at a later date. But at first I was just the bookkeeper/office manager/den mother. And that is a blog for another day.

When I called the temp agency to turn down the job, the owner actually asked me if they could check in with me here and there for the next little bit to see how I was doing in my latest bookkeeping job. I politely refused. Though I do wonder now if maybe I should have listened a little more to what their testing said I should be doing, might have saved me a lot of time in the continual debate of "what do I want to be when I grow up?" But it also would have prevented me from holding my next few jobs, which would have been a real shame.

A brief side trip....

Okay, I know I am in the middle of a series right now, but sometimes there is the blog I am "supposed" to write and there is the blog I "have" to write. If I ignore the blog that is a have to it blocks up the works and I can't get out the supposed to. So...this is the blog that has been gumming up the works for the last week or so.

Today I cleaned house. Top to bottom. Mopped the floors, dusted, scrubbed the bathrooms, did all the laundry. Big time clean. Now I clean house probably more than most. I keep a tidy place. Not as clean as Brent would like it, not as messy as I would be comfortable with, but clean. I have been told my messy house is everyone else's clean house. I knew this big all at once cleaning was coming, and it would have been worse if I had done it when we first got home from New Mexico, but continuing education requirements kept me busy long enough for the most neurotic of it to pass. So here we go...background time (it's your favorite part right?)....

I am not sure how far back this goes, you don't notice as much when you are little, it's not until you are older that it starts to seep in that things are maybe not this way in everyone's house. Our house was never clean. Or I guess I should say it was never neat. I know it was clean because it was my job to clean it. So I would dust, and vacuum and take things to people's rooms where they belonged, take out the trash, do the dishes, do the laundry...all of the things needed to keep a house clean. So underlying everything it was clean. But it was never neat. No sooner would I gather up a pile of stuff and put it in the respective bedroom than it would be back out in the main living area. Eventually you just give up. I would stack things into neatish piles and move them around to dust. Pick things up to vacuum and then put them back. Move the tons of knick knacks from the shelves, clean then put them all back.

It was just too much stuff. Add to that two dogs, a bird, a cat and fish. Plus anywhere from 4 people at the lowest to 8 at the highest all living in a 14' x 70' trailer and you can see where this is going. At its best it would have been cluttered. Just a small space with too many people and pets. But this isn't at its best. This is beyond that.

My dad doesn't throw anything away. Broken things can be fixed or salvaged for parts. My mom collects things. Anything and everything. Someday it's "going to be worth something". And she rotates through collections every few years, hummingbirds, owls, Precious Moments figurines, Noah's Ark themed items, anything QVC sells and on and on. And all of this stuff is out on display, or stacked in boxes in corners. Junk drawers are crammed so full of stuff you can't get them open. Garages never hold cars, they hold more stuff. The house my parents live in now is much bigger than the trailer we lived in when I was a teenager, but they just have filled it with more stuff.

Now coming from the other side was Brent and his family. There were RULES about cleaning. Dirty dishes were rinsed and put on the counter next to the sink, never left in the sink dirty or soaking. When there were "enough" dishes to wash you washed them and put them in the rack to dry. But not over night. They had to be put away. Clothes were never left in the dryer, once dried they must be removed immediately and put away. Beds were made daily. It was a very very neat house. The opposite of how I grew up.

When we got married we just didn't have a lot of stuff to clutter up a place with. I have talked about how we only had enough furniture for one room. We didn't get prints for the walls until we had been married for a few years. We had a ferret but just the one pet and she was small so didn't take up much space. Since there were only two of us, and we both worked a lot of hours the house wasn't really too hard to keep clean. A couple hours here and there and it was tidy and neat. And when Brent was out to sea it was even easier. Dishes each day took about 5 minutes to wash. Even though he was gone I still slept on the same side of the bed so it took about 15 seconds to make in the morning. The house was always clean. And I got used to it being the new normal.

Even after Christopher was born I kept the house pretty darn tidy. Of course our version of tidy changed. Anyone with little ones knows that the living room becomes a repository for toys, but they were kept neat as possible. It was added to the routine, after C went down for the night the toys were put away and the living room straightened up for the next day.

