First job after college (part 3)

Typically, I’d arrive at the office at 8:30 am in the morning and start working on processing invoices. Sometime around 9 am or 9:30 am, I’d get a phone call from a volunteer needing assistance and I’d have to stop everything I was doing to service the customer. Whatever invoice I was working on got put on hold and things screeched to a stop. After talking to one customer, I’d hang up the phone only to have another phone call waiting for me five seconds later. I’d print out some documents and tell the volunteer I’d send her some corrected paperwork. I’d hang up the phone and start working on her form until 10 seconds afterwards where I’d get interrupted and have to talk to someone about why their check wasn’t the correct amount. After answering that phone call, I’d have to research the rates and payment from a previous month and get to work sending a payment to correct the balance. But before I could do that, I’d have to take another phone call from a program director inquiring about the status of 5 new volunteers. Work environments like that drove me almost to the breaking point and it was quite common when I wanted to start cursing at the volunteers, smash the phones, throw all the invoices out the window, and storm out of the office never to return again. It got so bad to the point where I remember at least one day where I just completely gave up on trying to process invoices and just gave into the fact that I would be on the phones for eight hours a day.

What also contributed to the problem was that most of our system was analog. During the beginning, I didn’t know most of the volunteers by name so when someone called me, I wasn’t sure where along in the process they were. I’d ask them if they were a new applicant, approved, or had received payments from us in the past. After finding their status, I had to physically find their paperwork. If they were a new applicant, I had to search through a giant stack or ask a different analyst if he saw the application. If I misplaced a folder, I couldn’t help the volunteer because we only had one copy of information. I had no database that I could type in a name and find out where all the paperwork was. I had to physically find the documents myself. As I recall, the only electronic trace of anything I had was the emails that arrived in my inbox. Despite all these frustrations and challenges, I had to keep in there because I really needed to save up money. The first few weeks on the job help shaped my worldview in a big way.

First of all, I made the decision to never get married or have any children. I was not happy with my work. I did not enjoy getting yelled at by twenty people a day nor did I enjoy having to juggle twenty tasks at the same time and fixing all the mistakes I made from previous days of work. For what work was, I wanted to make it a goal to minimize the time I spent working as much as possible in my life. This meant that I would need to save up as much money as possible and live as cheap as possible for the rest of my life. Starting in October of 2010, I started recording everything I spent money on in notebooks and I kept track of where every dollar went. Each week, I was getting paychecks of over $500. Since I still lived with my parents, I paid no rent and I was saving at least $1000 per month. At that rate, I’d have enough money to buy a house in a few years. After that was done, I’d have the biggest purchase of my life out of the way and I’d only have to work hard enough just to sustain my cost of living. That was my American dream. That is what I wanted most of all.