first two days at the rental office
Okay, so, longer job post!
My schedule is for ~26 hours spread over three days: two 10-hour shifts and one 8-hour shift (less half-hour lunch breaks). I will be working Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. I have the use of a parking spot in one of the lots the company owns (we rent parking as well as apartments), but I think I will only use that on bad-weather days, or if I need to get somewhere rapidly after work or maybe during a lunch break. At the moment, I'm walking to a bus stop and then catching a bus to the neighborhood, and just walking all the way home. (I don't want to walk both directions because oh god hills and I am out of shape for that; also, I don't care if I get home all sweaty but it's bad form to start your work day all sweaty.)
Basically I am support staff. My job is to open and close the office; answer phones and either deal with the issue or pass the call to the relevant person; receive, log, and distribute tenant packages (they all come to the rental office rather than to their buildings); receive and process tenant payments; general office upkeep; do visual inspections on parking lots (to make sure unauthorized people aren't using them); and some other stuff I haven't learned yet because it only happens at certain times of the year and/or the person who does them is the other part-time support staff and I won't meet her until Saturday.
I think I may eventually get delegated to run apartment tours for prospective clients, but not until I have a better grasp of the properties in question.
This office is geared toward student rentals, which makes sense since it's in Collegetown. And let me tell you, the student rental market is weird compared to the general housing market. For starters, it is very temporally compact, which means you can actually get lines forming outside offices the day before open leasing starts. (This has apparently gotten worse since I was living in Collegetown myself.) This also affects the kind of questions we get, because a lot of the students haven't lived on their own before and need to be walked through various things that seem obvious to people who've been out in the world for a while.
Anyway, I have three coworkers: the office manager, her second, and my Mon-Thurs-Fri-Sat counterpart (who, as mentioned above, I have not yet met). I will probably give them nicknames in a week or so. There are also people from the maintenance office, people from the concierge desk at one of the company apartment complexes, and people from the downtown office who come up now and then for meetings or to transfer paperwork between offices.
In an unforeseen twist, the guy who usually does the transfers was a smoke shop regular -- Mr. Y, who sexually harassed Sweetheart, my former coworker (asked her if she was a 'muff diver,' etc.) -- and... I am really not sure what to do with that? Like, this company has a fairly strict internal sexual harassment policy, but I don't think it covers stuff employees do off the clock in other places (particularly if the incidents were several years in the past), so I guess I will just try to be coldly polite to him, never get drawn into actual conversation, and keep a sharp eye out for anything sketchy. And if anybody asks about my attitude toward him, I will tell them in general terms about his behavior at the smoke shop.
But Mr. Y is a minor fly in the ointment, all things considered. Everyone else has been great, and I think I will continue to feel more confident as I learn apartment floorplans and memorize the leasing process so I can answer more questions myself instead of having to pass them off to other people.
And that was my first two days at work. :)
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My schedule is for ~26 hours spread over three days: two 10-hour shifts and one 8-hour shift (less half-hour lunch breaks). I will be working Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. I have the use of a parking spot in one of the lots the company owns (we rent parking as well as apartments), but I think I will only use that on bad-weather days, or if I need to get somewhere rapidly after work or maybe during a lunch break. At the moment, I'm walking to a bus stop and then catching a bus to the neighborhood, and just walking all the way home. (I don't want to walk both directions because oh god hills and I am out of shape for that; also, I don't care if I get home all sweaty but it's bad form to start your work day all sweaty.)
Basically I am support staff. My job is to open and close the office; answer phones and either deal with the issue or pass the call to the relevant person; receive, log, and distribute tenant packages (they all come to the rental office rather than to their buildings); receive and process tenant payments; general office upkeep; do visual inspections on parking lots (to make sure unauthorized people aren't using them); and some other stuff I haven't learned yet because it only happens at certain times of the year and/or the person who does them is the other part-time support staff and I won't meet her until Saturday.
I think I may eventually get delegated to run apartment tours for prospective clients, but not until I have a better grasp of the properties in question.
This office is geared toward student rentals, which makes sense since it's in Collegetown. And let me tell you, the student rental market is weird compared to the general housing market. For starters, it is very temporally compact, which means you can actually get lines forming outside offices the day before open leasing starts. (This has apparently gotten worse since I was living in Collegetown myself.) This also affects the kind of questions we get, because a lot of the students haven't lived on their own before and need to be walked through various things that seem obvious to people who've been out in the world for a while.
Anyway, I have three coworkers: the office manager, her second, and my Mon-Thurs-Fri-Sat counterpart (who, as mentioned above, I have not yet met). I will probably give them nicknames in a week or so. There are also people from the maintenance office, people from the concierge desk at one of the company apartment complexes, and people from the downtown office who come up now and then for meetings or to transfer paperwork between offices.
In an unforeseen twist, the guy who usually does the transfers was a smoke shop regular -- Mr. Y, who sexually harassed Sweetheart, my former coworker (asked her if she was a 'muff diver,' etc.) -- and... I am really not sure what to do with that? Like, this company has a fairly strict internal sexual harassment policy, but I don't think it covers stuff employees do off the clock in other places (particularly if the incidents were several years in the past), so I guess I will just try to be coldly polite to him, never get drawn into actual conversation, and keep a sharp eye out for anything sketchy. And if anybody asks about my attitude toward him, I will tell them in general terms about his behavior at the smoke shop.
But Mr. Y is a minor fly in the ointment, all things considered. Everyone else has been great, and I think I will continue to feel more confident as I learn apartment floorplans and memorize the leasing process so I can answer more questions myself instead of having to pass them off to other people.
And that was my first two days at work. :)
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)