Thank you Joey and Aleethea for hosting our newest etsyBloggers Team Blog Carnival!
Please choose 1 of the following subjects to write about:
1). Work: Blog about anything to do with your work (past, present or future) which is outside of Etsy.
OR
2). Relax: Blog about what you do to relax.
WORK! OUTSIDE OF THE HOME AND STUDIO
For the better part of my "career" I have been in sales of some sort. Starting with telemarketing at age 15 because I could work a four hour shift at $5 per hour, 5 days a week, 4 hours a day. That was $100 a week plus bonuses, at the age of 15, in the early 70's! Plus my babysitting money. I was an avid babysitter!
My first telemarketing job was making/selling appointments for the sales representatives of a central heating and air conditioning company. I remember my mother had to drive me to and fro and I had to give her gas money weekly. Later, after some other jobs: Wendy's, Allstate filing department, I again got back into telemarketing making appointments for the sales representatives of a lawn sprinkler company that I worked for. Apparently I was so good at it, that I soon became the manager of the telemarketing office. The owner stiffed me on a pay check, I made a report to the police department, she was arrested, and I received my pay!
However, the majority of my career I was an outside sales representative in the construction industry. Imagine how easy it was for a "female" to get “in” on a cold call to see the person who did the buying . Back then I was a one and only, and very out of place in the longstanding good ole boy system that continues today. Just look at Washington D.C.
Selling underground corrugated drainage pipe mainly, at first via telephone while working as the liaison between the sales manager and the outside sales staff. When I was being hired, I negotiated for all benefits to begin on day one. The first month I worked there I found out that I was pregnant. When the company found out, they were certain that I knew before I was hired and I could feel them steaming and planning, counting down the days until the baby was born so they could disown their financial responsibility. In reality, it was celebrating the fact that I got the job and the first week there I became pregnant. She was born a little bit longer than nine months later. HA! HA!
Forced to return to work against company policy benefits, and fighting for two months over this, they said if I did not come back such-n-such a date, "they would believe that I no longer wanted my job and begin advertising", I returned. That night, with terrible back pain, I crawled from my car into the house, called my now ex-dickforbrains, who rushed me to my OBGYN. I was thinking I had a complication from the birth less than two months earlier.
MY OBGYN not knowing what was wrong, and me throwing up gushers all over his exam room, I was put into a wheel chair and wheeled across the street into the emergency room.
ONE kidney stone. I was in the hospital for a week on intravenous morphine. The stone was too big to pass, too low to laser, so the only choice was the most painful. Eventually I asked to be taken off of the morphine due to hallucinations.
I recuperated at home for another week before I was again told to return, or else. In the meantime, the company was downsizing and soon after I returned…yup, my position was cut. How they must have struggled over waiting so long to get rid of me! The very next day, they put a MAN from the customer service department in my office chair, doing my job!
Soon I found a job answering the telephone for their competitor. That really threw them for a loop because they’d forgotten to have me sign a “non-compete” form and word was that I had somehow removed it from the secretaries filing cabinet. I knew this because I remained very close friends with the Credit Manager at the other company.
Fools they were, I had not even heard of a “non-compete” at age twenty-something. Guess it was karma!
Anyway, answering the telephones was too easy and did not pay enough so I started to assert myself. My good friend the credit manager at my former employers taught me to do her job via telephone and fax, and soon I had gone through all of the companies customers debts and collected thousands! I learned about Notice to Owner’s, filing in small claims, taking cases to court…myself, and soon added Credit Manager to my duties. Then accounts payable and receivable.
Noticing that the three so-called sales representatives were padding their reports, both financial and sales calls, I began my own investigation. Learning that one of the rep’s would put her company car on some contraption to run up the mileage so it looked like she left home to do her job, and all were turning in receipts to me of which many were faked or padded.
When I brought this to our new management, the owners son-in-law, I was instructed to start following up on the sales departments call reports. Daily reports of who, what, where, when so management could “track” each rep’s progress. This is how they “knew” if the rep was working or not! More fools!
So I did what I was instructed to do and carefully and tactfully began calling the business on the rep’s reports to ask the “contact” how we were doing, when was the last time you visited with our rep, as well as investigating the receipts for food, lodging, gas, and such.