Then Brent got out of the Navy and we spent awhile living with my parents while we saved for our first house. I will always be grateful for them opening their home to us, but it was a really difficult stretch. Part of it was due to the house itself. I went back to work before Brent got on with Intel, so he stayed home with Christopher and tried keeping my parent's house in a way that would make us both comfortable. He soon reached the same conclusion I had years before. It was just impossible. Not growing up around it, it was worse for him. He just couldn't stand the clutter. Thankfully we found a house we could afford pretty quickly and moved into our own place.

So we have reached a pretty comfortable balance. I do tend to end up with a small pile of things I am working on right at that moment. Anyone who ever saw my desk when I had a desk job will let you know that I did not keep a neat desk. It was all stacks of stuff I was working on. Nothing got filed until I was finished with it. I am completely an out of site out of mind type of person. Drives Brent crazy. He will tell me if it's important I will remember it...well no, I won't. I am multi-focused at times (my more flattering way of saying easily distracted) and I often forget things that are VERY important to me, so I keep things out that I don't want to miss. Brent is a everything put away type guy, so we balance. I have a basket and a shelf that I keep a stack of things on. Everything else is put away. Still very neat, even in my messiest. Not as messy as I am in his most disorganized. But a good balance.

Then we go home. I am physically uncomfortable in my parent's house now. It's just gotten worse over the years. There are currently six people, two dogs, two cats and a bird in the house. The garage is packed full of things. I almost took a picture of what should be the dining room, or study depending on how you use it, but I wouldn't have been able to explain to them why I was doing it. "A reminder to NEVER live like this" just seems harsh to say. But it was packed. Stacks of stuff. Paper, boxes, old magazines, just stuff. So much stuff. The kitchen table couldn't have been used to eat off of without a few hours head start. And without someone in the house who is as dedicated to keeping it clean as I was growing up, and as Brent and I were when we lived there, it's not clean anymore under the clutter. Pet hair, dust, just not clean. We aren't talking Hoarders level, but Clean House for sure. I just want to call Niecy Nash and have her fix it all. But I know that it wouldn't stay that way. And I know it doesn't bother them. So it shouldn't bother me.

But it does. Every time we go back to New Mexico when we come home I clean. Or I guess I should say I CLEAN. I toss things out, I give things to Goodwill, I scrub, I scour. I clean. If I had gone at the house right when we got back I would have been digging through boxes in the garage sending things away. And I probably will anyway. But I will wait for the neurotic feelings to pass so I can do it with a clear head. I have, in the past, gotten rid of things I regretted later. I didn't realize at the time how it was tied to my parent's house and how I grew up. Now I do. So now I wait. I wait to make sure if I am getting rid of things it's because I don't want them, not because I am afraid to keep them.

We'll be back after these brief messages...

...okay so I have been MIA for a bit. Between Spring Break, Family Life and Continuing Education everything else sort of took a back seat for the past few weeks. I will be back to blogging this week.

Things to look forward to...
Finishing up the "things I've learned at work besides the job" blog series.
Family trips
Writing on writing
Socks and their hidden meanings
Wait, wait, I have one more blog on weight

And then whatever else I think up between here and there. Going to try for a blog a day this week to "catch up".

Hard at work or hardly working out?

Why is it I always think I am going to do these simple little blogs and end up telling a long story? So...where did we leave off? Oh with Christopher!

Okay, so when Christopher was just about 3 Brent got out of the Navy, we moved back to New Mexico and I went back to work. Since I had been out of the work force for three years I thought the best way to dive back in would be through a temp agency so I became a Kelly Girl. My first job was as a fill in receptionist for a car dealership. And that was my last temp job as well. It was supposed to be a two week gig while James, their head receptionist, was in Germany on vacation. Well then when James came back he had a lot of catch up work to do as he was also in charge of the Service Department's paperwork, so they asked if I could stay on another week. Then another. And then another. Finally Kirsten, the head of HR asked me to just fill out a resume. I did and she looked at my job history and my degree and pulled me off of the phones and into the office. I started as the AR/AP clerk and worked my way to Deal Processing for Honda then to Office Manager for Infiniti then for Mitsubishi.

My time with the dealership was an experience and a half. The work load at times was unbelievable. Sales people get paid twice a month, and the more deals they get through the more commissions they make. There are two finance people and 15 sales people, so you can see where the bottle neck occurs. Well, as deals would get hung up in finance and time to process commission checks would hit all of a sudden finance would put on a push to get the deals through which then meant we would go from 5 or 10 deals in the office to enter to over 100. I can remember hauling home boxes of deal folders to code at the kitchen table just so I could pretend like I wasn't at work. And it was like that twice a month every month for about a week at a time. So that's two weeks out of every month that is crazy busy, and two weeks that is just a little busy.

