Chapter 2: Verizon, Techs, and The New Girl

To tell this story properly I have to introduce the technicians a little bit.

Richard: Lead Tech. Has 1 wife and 1 child.
Danny: Has 1 wife and 3 childs.
Jordan: Has 1 wife, but she is not in Canada with him.
Jesse: Has 1 wife and 1 child.
Jason: Has 1 wife and like a billion pets.
JayTrevorDuncan: Single guys.
Nathan: Married to the best selling rep in the office.
Devin: Has 1 wife. Took some convincing to come up here because he had a bad experience the last time he worked for Pinnacle.
Richard W: Has 1 invalid girlfriend (she's in and out of hospitals every week)

This is the best tech crew I've ever seen, which presents some problems. You need at least 1 slacker tech in your office in case there's a slow day. We were under the impression there would be no slow days, so we weren't too worried about not having any slacker techs. But then the slow days started...

Anyways so where were we. I'm scheduling. From home. On my cell phone. Which shouldn't normally be a problem with all these crazy unlimited plans they've got these days. Unfortunately, every cell phone company in the US dropped their Canada calling plans except for Verizon. We didn't find this out until we started getting long distance charges with Sprint that they didn't warn us about. Sprint's customer service is a bit lacking lately. So we had to switch to Verizon in order to make this whole expedition even possible. We've always wanted to switch but never have because Richard is obsessed with his expensive palm phone. When he went in to Verizon they were having a 2 for 1 sale on late model palm phones, so that made us feel a little better about switching. I now have a pretty sweet phone :D That being said, Verizon's Canada plan is not very good. Probably mostly because they're the only Canada plan, so they can do whatever they want. Our plan includes 6000 anytime minutes and 1000 night and weekend minutes. No, I did not get that backwards. We also have unlimited texting within the Verizon network, and depending on how much we feel like paying that month a few out of network texts.

We knew going into this that Richard was going to be on the phone a lot, so we got the biggest plan they offered for that purpose. We did not know going into this that I would be scheduling for any amount of time, so I had a minimal texting plan and I was sharing Richard's minutes. If I knew I would be scheduling I probably would have gotten a different plan or we would have gotten Canadian phones or something, because the way it turned out was just ridiculous. We used almost 12,000 minutes in May. 12,000!! Do you know how many minutes there are in a month? 43,200. That means we spent almost an entire week on the phone. Yuck!

To combat these costs, I tried to spend as little time as possible on the phone. I would answer it when a rep called in a sale, but then I would text the information to the tech instead of calling him. This mostly worked, but sometimes the service wasn't very reliable and my texts didn't end up going through. Or a tech left his phone in the car. Or on silent. Or something. So on occassion techs were slightly more than 20 minutes getting to a job and it was my fault for not calling them to make sure they got my text. But I got really good at texting :D

All in all it was a pretty good system. Except for when Rachel started crying every time she saw my phone. Being a scheduler is a really weirdly time consuming job, because you can pretty much do whatever you want all day long but when the phone rings you HAVE to answer it and you HAVE to keep track of the techs and the jobs they're putting in. So it's ideal for a tech's wife who doesn't have much to do besides hang out with the other wives and wait for the phone to ring. It's a little more challenging for a tech's wife who has a house to clean and organize and laundry to do AFTER taking care of the needs of a 2 month old baby. Who goes through all her growth spurts earlier and longer than expected, so she has to eat pretty much all day long. I got really good at doing things with one hand while feeding the baby :D Which is a great accomplishment, but I got really worn out and tired and unhappy and no one ever paid me.

So I told Caleb I was done. I gave him a few days to find a replacement and I told him I'd be more than willing to train her up and stay with her for a few days to make sure she understood everything and did a good job. I told him on Saturday that Wednesday absolutely needed to be my last day. He said cool and thank you and told me if I emailed my hours to Graham he'd be sure to get me paid through Richard's account. I didn't really believe that was going to happen since I know how the back office side of the company works and that's not it, but I figured if Graham really has as much sway as everyone is showing he does, then it might work out. So I emailed over my hours and was feeling quite confident that Wednesday would be my last day. This was right around 15 May.

I understood from Richard that Adam (assistant manager) was working on hiring someone, so I was pretty excited. He was interviewing on Tuesday, hiring on Wednesday, and I'd be training on Thursday. Pretty sweet :D We made arrangement for me to have the car so I could drive downtown to the office and train that day and the next, just to make sure everything went smoothly. We found out they did hire someone, so plans were in motion.

I went in on Thursday around noon to train the new girl. I understood that she'd be in the office all day, so I had her help me put up a wall chart like I had in Texas that worked really nicely for keeping track of the jobs and the techs. I explained the whole process from when the phone rings until the tech is done with his job, and I had her download the app for facebook that I was using to text all the reps and let them know how we were doing on sales for the day. I had her write down all the phone numbers for the techs and told her about each tech, and everything seemed to be going pretty well. Tragically, it was a slow day. Which meant we were bored all day. Jennifer, the new girl, was neither a mother nor LDS, so she, Kristy and I had very little to talk about except work. Kristy and I kind of complained a bit, and I think we gave her a bit of the wrong impression about the job.

Towards evening it became quite clear that they weren't going to pick up very much for the rest of the night, and I was out of milk. I asked Jennifer if she'd be okay if I took off for an hour to go shopping and she assured me she'd be fine. When I got back she was still doing great, and I could see she was following the system really well. I was pretty pleased. She told me she was fine to go home for the night, so I showed her how to forward the phone to her cell so she could take any late or early calls and make sure everything was taken care of and told her to stay until about 10. Cool. I'm going home.

Richard came home around 10 as he rarely managed to do these days, and his phone was ringing off the hook as usual. He got a strange call from a rep with a sale because he said the office number was busy. I figured Jennifer was just taking a sale and handing it out like usual and the rep was just kind of impatient. But when Richard got done dispatching the job and got off the phone he told me he wasn't sure about Jennifer's capacity as scheduler. Apparently he called her looking for one of his techs and she sent him to a job that another tech was doing. Kind of strange...but oh well. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Richard got a text the next morning from Caleb informing him that Jennifer had quit last night. There was nothing in the text asking me to schedule again, but I figured I might as well, so I just picked up right where I left off. We went in to the office to take care of some things and found the note from Jennifer. She didn't even call anyone to say she was quitting, she just left a note around 9:30 at night (still rush hour) saying the job wasn't what she thought it was going to be and she had a better offer. I was flabbergasted that she would just walk out on a job without telling anyone. She was the sole dispatcher and she just left. I couldn't believe it. She showed absolutely no sense of responsibility, and that's just rude. Anyway I looked at the book and the wall chart and she had really messed things up big time. She skipped three techs and gave one tech two jobs without everyone having one, plus she had a lot of names wrong and it was just crazy. I eventually got it all sorted out, and that day was kind of a mess as far as the order goes just because she screwed it up so badly the day before.

So here I am, back to scheduling. I guess we'll see how long this lasts.