It was a very simple operation. There was a government program where volunteers would donate time and labor to various government work. In return for their service, the volunteers would receive a small living stipend and would receive reimbursement for child care services. It was our job to take the volunteer’s applications, determine if they were eligible for the benefit, approve or deny the applicant for the benefit, process invoices from their child care provider, and finally mail payments to the child care provider. It was a simple process but involved a lot of customer service.
It was then I learned a lesson about today’s economy. Companies don’t want to hire new staff until it is absolutely necessary. The first few weeks and months on the job, I remember the phones were ringing off the hooks and a hundred different things always had to be done at once. My company had recently acquired the government contract from a different company a few months prior. One of the requirements of acquiring the contract was that every volunteer eligible for the benefit had to submit their paperwork on new forms that we had to send them. Due to this backlog, I was working full time and on weekends for the first few weeks on the job.
It was the week after Labor Day of 2010 when I showed up for my first day at work. Being that it was the first real job I ever had, it really did feel like a rite of passage. At the time, I was no accountant. My boss said that the job title was business analyst. Later, I would realize that the title analyst was almost as vague as a job title as consultant. I sat down at my desk and I was greeted by Denise. She handed me a stack of volunteer’s applications and a stack of checklists. My first task was to look through all of the applications and check off all the items on the checklist to see what was present and what was missing. This is what I did for eight hours that day. It was boring and mind numbing but by God I was eager to do it.
During the first week, they also handed me stacks of invoices from child care providers. My second task was to look at the invoices and check the timesheets for how many hours the children were in child care. After that, I would look at the rate sheet to figure out how much money the provider would receive and then I would calculate the total amount of the invoice. I did this for multiple hours for many days.
I saw the last part of the process also within my first week. My boss handed me a stack of checks and a stack of envelopes. It was my task to cut the checks away from the stubs, stuff them in envelopes, run the envelopes through a machine for postage, and finally mail out the checks. I was using absolutely nothing I learned throughout my four years at college but that didn’t matter. All I cared about was the paycheck at the end of every week.
When I first started out, I wasn’t hired on as a fulltime employee. They started me out as an independent contractor and I realized this when I asked how they were keeping track of my hours. The told me that I would keep track of my own hours and submit it to them at the end of each week. On Saturday of the first week, I wrote down my total hours on a sticky note and handed it to my boss’s wife. I think I worked a total of 36 hours due to Monday being Labor Day. She took my note and wrote me a check for $432. It was the first paycheck I ever had. It was the proudest moment I had for the entire year up to that point. Never before in my life had I earned so much money in such a short amount of time.
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