I also worked for a woman we called the Great Soulless One. She was the owner's wife and a CPA and brilliant. But had absolutely no compassion for anyone. She loved her dogs, Princess Diana and her sister, in that order I believe. She tolerated her husband (now ex-husband) and showed open contempt and disdain for anyone that wasn't of use to her. When Princess Diana died I thought she was going to lose her mind. We had to listen over and over and over to where she was when it happened, and did we all know that people always told her she looked like her (could be because you cultivated the look) and what was SHE going to do now? Like she was part of the family and this was a personal loss. It was weird.

The three biggest lessons from working there. First off, I really enjoy and am good at forensic accounting. When I first moved back into the office they had Honda and had purchased Infiniti about six months before. The person they had running the office for Infiniti was in over her head and things were not posted the way they should have been. There was also a lot of cross posting of things that went into Honda's accounts that should have been Infiniti's and the like. As I moved through the ranks of the office I ended up with ownership of finding and fixing all of those issues. It was really fun and satisfying. And something that I would use in my next two bookkeeping jobs as well.

Second, know when to quit. People were worked hard there. Too hard. And for some reason we all stayed. It was a miserable work environment. You knew the boss didn't appreciate you, you knew the job wasn't going to get better, but for some reason we all stayed. I can remember getting in my car at the end of the day and screaming at the top of my lungs just to get out the frustration before heading home. I don't know if it was because those of us in the office were so close that we felt like it would be letting down the other girls if we left, or if we were all too panicked about the job market to go. There was a little economic downturn happening right then in Albuquerque and jobs were not that easy to come by. But no matter what we all should have left. The biggest tip off was when someone would quit and then we would have lunch a month or so later and it was always, "You look Great!" and they would! So much happier and their color would be better and they just all looked great. When a job takes a physical toll on your appearance you need to get out.

The most important lesson was one everyone needs to know. Email was really new when I worked for the dealership. In fact it was only interoffice. Nothing could go out into the wide world yet. By this time I had given my notice as we were going to move to Oregon and so I was on my last few weeks. One of my closest friends in the office was just at the point of overwhelming frustration. She was (and still is) a really gifted CPA, smart and funny and an exceptionally hard worker. And the Great Soulless One used her for everything she possibly could. Worked her like she worked all of us. Well this particular day she was called into the boss' office and had a meeting with her about some additional projects that needed done, when she got back I sent her an email asking how it went. There was no reply function, you just had to start a new email to reply. We were in the same back office, just divided by book shelves and filing cabinets so we couldn't see each other, but I could hear her typing away furiously. Then it was silent. No email. Nothing. Okay, she wasn't ready to tell me what happened no big deal. Then our boss came to the door of our office. She called my friend down the hall sat her down and fired her. Seems that the email she thought she was sending to me, describing how horrible our boss was, went to our boss instead. Oh shit. The lesson? Always, always, always double check the TO line!

I say I learned those lessons, but the two out of the three that were mistakes I would make again at the agency! Oh well, sometimes you need a refresher course in lessons, right?

Okay, so that covers my first job back in the work force after having Christopher. Only four more jobs in my work history! Two more blogs you think? Any one taking any bets?

You better work it, girl!

Okay, Christopher says I didn't really explain how I ended up working the back office instead of the floor so I will back up a little bit at Beall's.

Let me just say this for anyone who has never worked in Retail or in Customer Service, it's hard work. That person who takes your order at the counter of your favorite fast food joint? That woman with the smile who finds you that next size of jean to try on? The guy out there getting you three different styles of shoe to see which fits better? They are working HARD. A full day is a 9 hour shift, because you don't get paid for your lunch hour, and you are on your feet for basically 8 of those hours. You are smiling, you are taking orders, you are restocking, you are cooking, you are cleaning, you are moving...constantly. It's tough.

So when you are working the floor in a retail store waiting on people and hearing for the 20th time as a customer returns a dress that smells of smoke and sweat and has deodorant stains on the tags that were obviously tucked into the bodice so they could wear it and return it...that it just didn't fit right after they got it home...and you still have to smile and act like you believe them and not tell them that they are thieves and just stole that dress. Well...after doing that a few times as well as just being dog tired at the end of the day and feeling like you used up all of your smiles on strangers instead of the people at home you really want to smile at, those ladies sitting in the back office look like they have it pretty sweet. So I started campaigning for a back office job. Mark, my floor manager, was my first target. I let him know I wanted the position as soon as one opened. My next target was one of the ladies in the office. I would have her show me everything I could get her to do, and I started covering her for breaks. This moved into me getting the job part time, part time on the floor, then eventually full time in the office, along with overtime hours for the merchandising.

