November: Not a Qualifying Month

... which means that the earliest I could be offered a permanent position at the corporate masters' workplace would be February, 2006. I was just short on a couple of metrics to qualify for November. None of the five folx who trained with me that are on the present team qualified, and I did come closer than anyone else -- in fact, my total-margin-per-unit was higher than most of the experienced reps on the team, and higher than the entire center's average. That's because I try to only sell people the computer that will actually do what they tell me they want to do with it, instead of an "empty box" that might guarantee a sale at a rock-bottom price, but ultimately ends up with a customer who is disappointed with their new system. Everyone wishes they could buy a $299 PC that will do video editing and play Call Of Duty, but trust me -- it ain't gonna happen this year. :)

Of course, this news was given in a one-on-one session in my manager's open cube, in somber tones. I was told that I was making great progress, and that he recognized that my many years of experience in the industry would be a great asset to the company, but that since I had hired in as a sales rep, I needed to prove myself in that role before being shown a plethora of wide-open doors that existed in the company.

My response? Well, I let him know that I never expected any special treatment due to my previous experience, and that I fully intended to do the best job I can as a sales rep -- and so long as meeting customer needs is not simply lip-service, I should continue to prosper in the role. Obviously, I quite enjoy helping people connect with the technology they need, at all levels. That's where I derive satisfaction from this ridiculous job; ultimately, I get to help people do what they need to do, even if they have to spend more than they expected when they called in. If they can't afford what they need, at least when our conversation is over, they understand what the options are, and why they'll have to spend more money down the road in order to achieve certain goals.

What I didn't tell the boss is that I'm not convinced there's a good fit, here. I'll do my best -- but I'm not sure I like the prospects of working in a place where I can expect a nasty e-mail because I took too long taking a dump. I'm also, frankly, very concerned about a career in a place where it is viewed as completely and unquestionably reasonable that all of the flexibility, resourcefulness and responsibility is on the shoulders of the lowest-paid workers in the organization; where not even missing 20% of one's paycheck is a situation that one's immediate supervisor will insert themselves into to correct, and prevent from happening again, in the future.

The first week on the floor, my manager told all of us new hires that he "never wanted to hear a complaint that wasn't accompanied by a proposed solution." Well, as luck would have it, a few weeks ago, the entire team was hit with a slew of "policy violations" -- that is, third-party call auditors had determined that some of us were not reading one or more of the various scripts to our customers, verbatim. As it so happens, the violations centered around a recently-changed service policy script, and no one on the team had received the new script. Now, since we have a supposed "integrated desktop" application for completing orders, one might easily expect that such a script change would be incorporated into that software -- where every rep on the floor would have instant, incontrovertable access to the changes as they were implemented. Alas -- it is not there, to this day. We now have it on paper, or on another app, called "Policy Buddy," with either method, obviously, being anything but integrated into the "integrated" order software.

I got on the net, found the white paper that Micro$oft published concerning this integrated app (that they helped to develop, of course), and discovered that the whole shebang was built within the .NET framework. That means that changing nothing more than some text for the sales reps to read to the customer is a simple matter of updating one XML file with a few lines of text. When I told the manager that if he would loan me out to the development team for one day (or less), I could implement this change, and walk it through QA and into production, his response was that "It would take an act of Congress" to make something that simple happen in the app.

Okay.

I complained, and I proposed a solution that I would stake my fucking job on being able to do successfully. Where did that get me? Nowhere.
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