Month: July 2021

My goodness, where has this week gone? It truly feels like yesterday was Monday! It’s been another intense workweek, and my brain feels fried. Although it’s incredibly challenging, I’m enjoying the ride. We have an excellent instructor/facilitator, and my classmates are friendly. I’m thoroughly enjoying working from home once again, and as I mentioned, I can’t see myself going back to working out of the house. This morning the Assistant Vice President virtually paid us a visit in our daily huddle. He talked about himself, his history, and we went around the virtual classroom introducing ourselves.

Since my workday doesn’t start until 9:30 am, I allow myself to go to bed later. Once I’m out of training, my workday will be from 10:30 – 7:00. I cannot say that I have too many issues with that since I’ll be working from home anyway. If I were working out of the house, that would be a different story. Additionally, if I don’t like the schedule, I can eventually adjust the hours.

Of course, now that I’m working from home, even the little things that I do, such as popping in to see my daughter, interacting with our dog Bella, or even using our bathroom, are appreciated. Not to mention heating my food. No need to do anything differently since I’m out of the home and outside of formal meetings like the one we had today and the one I’ll have with my manager tomorrow; I can dress in casual clothes. While that’s the case, working from home is not mean I’m lazy. That was never the case with me, and I’ll continue to work the same way. Naturally, you’ll have people that abuse working from home; however, I’m not one of those people.

In other news

The Brain Needs Space title comes from a blogger that I used to follow. His blog had the same name. Daniel was/is a fantastic storyteller, and I was a bit disappointed when he stopped writing. I first discovered him from his older blog called Big Red Kitty. He played a hunter in World of Warcraft, and his pet was a cat. There was a hunter talent called enraged beast, and the hunter’s pet would turn red and be immune to certain effects while it attacked its target, hence the name big red kitty. WoW is an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) created by Blizzard. I had many great memories of playing that game for years. I developed friendships and with others who played the game and even introduced my daughter to the game. I stopped playing it as frequently about six years ago, although I would still log on and play sporadically with my daughter and people that I’d developed friendships with over the years. When Activision bought World of Warcraft, I stopped playing as much, and at the beginning of this year, I canceled my subscription since neither my daughter nor I saw any value in the game.

Interestingly enough, I have seen Activision Bizzard in the news recently with numerous allegations of inappropriate behavior towards women and minorities. I’ve followed the story a bit, and it’s interesting to see that some of the popular WoW streamers have also left the game based on the allegations and tepid response from Activision Blizzard. If the allegations are true, I hope those who are guilty are fired and held accountable for their actions, and hopefully, those who step in will start treating all their employees with respect.

My first whole week working remotely has come to an end, and I must say that it was terrific. Even before I began at my new company. My badge and computers arrived days before I began my new job. I had eight people from management reach out to me to make that transition seamless, and it continued after I started on Monday when I logged onto Microsoft Teams.

My first meeting was with my manager and three other people coming on board within her department. It continued a half-hour later when we immediately went into an hour-long session and were introduced to managers from different departments and the director. Immediately after that meeting, I hopped into the training room with our trainer.

Weeklong training

I’m back working in insurance. It’s an industry that I’ve been out for several years; however, I missed my time away, and now I’ve returned. This first week and the upcoming eight weeks will be training. This first week, I did not handle any “live” documents. All my training was conducted within Microsoft Office Team meetings, and virtual training was conducted in a simulated program environment. I must say that everything that has to be done is a lot to wrap my head around, and I’m grateful for the nine weeks of training that I’ll receive. Even after the training is over, I’ll be working with a mentor for quite some time before I’ve fully “mastered” my position.

During the week, I was able to see firsthand how my company handles difficulties. One of the ladies within our department was having issues with her laptop computer. It was slow, not responding. She could still hear and see the instructor, and so she watched and took notes.  Within a few hours, the help desk reached out to her to troubleshoot and fix the issue. Once they took her laptop through all of its paces, they overnighted a new laptop to her, and she was able to actively follow along and do the assignments with the class. Before this happened, management had reached out to her and would have let her start at a later date; however, she had bonded with the instructor and us (classmates), so she was adamant about staying within our class. They allowed her to do that, and in 1.5 days, she had a working computer.