I learned a few extra things working in the office, one was people making payments on their store credit cards are not very happy to do it. Once someone is walking in a check by hand they have missed the deadlines to mail it in, which usually means that they are not sure that check is going to clear. Policy was to call the bank and verify funds right then and there. People don't like you to do that. They get testy. And you still have to smile at them while they call you names. The other thing I learned was how to wrap a present. One of our services was complimentary gift wrapping and it was the job of the people in the office to do the wrapping. I learned very quickly how to wrap a gift neatly, professionally and quickly. Before I worked retail I was a fan of the more tape is better method, now I can wrap a gift with 3 pieces of tape and have it look tight and have patterns matched up and everything. The scene in Elf where the store manager lectures Jovie about the length of a ribbon curl? Yeah, we had to pre-cut the ribbons and they had to be measured out to a certain length, don't ask, I don't remember!

So anyway, I was in the back office balancing tills, making bank deposits, taking payments for credit cards, entering inventory, all of that good stuff. But best of all, I only had to deal with cranky customers for a small portion of my day and I got to sit down! So when we moved to Idaho Falls from Florida I made sure I was hired at a department store as the office help instead of on the floor. And that would have worked out except they wanted me to start right away covering someone else's floor shift, for only two weeks, then they would move me into the office. I never did get moved into the office, spent the entire time I worked at Lamont's on the floor. They felt that I was "too valuable" on the floor to lose to the office. Oh well! What did I learn there? Not to agree to doing a job you don't want because you might never get moved into the job you do want, no matter what they tell you. I should have turned down the job at Lamont's and kept looking. But I did get a great wardrobe, excellent employee discount program.

After Idaho Falls was the move to California and after a time out to get my degree in Accounting it was on to Full Charge Bookkeeper at a wholesale pottery company. This was the most challenging job I had experienced up to that point. I was the only bookkeeper in the place, would send my information in to the accountants at the end of the month and they took care of taxes and such things, which was great. But the part that wasn't great was that there wasn't a lot of money in the company at the time. They are still in business and have moved to a larger facility, so I am guessing time has been very good to them, but at the time it was a struggle. Balancing who to pay with what check while keeping enough in the bank to cover the salaries of the 5 of us that worked there (okay, 4 of us who WORKED there and the owner who showed up once a week to pick up his check) and keep the suppliers happy and shipping pots was a daily nightmare. But it was a good job experience.

First off David, Sherma, Sam and I were it on a day to day basis. There were a couple of other warehouse guys that would come and go but the four of us ran things. Once a week the company picked up lunch. This might seem like a silly perk for a company struggling with money, but it was really well received. For about $25 it was a huge morale booster. Sandwiches from the deli down the street or Mexican from the place up the hill, these were big deal lunches to us! Good things for managers of departments to understand, the money doesn't have to be big for your employees to enjoy the perk. But the most important thing I learned from my time there was that people just want to be heard. Our suppliers knew that money was tight. They knew we were holding on just by the skin of our teeth. And they also knew that when I got invoices I was going to call and let them know what they could expect to be paid on right away and what they were going to be waiting on. If I had ignored them we would have been cut off and that would have been the end of the company. But I developed pretty solid working relationships with all of them and they knew if I said they were getting a check on Friday, they would get a check on Friday. But they also knew that it did them no go to ask for a check on Friday if I told them I couldn't get them one.

