First job after college (part 2)

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.

For the first couple of weeks on the job, I was relatively content. Things were busy and I was a little nervous about the fact that the phones were always ringing but I was never asked to answer phone calls yet. Because of the backlog, I was asked to work on Saturdays for the first few weeks. That did bother me a little bit but since I was paid by the hour, I was okay with working six days a week. At the same time, I was also taking classes at the tax company because I wasn’t sure if my job was going to be permanent and I had already spent the $250 on 8 weeks worth of classes. By the time October rolled around, Denise was about to leave. The entire office went to a local rib shack and wished her well after she left.

Before she had left, Denise showed me how to enter invoices into the accounting system. It was simple, I just entered the same amount on both the debit and credit side. The only other thing I needed to do was add vendors when we got new people into the government program. Lastly, she taught me how to reconcile the balance with the other analyst before we printed the checks.

After she left, the entire experience for me changed. With one less staff member, the work load increased for everyone. In my case, I just wanted to process invoices, print checks, and send them out. Members would send their invoices at the beginning of every month and we promised to process the invoices within 7 business days. However, new members would send applications in and most of the applications sent in were incomplete. Incomplete applications would require communication with the member to get them to send in the complete and correct documents. In addition to that, current members would occasionally send in incorrect or incomplete invoices and timesheets and these documents would require communication with the members in order to get the complete and correct documents. And the worst part of it all was that communication was always a weakness for me throughout my entire life. Throw in the minimum amount of job training and the expectation of learning as you go along, and I experienced a whole mess of frustration that made me want to quit the job within the first few months.

Due to my inexperience, if I came across an incomplete application or invoice, I would just set it aside and move on to an application or invoice that was complete and could be processed. We were overburdened with work and it was my intention to get as much of the correct easy work done before dealing with more complicated matters. Unfortunately, this resulted in members calling back after weeks wondering why their applications or invoices were not processed. At that time, I would bring up the checklist of all the things they were missing and they would get mad at me for not calling them and telling them what was incomplete or missing. However, the absolute nightmare was the sheer volume of phone calls in the month of October, November, and December of 2010.