the best part about business trips is coming home and naked blogging
Have returned home.
Many many photos taken, I haven't uploaded them yet since it'll take forever to get them off the camera and all I wanted to do when I got home was sleep.
Had a bit of a scary dehydration incident on the way home from my stopover in Tokyo. I've never taken sleep aids on a flight before, and Tylenol PM is full of more sodium than I normally ingest. So my normal in-flight water consumption completely didn't cut it - I swelled up, especially in my legs, which hurt to the touch. And my first ever nosebleed, wow, that was fun, except for the part where it was wholly gross. Fortunately not too bad.
I sucked down a bottle of water as soon as I realized what was happening. I won't ever take a sleep aid on a flight again, or at least not without two or three enormous bottles of water on hand. Which I should have had anyway but for some reason I only had one smallish one. Probably because my final flight gate was at the ass-end of Narita airport (I swear it took a full hour to get from my arrival gate in the JAL international arrivals annex to the AA gate in the main Terminal 2 building) and the nearest place to buy water and Pocky (of course I did, come on, don't you people know me by now?) was a good ten minute walk away. Not a fun walk when you're taking a roll-on suitcase onto the plane (another first I won't be repeating, what a pain in the ass that was).
The one bottle did enough of the trick to deflate me and stop me feeling quite so much like boiled ass. When I got home, I fell pretty much right into bed. After petting the cats for a while, of course.
As far as the work went, well, let's say I will gladly do an overseas assignment again, but not with the group of colleagues they sent me over with, and not without a member of the training department on hand for the full three weeks. The training manager left about a week into my assignment, and neither of my colleagues were as invested in making a good impression and following our corporate training procedure as I was. Oh, and adding to the fun, they were both much older than me. The job we do is their retirement job and they don't really have interest in moving about within the company. I do.
This led to a lot of butted heads, and me feeling ganged up on after a sales supervisor joined us in Manila and immediately seemed to take their side in EVERYTHING (and there shouldn't even have BEEN sides but these two were spectacularly uncooperative). Hysterically, this supervisor is one of MY former supervisors, and when I brought an issue I was having with my male colleague (a man with one year of work at our company under his belt, and no direct report experience with her at all) to her attention, she dismissed me and said, "Oh, I don't think he would ever have done that." And would not let me finish my sentence. Actually, none of them were especially hip to allowing me to complete expressing a thought at all, whether they agreed with me or not.
I really loved the part where they insisted on splitting the class into three equal groups and then would be a bit smug with me about how "my" agents weren't getting the attention and thus weren't doing as well as "theirs." Of course I couldn't give "my" agents that attention! I'm the senior agent. I'm supposed to handle the reporting and number crunching, so I don't GET that time with agents. That's why we're NEVER supposed to split a class up into independent groups, and we NEVER do that at home. Some agents will always suffer when you do things like that. I shouldn't have had a "my" group in the first place, and the other training class instructors were astounded that I "allowed" that to happen. Allowed? I was working with two people who pretty much only applied to this job for the chance to go overseas, who refused to take me seriously as senior agent, and I was left without useful managerial support. I'm all about rising to challenges, but if you wall me into a small windowless stone room, I'm not sure what you want me to do there.
So...yeah. I ended up with my hands tied at every turn, people yelling at me for following procedure, and being completely unable to finish a sentence for two out of the three weeks of my assignment. I never want to work with that particular group of people ever again. Fortunately I think that before she left, the training manager saw what I was dealing with, and between that and the uphill battle you would normally have in outsourcing a call center in a country where English isn't the first language, she gets that I did the best I could do. I hope.
I am so glad to be home.
Many many photos taken, I haven't uploaded them yet since it'll take forever to get them off the camera and all I wanted to do when I got home was sleep.
Had a bit of a scary dehydration incident on the way home from my stopover in Tokyo. I've never taken sleep aids on a flight before, and Tylenol PM is full of more sodium than I normally ingest. So my normal in-flight water consumption completely didn't cut it - I swelled up, especially in my legs, which hurt to the touch. And my first ever nosebleed, wow, that was fun, except for the part where it was wholly gross. Fortunately not too bad.
I sucked down a bottle of water as soon as I realized what was happening. I won't ever take a sleep aid on a flight again, or at least not without two or three enormous bottles of water on hand. Which I should have had anyway but for some reason I only had one smallish one. Probably because my final flight gate was at the ass-end of Narita airport (I swear it took a full hour to get from my arrival gate in the JAL international arrivals annex to the AA gate in the main Terminal 2 building) and the nearest place to buy water and Pocky (of course I did, come on, don't you people know me by now?) was a good ten minute walk away. Not a fun walk when you're taking a roll-on suitcase onto the plane (another first I won't be repeating, what a pain in the ass that was).
The one bottle did enough of the trick to deflate me and stop me feeling quite so much like boiled ass. When I got home, I fell pretty much right into bed. After petting the cats for a while, of course.
As far as the work went, well, let's say I will gladly do an overseas assignment again, but not with the group of colleagues they sent me over with, and not without a member of the training department on hand for the full three weeks. The training manager left about a week into my assignment, and neither of my colleagues were as invested in making a good impression and following our corporate training procedure as I was. Oh, and adding to the fun, they were both much older than me. The job we do is their retirement job and they don't really have interest in moving about within the company. I do.
This led to a lot of butted heads, and me feeling ganged up on after a sales supervisor joined us in Manila and immediately seemed to take their side in EVERYTHING (and there shouldn't even have BEEN sides but these two were spectacularly uncooperative). Hysterically, this supervisor is one of MY former supervisors, and when I brought an issue I was having with my male colleague (a man with one year of work at our company under his belt, and no direct report experience with her at all) to her attention, she dismissed me and said, "Oh, I don't think he would ever have done that." And would not let me finish my sentence. Actually, none of them were especially hip to allowing me to complete expressing a thought at all, whether they agreed with me or not.
I really loved the part where they insisted on splitting the class into three equal groups and then would be a bit smug with me about how "my" agents weren't getting the attention and thus weren't doing as well as "theirs." Of course I couldn't give "my" agents that attention! I'm the senior agent. I'm supposed to handle the reporting and number crunching, so I don't GET that time with agents. That's why we're NEVER supposed to split a class up into independent groups, and we NEVER do that at home. Some agents will always suffer when you do things like that. I shouldn't have had a "my" group in the first place, and the other training class instructors were astounded that I "allowed" that to happen. Allowed? I was working with two people who pretty much only applied to this job for the chance to go overseas, who refused to take me seriously as senior agent, and I was left without useful managerial support. I'm all about rising to challenges, but if you wall me into a small windowless stone room, I'm not sure what you want me to do there.
So...yeah. I ended up with my hands tied at every turn, people yelling at me for following procedure, and being completely unable to finish a sentence for two out of the three weeks of my assignment. I never want to work with that particular group of people ever again. Fortunately I think that before she left, the training manager saw what I was dealing with, and between that and the uphill battle you would normally have in outsourcing a call center in a country where English isn't the first language, she gets that I did the best I could do. I hope.
I am so glad to be home.