Tomorrow will be my last day in the best job I have ever had. And I'm hurting.

I'll get the suspense out of the way: on February 12, I start in a new campaign as a business travel Agent. The training, I'm told, is intense and lasts three months. It includes SABRE certification.  But that's the future and I want to talk about the past that brought me to this present.

I started with Majorel in 2016 after Walmart announced they wanted to put me on straight overnight shifts, with Sunday and Tuesday nights off. I would have refused this schedule had they tripled my wage: it would have meant -- technically, at any rate -- that I'd have NEVER HAD A FULL DAY OFF. 

Before Walmart, I was at Sobeys; before that, Price Chopper and FreshCo; before THAT, Little Short Stop. I'd been in retail for more than 20 years. 

It was a woman named Ashlea who convinced me to make the jump to a call centre. It was not something I'd ever considered, and I walked in on my first day scared witless.

For no good reason. A drawl coated the room in honey: it belonged to a woman named Amanda, and I fell a little in love with her. But she was merely the beginning: over that day and the coming days I would meet about six workplaces worth of Good People. Like seriously, I have to compliment Majorel's hiring practices. Over my seven years there, there was not one person I felt a burning urge to avoid. That's unheard of in a place that big. 

Not just a lack of faces you want to punch: lots and lots of people you want to hug. The head of training when I started was Maryanne, and she brought both calm and vitality into every room she entered. I had so many trainers for the various roles I've held: Raff, Jamieson, Skylar and Tess. My quality coaches included Gwilym, Jayden and Meghan, all three of whom treated me well and helped me grow. A bevy of supervisors, chief among them Greg -- he was absolutely the ideal supervisor for a customer service job. He gave me tips that impressed Eva, and SHE has six professional customer service designations. 

I've talked about the nuts and bolts of the job often enough. I excelled at chat: good enough to have supervisors steal my phrasings and at one point I was poised to become a 'grad bay lead': teaching newbies how to do the job. Then the client decided to amputate chat from our site, and I went back to order support where there's a minimum of customer interaction and thus a minimum of stress. 

Except at that time there was no such thing as a minimum of stress because that was 2020.

I had three separate long term illnesses that year. The first of them was thought to be covid. It wasn't. But I missed more time in 2020 than in the rest of my career put together, and I'm forever grateful that they felt I was worth keeping. I spent three days in tier one OS before getting 'upskilled' to T2, and then rode out the pandemic replacing and refunding the thousands of things that went missing.

Some lessons:

1) Don't order anything non-food related from Uber. I swear to dog they lose or steal more shit than they deliver. 

2) CHECK YOUR DAMNED SHIPPING ADDRESS BEFORE YOU ORDER ANYTHING ONLINE.

3) Know what state you live in.  Seriously, I remain amazed at the number of people who don't know their state's two letter abbreviation. This is part of your address, people. I learned my address not long after I learned how to TALK. Every day in OS we'd get a number of induction tasks: orders that failed to make it into the system, often because the customer did something like enter "BOSTON MS" as their city and state. MS is Mississippi. MA is Massachusetts. I'm Canadian and I know this stuff. You Americans have zero excuse. 

4) As much as your Friendly Agent would like to, they can't teleport something to you. Some things ship from overseas. That means customs. That means you'll have to see Helen Waite about your rush order. That's right, if you have a rush order, go to Helen Waite. 

Related: if something is lost or damaged in transit, your friendly agent DID NOT DO THAT. No matter how important and expensive it is. Your friendly agent wants nothing more than for you to get your thingie and live happily ever after. Threatening to sue your friendly agent won't get you thingie to you even ten seconds faster, so kindly don't bother. 

Although it's the best job I've ever had, it was by no means perfect. Shift bids come standard in most call centres and so  I can't complain about the mechanics of the bid, but I can and will complain that the means by which our ranking was derived was utterly opaque to us, and I will sure as hell complain that in all the time I was there exactly one bid -- out of about 25 -- opened when they said it would, closed when they said it would, and took effect when they said it would. 

More troublingly, once I got out of chat I was allowed to go as high as second overall in the stack ranking -- but my attempts to go further, by, say, getting to lead another grad bay, or after a while even being Floor Support -- weren't rebuffed so much as utterly and completely and totally ignored. It got to be kind of pointed after a while: I'd send an email requesting some hours on floor support, get no reply, send one more, get nothing, and think they seem to like me right where I am.

I was thinking about this one morning early this month as I worked a succession of Global Trade Services blocked orders. These are parties to whom it is illegal to sell things, and our system casts a comically wide net trying to catch them. If there's an Andrew on a restricted list, for example, the system flags every Andrew, Andy, Andre and Andrea. So most of these blocks can be lifted quickly and easily. These tasks tend to come in bulk, especially first thing in the morning, and they do wonders for your average handle time, but...they're really kind of...boring.

Not an hour after "I'm bored" flitted through my mind for the first time in years, I got an email notification and MS Teams invite to a meeting with the head honcho. There's only one reason those happen, and sure enough about 90% of us are being let go. I can't say one way or another but I don't think it likely the remaining ten percent will be there by spring.

I was given a choice of three campaigns to go to, supposing I qualified for any of them. Again, grateful: they didn't have to do that. I then had a 'digital interview' (results decidedly mixed) and an actual interview with a man named Vlad (results: got the job).  Getting onboard has been like trying to catch a running train...at one point I was five hours from my offer being put on hold, which probably meant rescinded...but I'm okay now.

Mostly.

Truth is, I teared up a bit when my supervisor announced she was closing our team group. (She's gone too: today was her last day.)  I'm sure more tears will follow tomorrow. And then I'll move onward and upward.

Thank you, Majorel, for everything you have done for me and my family.