![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Welcome to the Big Time
Jan. 25th, 2006 11:58 pmI think I'm actually starting to realize just how big of a company I'm working for now. One thing was going with one of my classmates to watch him smoke. The smoking area is out on a loading dock that takes five minutes to walk through the twisting basement hallways to get to. The "pit" as it's been called is probably designed to be a deterrent to smokers, as it's far away from the ponds and landscaped areas or the lake that the majority of the building looks towards.
The building is large. Three wings, four stories each, and each wing is yards long with hundreds of cubicles. The building is built in a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright style that, low and long that seems to belie it's actual size. Still, the building houses over 3,000 workers. That's more workers than my last company had at their largest, and this represents only a fraction of my company's current workforce.
With this, the work gets broken up much, much more. Instead of workers being able to process many types of related items, here many people just work on one type of item. I worry a little about this, because it's easy to get bored with a job like that. Still, I plan to make it my business to move around and get to know as many sides of the business as I can here in the Dallas office. After a while, I'll have to decide whether management is my primary goal, or finding my way to a workgroup that fits my desires. We'll just have to see as I get to know more about it all.
Right now I'm just stuck in a far away training room that's named for a Texas lake. There's about 20 more rooms that are roughly similar, and about half of them have a class in them. Still, with all of this, I'm in a class that only tangentially has something to do with what my job assignment is. Everyone else in class is going to one group, but me. I'm learning how to process in the system, doing quite well, I may add, but my job is support after the work they will do, so I wonder where I'll start to get that information.
This company is so big, and works through so many people, that they have their own temporary agency. A few people in my class are moving from temp to full time. As I was looking at the company directory I noticed them, and all of the other people in my class are listed as Service Specialists. Apparently the temps are just Processors, while I've done something good to be assigned to a special group and be listed as a Senior Service Specialist. I guess I'll find out what the big differences are as I go along.
Having been a former trainer, I kind of get caught up in it, trying to share knowledge that sometimes relates, sometimes doesn't. I see that their training systems are still a bit primitive, and I want to work with them to fix that, but I'm in no way able to do that in my position. It's somewhat frustrating. I feel experienced, but not ready for this job at the same time.
I'll admit, it still feels strange, for one, to be in training again, but also not to be at the old workplace. I try to watch myself so I don't do a lot of "we did it this way" or such, but really, after being in management for a while got me away from the feeling of a workerbee. I feel I may chafe having to go back to productivity standards and being controlled where I had once controlled. There's definitely a culture change to be dealt with here.
Still, I drive to work both happy, and amazed, since I have yet to feel truly like I work and live here - that it's just a temporary life, and I'll return back to my old life soon. Luckily I've resisted contacting anyone back at AIM for not wanting to feel homesick for the way things used to be, in the little world we had there.
The building is large. Three wings, four stories each, and each wing is yards long with hundreds of cubicles. The building is built in a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright style that, low and long that seems to belie it's actual size. Still, the building houses over 3,000 workers. That's more workers than my last company had at their largest, and this represents only a fraction of my company's current workforce.
With this, the work gets broken up much, much more. Instead of workers being able to process many types of related items, here many people just work on one type of item. I worry a little about this, because it's easy to get bored with a job like that. Still, I plan to make it my business to move around and get to know as many sides of the business as I can here in the Dallas office. After a while, I'll have to decide whether management is my primary goal, or finding my way to a workgroup that fits my desires. We'll just have to see as I get to know more about it all.
Right now I'm just stuck in a far away training room that's named for a Texas lake. There's about 20 more rooms that are roughly similar, and about half of them have a class in them. Still, with all of this, I'm in a class that only tangentially has something to do with what my job assignment is. Everyone else in class is going to one group, but me. I'm learning how to process in the system, doing quite well, I may add, but my job is support after the work they will do, so I wonder where I'll start to get that information.
This company is so big, and works through so many people, that they have their own temporary agency. A few people in my class are moving from temp to full time. As I was looking at the company directory I noticed them, and all of the other people in my class are listed as Service Specialists. Apparently the temps are just Processors, while I've done something good to be assigned to a special group and be listed as a Senior Service Specialist. I guess I'll find out what the big differences are as I go along.
Having been a former trainer, I kind of get caught up in it, trying to share knowledge that sometimes relates, sometimes doesn't. I see that their training systems are still a bit primitive, and I want to work with them to fix that, but I'm in no way able to do that in my position. It's somewhat frustrating. I feel experienced, but not ready for this job at the same time.
I'll admit, it still feels strange, for one, to be in training again, but also not to be at the old workplace. I try to watch myself so I don't do a lot of "we did it this way" or such, but really, after being in management for a while got me away from the feeling of a workerbee. I feel I may chafe having to go back to productivity standards and being controlled where I had once controlled. There's definitely a culture change to be dealt with here.
Still, I drive to work both happy, and amazed, since I have yet to feel truly like I work and live here - that it's just a temporary life, and I'll return back to my old life soon. Luckily I've resisted contacting anyone back at AIM for not wanting to feel homesick for the way things used to be, in the little world we had there.
