Self Discoveries.

This summer, I've taken up employment at a local call center.  During my long days of training, I came to several conclusions while I was supposed to be learning how to engage, be empathetic, and listen.  Yes, I recognize the irony in not listening to a lesson about listening.  But if I'm being honest, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on customer management- pretend to be interested and above all else, don't ever tell the customer he/she is an idiot.  Even if he/she is potentially the dumbest person I've ever smerfed with in my life.

But I digress.

The following are very important life lessons I will remember always.

1. Long nails give me the heeby jeebies.  Maybe it's because I played piano for a very long time, and the importance of having consistently short nails was ingrained to me in third grade when my piano teacher would not allow me to continue playing until I cut my nails, washed my hands, and was thoroughly lectured on the negative effects long nails have on performance.  One of my coworkers has freakishly long nails, and every time I see them, I shudder and all I can think of is the disturbing picture I saw in a Guinness world records book once of the longest nails in the world.  Am I alone here?  Long nails are the worst.  
2. I have very little patience.  We played twenty questions as a bonding experience one of my first days, and I was interested for the first three questions or so.  Then I lost all hope and spent the rest of the game calculating how much money I was being paid per minute to listen to my coworkers try to identify a taco in twenty questions or less, completely tuned out.  Which brings me to my next point.
3. I have a breaking point when it comes to learning new material, after which I am decidedly done.  I am unable to continue paying attention, and I zone out.  I quickly realized if I sat at the back of the room and leaned in to my cubicle, it looked like I was just following the lecture on my computer, and my instructor was not able to see anything I was doing.  That is how I read upwards of a dozen books in three weeks of training.
4. According to my instructor, adding "mundo" to the end of any word basically makes it Spanish.  True storymundo.

As a bonus, I found this on my second day.  What a great indicator of my time as an inbound phone technical specialist.  Smurf this, indeed.