Anyway finally got the nerve to apply at Alpine Access for one of those virtual assistant positions or perhaps customer service. Not trying to brag but I have over twenty years of experience working with clients over the phone and in person. I was just looking for some part time work to get my feet wet and get adjusted to working from home and possibly make it full time down the road.

Well I was in for a very rude awakening. After uploading my resume, filling out a personal profile with somewhat nosey questions, picking my work hours and then writing an essay about why I wanted to work for Alpine, there was an exam. Can you believe this? A timed one hour exam.

This was no ordinary exam either. It started off quite easy with general "personality" questions, basically how you interact with other people. If you chose too many "neutral" traits, the exam would prompt you again to narrow the choices. Had I known this, it would have saved me a ton of time. Then there was a typing test which is usually expected. Here is where the exam took a slight curve towards getting difficult. You were given a long list of words to guess their meanings and it was multiple choice. I know what you are thinking multiple choice is easy right? Not when all the words on the list are ones you never heard of; definitely not used in every day conversation. I had to look up every single word in the dictionary and of course that took up more time.

Now comes the hard part. They gave you a list of words and a sentence with a bunch of blanks. You had to rearrange all the words to make a complete sentence and once again the words they chose were not ordinary. By this time my brain is racked and I honestly felt like quitting but the exam was almost over so I continued. The very last part was looking at three-d objects and then choosing how they would look from different views. Huh? What the hell does this have to do with helping people? I'm not applying for an engineer job, just normal phone work. It felt as if I were back in tenth grade algebra class again.

Seriously folks, this exam was way over the top. I may even have forgotten some of the material on the exam but you have a general idea of what to expect if you want to apply with this company. Needless to say, they rejected my application for employment based on my exam results no doubt. No worries though, it was not meant to be and where one door closes, another one will open. I hope my experience will help you out one day. Good luck.