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.

Lies! All Lies!

Ciao ragazzi! It's Leah. Yup...the one who sounds totally crazy from this blog. Okay, fine so I may be a little crazy, but it's cool with me and I love my life. Anyways, I would like to clear up how the prank war really started. One fine late winter night, I was sitting on the floor in Katie and Sara's room. I found an empty Powerade bottle that was lemonade flavored and had a little left inside. It sort of looked life pee, so I jokingly said, "hey guys would you be mad if I peed in this bottle and put it in your fridge?" Sara and Katie both responded with, "Not at all. Go for it!" With the unexpected answer, I decided..."hmm I might as well". So I said, "I'm really going to do it then", and they gave me the okay. So there I was with a Powerade bottle that I did not originally intend on peeing in, but now that I said I would, I couldn't go back on my word. And so I did...and stuck it in their fridge while they were in class.

Thus we see, this prank war did NOT start by me saying, "hey guys, I'm going to pee in this bottle." Sort of. I just wasn't going to go back on my word. Moral of the story, I'm not that much of a freak. :) BUT, don't mess with me unless you want to get smerfed up. Woo! :)