Chapter 3: The New New Girl

My scheduling lasted a few more weeks. Somehow. I was doing the best I could, and my heart went out of it before I even started so my best wasn't that great. But I'm amazing, so I was still doing a good job :D

Meanwhile, Richard was doing amazing things as a lead tech. He put together a neat spreadsheet to make counting equipment a lot easier for everyone, and I was helping him get his tickets and inspections scheduled every week so he was making a lot more money than he was last year when he didn't do inspections. It was great. He even sat down and planned out this awesome incentive for the techs to improve their work and their attitudes. Whoever lost had to grow a mustache for a month lol.

I was having a lot of fun day to day hanging out with Marilyn and learning how to be a mom. I was also cleaning up the house quite a bit. The several groups of people who had lived there before left random things in the basement, and I got on Calgary's freecycle page to get rid of them. I was vacuuming, I was mopping, I had dishes done every day by noon...life was great. Oh and Rachel started LOVING baths, so that became part of a new bedtime routine and it worked pretty well. She's so cute :D

But I was hating scheduling.

The reps came up with some cool ideas to help pick up their numbers. They had slowed down a lot in the past month, and the new projected total for the summer was closer to 1600. Remember it started at 3000? Yeah, not gonna happen. We had a tech follow a few reps around all day with the idea that if that rep didn't sell, that tech wouldn't get work. It worked okay I suppose...it motivated the motivated people and the unmotivated people didn't sell anyways. The next idea they had was an incentive competition with the techs. It was to go for 7 days, best out of 4 gets to pie the other team in the face. The competition was to see if the reps could back up the techs. If any tech was more than 20 minutes to an install, the reps would win that day. If all the techs were on time, the techs would win. The first four days the techs won so we gave up on that idea. Richard's boss thought it was a cool idea and he chipped in some incentive money for a bbq if the techs won, which they did, so we had an awesome bbq. Marilyn and Carol made an awesome marinade and the steaks were sooooooo juicy....it was amazing.

Speaking of Carol...

I continued to get stressed and kept telling Richard I needed to be done. He kept telling me to ask Marilyn to schedule for a day or something and I kept telling Caleb I would absolutely not be working in June. Eventually Caleb got totally stressed and couldn't find anyone, and I suggested (at Marilyn's suggestion) that we bring Carol up from Logan to try it out. She was already working on getting a visa and was really excited about the idea. Caleb asked if I thought she'd do good and I told him definitely, and he told me to do it. So we brought up Carol and she was so excited. I was really happy to have someone doing it who I could actually watch and help her with anything that came up. And she did great. It was so great to have another person to hang out with and to be FREE from scheduling once and for all!! I loved June.

We had a lot of fun in our office. We would get everyone together every Sunday and have big dinners and play games and watch movies and play with Trevor's slack line and take pictures and once we bought the bbq we had a bbq every Sunday...it was fun. We had such a great work crew and we always had fun when we got together. Things were great.

And then it all went wrong...