Downtime activity

I only have one HR video to complete. I already watched over eight hours of video. At the end of most of the courses, I was graded. I received 100% on the majority and high 90’s on the three that I did not receive perfect scores. Currently, I only have one video left to watch, and that is two hours long. I most likely will hold off watching that video for a while. For several of the videos that I watched, I had 90 days to complete; however, I wanted to get them out of the way quickly to focus on getting familiar with my job in my downtime.

I much prefer working remotely

As I’ve mentioned before, I have worked at home several times throughout my career. Our instructor stated that this was one of the largest classes. Our instructor was filling in for a trainer that was on vacation this week. She’ll be returning next week. It’s a lot of information to process; however, the trainers/mentors made the transition easier. I don’t miss dealing with 695 traffic, and I don’t see myself going back to working within the office setting.

 

 

 

 

I’m happy to say that the technician from Comcast was out to the house this morning, shortly before 8:00 AM, to install the cable for Comcast Business. The truck says Xfinity; it’s owned by Comcast. Xfinity handles all the residential cable installations.

In total, it took the technician about two hours to complete the installation. He had to add a phone plate to the room and run an additional cable. Before he left, he mentioned some issues with the phone line, and a technician would be coming out later today. It turns out there were a total of two separate technicians that came to troubleshoot the issue. Unfortunately, since the problem was at the telephone pole, they did not go into the house. However, I will follow up with my contact to ensure that everything is working smoothly. It seems to be doing fine. After all, I’m using Comcast Business to write this current post.

How’s the speed? Judge for yourself. Fios is available in our part of town; however, it isn’t- sighs in our small rural community, perhaps someday. However, for my new job, the upload and download speed is more than adequate! My company requires that I be directly connected to the router, and that’s how I’ve connected my laptop. I used an ethernet cable.

A former co-worker’s husband is also working remotely and uses Comcast Business for work. She stated that he had had nothing but good things to say about his experience. The only time the cable has gone out was when there was a terrible accident in their area. Just like them, we also live in a remote location.

Years ago, I had Comcast residential; however, I canceled the service and swapped to Verizon because the service was awful. Their internet service was down  lot. From my research, it appears that they’ve made significant improvements, and since my new job requires that I have a cable connection and not DLS as we have with Verizon, it’s what prompted me to start researching my options. Interestingly enough, it led me back to Comcast. Who would have thunk?

In other news

My office furniture arrived yesterday, and so this was the last hurdle that I had to do on my end. I followed up with the Talent Agent for where I’ll be working. When I talked to “A” last week, she mentioned that I could start on 7/12/21. I asked what was going on, and she told me to follow up with her once everything had been completed. It’ll be nice to be back working again. I’ve been off for almost two weeks, and while I’ve enjoyed my time spending time with my daughter and just being in a different space. I must admit that I’m ready to start my new job; however, if I have to wait until my official start date of 7/19/21, well, that’s fine also. I’m stoked that I’ll be working remotely.

 

 

Shortly after 8:00 this evening, my Bose 700 Noise Cancellation Headphones arrived via Amazon. I’d purchase headphones along with a few other items earlier this afternoon. About six hours later, my Bose headphones arrived. Bose makes excellent products. I bought these headphones because of the sound quality when taking calls and the noise cancellation feature.

In a little over a week, I’ll be starting to work from home remotely. I’ll be making and receiving calls and participating in meetings. Therefore, I thought that it was high time that I invested in a good quality hands-free device headset that would allow me to continue working on the computer while taking calls. Once I finally narrowed it down to Bose, I watched other videos to determine which model to purchase.

Since I want to maintain a “professional” work environment while at home, I chose the Bose 700 Noise Cancellation Headphones, I live in a rural area, and our house isn’t noisy. However, I still chose these since the noise cancellation also blocks out the occasional noise I might hear from our dog Bella.

The Bose headphones are the first of a few work items that I’ve purchased for my office space. I ordered the bulk of the things today on Amazon, and as I already mentioned, the headphones were the first item that arrived. I believe I’ll be spending about $1,600 to get my designated space office-ready. The only reason that I’m investing money in the setup is that I will be participating in a few meetings weekly. Since I’ll be on video, I do want to have my space looking like an office. I already spent a little over $1000, and I have one more item to purchase; an indoor portable generator. I’m still researching that. We do have an outdoor generator; however, it’s not the type that automatically turns on once the power is out. We don’t have too many power outages; however, if we do have heavy storms (such as what we had last week), the chances of the electricity going out is high since we live in a small community surrounded by trees. Also, in our state, the phone cables and power lines are above ground.