I also learned that sometimes you just have to stand up to your boss, no matter what the voice (Dad's) in your head is telling you! Brent was out to sea a lot of the time we lived in San Diego. He had been out the entire time I was working for the company and was on his way home from a 6 month cruise. I had cleared with my boss and the owner that I was going to be taking off from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through the following Monday. The ship was pulling in on Wednesday and I wanted Tuesday off to get ready. And because I knew I wouldn't be any good to anyone that day, just too excited about him coming home to focus on numbers. So Monday I am on the phone with the owner and he gives me a project he wants to go over with me the next day. I told him I was off, and he said, no. He had changed his mind. In fact since the ship wasn't pulling in until late morning on Wednesday there was really no reason I couldn't just take off around 10 on Wednesday and then have the Thanksgiving Holiday with Brent. I was livid. I had gotten that time off cleared, there was no way I was going to work the MORNING the ship came in let alone the day before! But there was still that voice (Dad's) in my head, telling me that if my boss said I had to work, then I had to work. But I listened to the other voice (the 6 months without my husband screaming banshee voice) and told John that I was taking the time off as planned. He threatened to fire me and I told him that would be his call. If I came in on Monday and my key didn't fit the door then I would know what he had decided. And I took the time off. He didn't fire me and didn't even mention it again.

Okay, so back to Idaho Falls again after this time in California. But I cannot possibly sum up what I learned from my next job in a few paragraphs because my next job was Mom. I was blessed to be able to stay home with Christopher for the first three years of his life due to an extremely low cost of living in Idaho. That particular job is ongoing and I am continually learning new things. So my next section will wrap up the jobs after I went back to working outside the home.

So far, working for the family, working as a cashier, working in fast food, working in retail front and back of house, working as a full charge bookkeeper for a wholesale pottery company and working as a stay at home mom...and I was 24 when Christopher was born. :-)

Get a haircut and get a real job...

Graduation! Time for freedom and that last summer of laziness before heading off to college and beer. Or...if you are getting married in 6 months and moving across country it's time to find a full time job and start saving your pennies! I always consider my first job out of high school as MY first job. Yes, I had been working with the family and on my own for years by this point but this job I got because of me, not family connections, but me. So that meant something.

Graduated June 2nd, had my wisdom teeth pulled June 5th went to work for Schlotzsky's on June 8th. Started as a crew member in June, was promoted to assistant manager by August and offered my own store by November. Fast food moves fast! I turned down the store because I knew I was moving after Brent got out of Basic Training and I didn't want to put them in a bad spot having to replace a manager that quickly. My area manager was so impressed that I was honest about leaving and didn't want to put them in a difficult spot that he gave me a raise. Nice balance there! I learned a lot by working at Schlotzsky's and I was also able to apply things I had learned at my other jobs.

First off, the restroom cleaning schedule rotated through every shift member, if you had bathroom duty Monday, you knew you wouldn't have it Tuesday. And I kept myself on the list as well. Figured if I wasn't willing to do the job then I shouldn't expect the people that worked for me to do it either. Secondly I asked the folks that worked for me where they wanted to work, counter or back of house? For the most part there were only 5 of us that worked nights and usually there were only 3 of us in the restaurant at one time. So it didn't seem to make sense to force Jackie to work the grill and Shelby the counter if Shelby liked making sandwiches and Jackie liked waiting on customers. I like to think I was a pioneer in Strength Finders Management. (I know! I need to get that blog written some day soon!!)

I also discovered that sometimes you have to change your management style to fit the current situation. I am not in favor of bosses publicly reprimanding employees, I think it's just degrading and unnecessary. For the most part. But I did make an exception for Steve. Steve had been the assistant manager when I first started. He stepped down to go back to school and that's how I was promoted. He went to working day shift on his off days from school. When our manager went on vacation I worked days covering her shift while she was gone. Bigger staff, busier store, more responsibility, but nothing I couldn't handle for the week. Steve was on break from school that week and so had a shift every day. And for the first two days every time I would assign him to a station he would wander away. Supposed to be cutting tomatoes, he was busing tables. Supposed to be assembling sandwiches, he was trying to work the counter. Finally I had had enough.

The beginning of his shift the third day I put him on steamer and I turn around and he is in the stock room getting chips to restock the front counter. I asked him what he was doing back there and he told me that I wasn't paying enough attention to what REALLY needed to be done so he was helping me out by covering for me. Now, normally I would have taken an employee outside (no private office so out back was the "private meeting space") and discussed things with them. But I felt that he had been pushing me all week so I needed to show that I was the boss. I explained to him that Janelle was restocking and if he would have paid attention he would have seen her taking notes on what was needed before beginning the job. Because that is how I told her to do it. And that is what I expected to happen when I told someone to do a job, that they do it. So he could either go work the steamer, and by the way, he was already behind 2 orders, or he could go home, and go for the rest of the week, and he could take it up with Janice when she returned from vacation. He told me he didn't believe me. I walked over to the time-clock, picked up his time-card and went to clock him out. He moved right over to the steamer and got to work. We had a follow up meeting after his shift was over and I wrote him up formally. I never had a problem with him or with any staff member doubting I was serious again.

