It was the middle of May when I started work again after 7 months of being unemployed. As soon as I arrived at the building, I was hit with a sense of deja vu. It was the same building I visited for an interview back in 2012. I took the elevator up to the sixth floor and walked to the suite only to find an empty room with the lights turned off. Maybe I was a little bit early. Feeling nervous, I walked outside and sat down at a table. Back in college, there was an unwritten understanding that class was canceled if the professor was more than 15 minutes late for class. I had no idea what to do if you went to work and no one showed up though. Luckily, I had the number for customer service for the company and I called them. When they asked me what I needed, I just told them that I was hired as an accountant and had arrived at the office but no one was there yet. The customer service representative was able to get in touch with the operations manager and they said that someone would be in the office shortly. Feeling assured, I walked back inside the building and up towards the sixth floor to see that the lights were on and the boss opened the door for me. It was the first time I saw him since the interview and I said it was good to see him again. He showed me to my desk and I saw one woman on the opposite side of the room which I assumed to be another accountant.
The CFO gave me my login credentials to my laptop and said I could take a look at the accounting software as well as the other programs. We were still waiting on one more employee to show up so I was idling there without an assignment to work on. The room was very empty. The walls were bare and there were only two tables and some chairs. Immediately, I got the impression that I was interviewed in a hotel because the company did not yet have the office space yet. After a little while, the CFO gave us a brief introduction to the company. Fifteen minutes later, the third guy finally showed up. He was breathing hard and in a mess. Apparently, he was late due to his car breaking down or the buses running late. After he arrived, the four of us went to lunch.
As it turned out, I was the only accountant there. The man and the woman that started with me were both customer service representatives. Most of our company’s operations were located in South America and Europe. Our senior staff accountant was located in Bolivia and the other accountant was stationed in Texas. Lenny would start training me on how to do my job in a few days however we would have a much more important task to do first which was assembling furniture.
During the first week, we didn’t get actual work done. We had to spend the week getting ready to get work done and part of that entailed assembling chairs and tables. Immediately, I felt a little resentful. I didn’t recall furniture assembly in my job description when I started but there was probably a section that said ad hoc activities. Later, I would come to learn that the term “AD HOC” was a latin term for stuff the boss doesn’t want to do. Well, I couldn’t complain. I had been unemployed for the past 7 months. I was also very understanding considering that the United States operation was very small. There were only four of us and that was probably not enough to justify hiring an operations manager. During the first week of work, the four of us assembled multiple tables, chairs, and drawers. We spend a good amount of time hooking ethernet cables into wall jacks, modems, and phones. We spent even more time wrapping the cables and cords around the tables and walls to make everything look neat. I did so without complaining however part of me kind of wondered what kind of company wouldn’t have this stuff sorted out before the employees started working? We were making room for extra capacity. By the Summer or Fall, our company was trying to hire two extra customer service representatives, one IT guy, one senior accountant, and maybe two people for marketing positions. After setting our office up, we started to run into some technical difficulties.
During the first week, I was working with my boss to set up my phone properly. The phone I was using was a VOIP phone so I had to call tech support in Bolivia just to get the phone activated and the number set up. But repeated problems caused us to be going back and forth with Boliva for over 45 minutes. Even after finally getting the VOIP phone set up, everyone in the office was struggling with the call quality of the phones. Whenever we used the phones, the call was cut in and out every few seconds making communication completely impossible. During our first two weeks, I was barely able to get any effective training with Lenny and the customer service representatives were barely able to communicate with customers. The only solution we had was to get rid of the wireless modems the phones were connected to and plug an ethernet cable directly into the VOIP phone. This solved the problem for the most part, however our phones were affected if our internet connection cut out.
Unfortunately, internet issues were frequent during our first few months of operations. This would be particularly frustrating for customer service as sometimes the conversation would just be lost on their end. In my case, it was annoying and disruptive when I was entering invoices into the accounting system and my system would freeze up after every entry and mouse click. Losing an internet connection was always nerve wracking because we never would know how long it would take to reconnect. It could be a few minutes or as long as an hour.
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