My last day at my old job was Tuesday, June 29, 2021. Through networking, I’d applied for a job at a Fortune 200 company. I started the interview process about three weeks ago, fast forward until June 18, 2021, and I met with the manager of operations and the senior director of operations. I did my homework and did a lot of research on the company.

On the day of the interview, I took the day off. I even made sure I had plenty of STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) questions and answers ready for the meeting. That’s the format that this company uses, and the company also mentions this on their website. The interview was virtual, and it went well. However, they could not see me on video for the first 30 minutes! Whoops, I thought they could. I could see myself and both of them just fine when this was brought to my attention after finishing the STAR questions. I immediately started the process of troubleshooting this situation. It took about three minutes, and they were able to see me and commented on my perseverance in resolving the issue quickly. They cheered once we were all on video. The Senior Director of Operations joked about starting the interview again, and we all had a good laugh. I must say it was one of the best interviews I’ve had, and I left with the feeling that “This job is mine!”

 

I GOT THE JOB!

Of course, I didn’t find out that news until two days later. The talent agent reached out to me on Friday, 6/18/21, and gave me the good news. I was at work and stepped outside to take the call. I did an excited fist pump when she told me the news. She was so excited for me also. I like this talent agent. She’s friendly, responsive, and has gone above and beyond to assist me when I had questions. After the initial excitement and chatter had dissipated, “A” went on to say that it was apparent that I did my homework. Because both of the interviewers were very impressed with my responses to the STAR technique, she was right; that weekend leading up to the interview, I did research the STAR technique, came up with numerous questions, and used five incidents throughout my work career that could be used in any scenario presented. Later that evening, she emailed me the acceptance letter. They were offering me much more than I originally had anticipated. She was so happy when she told me my salary on the phone. She also mentioned that she would be sending over the paperwork to grant my permission to do the background check.

The next phase was the background check. Over the years, I’ve had several of them, and so I was not concerned at all. That is until I discovered the company they were using. It appears that a lot of the popular companies that do background checks outsource their work to other countries. That’s not automatically an issue; however, time constraints and occasional trouble understanding one another can be an issue. I’d read this and discovered this for myself with this background check. Everything, except for my employment, came back clear. Since I’d already read horror stories about this, I was prepared.  I had W2 transcripts for past jobs; they used paystubs and all three years of W2’s for where I was currently working. I did not want them to know I was looking for work. Monday, June 28, 2021. I received word from my new company Investigative Team that my background check had cleared, and the Talent Agent would be contacting me to go over the next steps. She did the following day. I received my credentials for Workday, and I’ve begun the Onboarding process. I still need to take a photo, which I will complete today. I also need to complete the tax information. Everything else, except a few benefits-related videos, was completed yesterday. I must say that my entire interaction with my new place of employment has been positive. I’ve dealt with five people from the new company, and they all have been cordial, professional, and prompt. That’s exactly how I am at work, so you know I’m thrilled to see that with all that I’ve interacted with thus far.

Preparing for working at home full-time

Monday, I had a cable technician come to the house to install Xfinity Blast; however, since there was a tree in our yard that had grown over the telephone and power lines. He told me that he could not do the job and would have to come out once the tree limbs had been removed—more on that in a later post. My employer still have to send out the monitor, computers, and I’ll need to do my I-9 verification. It’ll be exciting being on the other side of the verification. As an independent contractor, I’d occasionally conduct inspections to verify that a remote worker had the proper office set-up. I always knew that I most likely would be on the other side of that equation.

No more weekday commute!

I will not miss the daily traffic on 695. It typically took me 1.5 hours round trip. Of course, that was on a good day; sometimes, it took a bit longer. I’m also loving the fact that I won’t be using as much gas. My Prius gets excellent gas mileage; however, I’m thrilled that I won’t have to travel for work. I’ve worked from home several times throughout the years, so this is not a new experience. I prefer working from home, and it means I’ll get to see my daughter more!

I must say that I’m thrilled with the opportunity. I was listening to my interviewers, doing my research on employees that work at the company, and viewing how they treat their customers. I’m very sure that I’ll be happy working at this organization. A bonus is that the company is recognized as one of the top places for employees to work.

 

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