I'm free!

Dylan comes home on Friday!

Yesterday was free museum day in Montreal - 32 museums around town opened their doors and let just any ol' person in. We had grand plans to spend a carefree afternoon wandering around downtown museums, sipping coffee and pretending to be more sophisticated than we really are. We then remember that people were coming by to look at the apartment between 1-2pm. But we figured we could still make it to the two museums that we really wanted to see. So at 2pm on the dot (that's a lie, I am not that punctual), we headed out. We hit up the McCord Museum, where they have a pretty cool exhibit of 90 treasures, 90 stories, 90 years. The museum is 90 years old; most of the 90 things were much older. There was also this really cool mosaic panorama of Montreal from this guy who stood on a roof and took hundreds of pictures throughout the year at different times of the day. It's hard to explain, but it was cool. So cool, in fact, that by the time we were done looking at it we were exhausted and decided to scrap the second museum in favour of skipping straight to the coffee.

Weird baby horse seat thing. Looks terrifying if you ask me.

Hmm, then I got to run around trying to get money in to the right bank account for rent. Turns out that if you don't use any of your accounts at a bank for over a year, leave a whopping $0.01 in it, and forget your telephone and online banking passwords, things get somewhat complicated. Almost forgot my PIN, but remembered after a few tries. I got money into my savings account no prob with the help of the nice telephone person, but of course the cheques I had written were from my chequings account that is apparently just gone. Maybe I closed it? Maybe they did? Who knows. Second telephone person told me that I would have to figure something else out for the immediate future, and could order cheques for the account that is exists. So I went onto my online banking, that I miraculously remembered all the answers to the security questions and could therefore get into, then promptly got even more confused. Apparently, I remembered to change my name with them so it welcomed Tamara MarriedName, but then when I went to order cheques it said that they would come in the name Miss Tammy MaidenName. But my old cheques are in Tamara MaidenName, so I don't even know. We'll just leave that for now.

But, the most exciting news of all: I am no longer employed! Friday was my last day. It was sad to say goodbye to people. Ok, it was sad to say goodbye to the 5-6 people out of 65ish I actually liked and talked to on a regular basis. Other than that, I am so happy to be done! Have I mentioned that I really hated working there? Because I really hated working there. I wasn't bad at it. Ok, I was awful at selling, but I was good at the customer service part and my quality scores were always really, really good. I was punctual, polite and didn't cause any problems, so my supervisors all liked me and got around the sucky selling thing by putting me in a department that had less selling pressure, which worked out well for both me and for them. But I think I'm too introverted to be able to comfortably talk on the phone to strangers all day. And, at the end of the day, it was just too stressful for me. I would feel physically nauseous every single day before I went to work and at least the first hour or so of my shift and I developed this weird eye twitch. Definitely the worst job I've ever had, and that is including the job that didn't pay me for the two months I worked there and the job where my boss yelled at me for 20 mins about whipped cream, telling me that I was single handedly ruining his business (even though he was always telling other people how amazing I was), and made me cry. That being said, I and everyone who knows me at all, knew going into it that I would find it awful. I needed money, and I am eternally grateful that I had the job. Because I have no idea what we would have done if I hadn't have gotten it. I will just not be losing any sleep lamenting leaving my call center days behind.

Now, out of respect for the company(ies?), I still won't say who I worked for or go into the specifics of the job. But, in celebration of being done, a short list of things that I will not miss:
- People who make up services that they think the company should offer, get huffy at me when I tell them that that's not how it works and then tell me that that is a really bad business practice/customer service.
- People who forget that they aren't the only customer that we have and yell at me when I tell them that we can't get to them immediately. Personally, in 90% of circumstances I think that getting service within 24 hrs is more than acceptable. This makes more sense if you know what I'm talking about, but oh well.
- People who think that just because they exist, they deserve preferential treatment and are entitled to discounts. Then, when I explain to them that we have set prices, that that is a really bad business practice/really bad customer service. Because they can switch companies, but they thought that we'd like to keep them as a customer! Well, yah, we would but if we give you everything for free then there really isn't any point.
- Oh, which directly leads into people who don't read the terms and conditions and then yell at me when we tell them that they have to pay for things that aren't covered.
-People who yell at me for billing issues that are actually issues with a completely different company. Then yell at me about how awful that company's automated system is and how they can't get through to them. Ok, but there is still nothing I can do for you. You not being able to get through to them doesn't magically mean we are suddenly the same company.
- Other agents who work with me (or at one of the other centers) that just do not know how to do their jobs and screw up, leaving me to have to explain to the customer why things didn't go the way they were supposed to. Agents who inappropriately transfer calls to me. Agents who do not know how to write useful, coherent notes of customers' files and make me waste a whole bunch of time going back over the same things again. Or, my favourite, agents who just seem to blatantly lie to customers and tell them things that are not at all true.