After Schlotzsky's it was McDonald's for a brief spell. It was the McDonald's on base in Orlando and I had never seen and have not seen since a store so busy. I would get on shift at 4:30 AM. The doors opened at 5 AM and I spent the next 4 hours cranking through hundreds of customers, and just at my register, there were 4 of us ringing up! The lobby was packed, the restaurant was standing room only, it was amazing. We had a lull between 9 and 10 where it was just a little busy, only 2 registers needed, so we would cycle through breaks at that time. Then when breakfast shifted to lunch at 10:30 the second rush of the day would hit and we would be slammed again until my shift ended at 1. I was exhausted. But the shift moved quickly and that was a blessing!

Working at a fast food restaurant on a Navy Base serving people who are far from home for probably the first time in their lives is a good lesson in how important a smile can be to someone. My last week there as I was leaving to move on to the big bad world of retail sales, I was letting people know that I was going. I served the same group of people breakfast and lunch every day, so you get to know your customers at least by face pretty quickly. As I told them good bye and let them know it had been a pleasure serving them quite a few let me know how much they had enjoyed coming in for breakfast and being greeted with what might possibly be their only full on smile of the day. That made me feel great. What a small thing to give to someone, but what a huge difference it can make in attitude.

So on to the world of retail. First it was Beyond/Viva designer electronics. The biggest lessons here were that it's much better to be slamming busy than dead slow. An 8 hour shift can seem like minutes when you are busy but passes like days when you are slow. Designer electronics was a slow business. I took what I had learned at McDonald's about the smile and applied it to the mall even more. The mall was within walking distance of the base and so we had a large contingency of sailors coming in to spend their money. I had something going for me right off the bat,my husband was in the program most of them were heading to, so when they came in to buy their new calculators that they would need for school I could steer them away from the very expensive completely programmable model they all wanted to the lower end graphing but not programmable one that would be allowed in class. Lower commission for me, but why sell them something they weren't going to be able to use? Customers appreciate honesty. And they show their appreciation with loyalty. So when it was payday and they "needed" a cool new radio who did they buy it from? Me. And I sold it to them with a big smile, and tried my hardest to remember everyone's names. Greeting someone with their name and a smile can make their day. Simple. Easy. Effective.

I left B/V when they started to shut down stores and re-arrange staff. The drive to the mall that had room for me wasn't practical. But as luck would have it Beall's (a department store in Florida pronounce it like Bell) was opening a store right down the street from where Brent and I lived. I went to work on the floor then moved into the office while I was there. I also did displays for them. That was great fun! I have explained in an earlier blog why I shifted to the back office so I won't go into that again but I do want to talk about being in displays.

It's a seemingly simple job with a lot of rules! You had to make sure that the mannequins were dressed in the newest items, but not items that were on too big of a sale. If you could, you should really try to keep a continuing color theme through out the store. And NEVER EVER undress a mannequin in view of a customer. I would try and get everything set up during hours we were slow or if I was scheduled for an hour before open or an hour after close I would take care of it then. But sometimes the way shifts worked I would need to do the displays during store hours. This meant hauling a mannequin into the dressing room, changing the clothes, doing all of the pinning and adjusting that is done so the outfit looks perfect and not at all like it's going to look on you when you buy it, accessorize and then re-setup. And you could never as a sales associate take an outfit off of a mannequin to sell to a customer without first taking the mannequin off the floor so no one would be offended by their plastic nudity. And they could also not be dressed in any way shape or form "suggestively". Now how in the world I could make an almost androgynous plastic mannequin suggestive was beyond me. I look at the new model mannequins now that come fully equipped with erect nipples posed with their legs spread and butts in the air (thank you Forever 21) and think somewhere Mr. Beall is rolling over in his grave!

Again, this is really long and we haven't even left Florida, so I am going to wrap up and get back to work tomorrow (ha! Get it? See what I did there??)! But one last thing I learned at Beall's. This is a great line to have in your arsenal as a clothing salesperson..."That line runs really small. I had to buy it two sizes larger than my normal size." This prevents those size 12 ladies from insisting they are no bigger than an 8 and busting out the seams of whatever they are trying on. It's a brilliant line, and I died a little inside the first time someone used it on me! ;-)