Two were fired almost immediately, the last soon to follow.
By now, we had a new in-house manager. You see, our parent company was in The Show Me State, and one of their plants was where I was working in Florida. They had no oversight for years upon years of being in business.
Now I was begging. The biggest career goal I had ever wanted was to work in outside sales. The new manager was very involved in the “End Timers Cult” driving hundreds of miles from home to work the days he did not sleep in the office. His wife was only allowed to wear dresses, all of the children in this sect are home schooled, all children delivered at home. My boss had delivered all of his five children and counting. They lived in a community unto themselves. He was the ruler of his family, a very sweet family, and they were so isolated that he did not know that women/females could whistle!
I was whistling in my office one day, and he asked me who was there? Me. No, who is here and whistling? Me. Thus the connection…
Anyway, I got the job with a very tiny territory. Thinking back, I was being test driven. Within months my territory began to grow and by the time I left the company seven years later I was working ½ the state of Florida and all of Southern Georgia! I had done it. My ambition come true. And while there, I invented a system of keeping track of each and every contact that I believe is still being used today.
Later, in a job I hated…selling paint to painter and contractors…I was asked to teach a class on my organization system to the entire sales staff. Felt good to share this part of me, and made it better for the company. If one of the reps left, you could pick up right where they left off without such as one wrong turn in the driving directions section!
After 20 years in the outside sales business, I was asked by my best friend to go to work for her boyfriends company where she now worked. No.
Knowing in my gut it would change things forever. However, DH and I were wooed, wined, dined, and promised things would never be like we worried over. Almost a year later, the company started loosing its suppliers to cash only, and mismanagement by my “best friend’ and her boyfriend turned my world upside down. My best friend had never said a word to me about the situation.
She was either giving me bad paychecks, paychecks to “hold”, or not paying me at all. I was let go via a long distance telephone call and to this day I am owed more than $10,000 and my grandmothers player piano that she was holding for me because she had a huge house and ours could not accommodate it. Had I known then what I know now, I would have found a place for my cherished piano. It was my grandmothers first piano, bought for her by my grandfather as a gift. It then was passed to the oldest of their children because his wife played. Then onto me. It was the first one I learned to play and took lessons on at home on Cape Cod.
A year later I was able to collect on two outstanding bad paychecks, when the company who handled their payroll sent me a W-2 including monies I had not received. Yeah for me!
Unemployment for months soon before 9-11 hit our country. Something you probably do not know, but I am super patriotic! Too old to join the military, I was desperate to do something to help to defend or aid my country when an ad in the newspaper grabbed me by the lump in my throat. The Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Department was looking for thousands to study under their new security program to become National Security Officer’s at our Nations airports!
One unemployment check away from no income, tested both physically and for visual acuteness, an extensive background check, fingerprinting, drug tested, interviewed, roll played, and so much more, I was hired with job security based on what was to come.
The group of us who passed the first few rounds of the above began grueling hours of training from dawn to well past dusk, traveling by bus many miles to and from the city where I live for an intensive and exhaustive training schedule. Business dress required daily.
If you were lucky enough to not be called out following the above, you had made it. However, we were not finished yet. Certification was next, and the most anxiety filled part of the process. Passing meant you had a Federal Government Job and Certification. Those of us who passed were given a security clearance, and some of us left two days later on a newly created “Jump Team” to travel the country aiding in the training of our counter parts at our Nations airports.
No matter our rank at hiring, we were all moved to temporary Supervisor status. Newbie’s, training newbie’s how to do the job we had not even worked at ourselves.
I was having the time of my life spending two weeks each in states and cities I had never traveled, using every spare moment of time off to explore, but most of all my deep, heartfelt desire to be on the frontlines of protecting my country had evolved. Uniform, badge, security clearance, watching ever so closely the passengers attempting to board flights across the world.
I, at 40 something had found a way to serve and protect the citizens of the United States of America, having held up my right hand up, in a group of approximately one hundred, to take the oath of office.
Six years later, well, I am disabled due to work related injuries. Physically and emotionally.
Aside: While on Federal Workers’ Compensation (OWCP), my assigned manager (three ranks higher than me) and another (individually) falsified documents to the OWCP and to the Office of Personal Management.
Taking almost two years, and finally seeing the need to hire a specialty attorney to settle the situation, less than a year ago OWCP admitted and accepted the additional emotional disability claim.
This and many, many other actions perpetrated by the powers at be caused me to have what I learned was a complete nervous breakdown. Severe depression, acute anxiety, and panic attacks. The physician/MD appointments continue, as does a multitude of medications.
Needless to say, I “see” the federal government now. I pay much closer attention to the goings on and know of a place south of here where many of them will likely someday reside.
My work. Taking care of my health and well-being.
Maybe I should have picked the "relax" carnival...LOL
Shop at:
Please choose 1 of the following subjects to write about:
1). Work: Blog about anything to do with your work (past, present or future) which is outside of Etsy.
OR
2). Relax: Blog about what you do to relax.
WORK! OUTSIDE OF THE HOME AND STUDIO
For the better part of my "career" I have been in sales of some sort. Starting with telemarketing at age 15 because I could work a four hour shift at $5 per hour, 5 days a week, 4 hours a day. That was $100 a week plus bonuses, at the age of 15, in the early 70's! Plus my babysitting money. I was an avid babysitter!
My first telemarketing job was making/selling appointments for the sales representatives of a central heating and air conditioning company. I remember my mother had to drive me to and fro and I had to give her gas money weekly. Later, after some other jobs: Wendy's, Allstate filing department, I again got back into telemarketing making appointments for the sales representatives of a lawn sprinkler company that I worked for. Apparently I was so good at it, that I soon became the manager of the telemarketing office. The owner stiffed me on a pay check, I made a report to the police department, she was arrested, and I received my pay!
However, the majority of my career I was an outside sales representative in the construction industry. Imagine how easy it was for a "female" to get “in” on a cold call to see the person who did the buying . Back then I was a one and only, and very out of place in the longstanding good ole boy system that continues today. Just look at Washington D.C.
Selling underground corrugated drainage pipe mainly, at first via telephone while working as the liaison between the sales manager and the outside sales staff. When I was being hired, I negotiated for all benefits to begin on day one. The first month I worked there I found out that I was pregnant. When the company found out, they were certain that I knew before I was hired and I could feel them steaming and planning, counting down the days until the baby was born so they could disown their financial responsibility. In reality, it was celebrating the fact that I got the job and the first week there I became pregnant. She was born a little bit longer than nine months later. HA! HA!
Forced to return to work against company policy benefits, and fighting for two months over this, they said if I did not come back such-n-such a date, "they would believe that I no longer wanted my job and begin advertising", I returned. That night, with terrible back pain, I crawled from my car into the house, called my now ex-dickforbrains, who rushed me to my OBGYN. I was thinking I had a complication from the birth less than two months earlier.
MY OBGYN not knowing what was wrong, and me throwing up gushers all over his exam room, I was put into a wheel chair and wheeled across the street into the emergency room.
ONE kidney stone. I was in the hospital for a week on intravenous morphine. The stone was too big to pass, too low to laser, so the only choice was the most painful. Eventually I asked to be taken off of the morphine due to hallucinations.
I recuperated at home for another week before I was again told to return, or else. In the meantime, the company was downsizing and soon after I returned…yup, my position was cut. How they must have struggled over waiting so long to get rid of me! The very next day, they put a MAN from the customer service department in my office chair, doing my job!
Soon I found a job answering the telephone for their competitor. That really threw them for a loop because they’d forgotten to have me sign a “non-compete” form and word was that I had somehow removed it from the secretaries filing cabinet. I knew this because I remained very close friends with the Credit Manager at the other company.
Fools they were, I had not even heard of a “non-compete” at age twenty-something. Guess it was karma!
Anyway, answering the telephones was too easy and did not pay enough so I started to assert myself. My good friend the credit manager at my former employers taught me to do her job via telephone and fax, and soon I had gone through all of the companies customers debts and collected thousands! I learned about Notice to Owner’s, filing in small claims, taking cases to court…myself, and soon added Credit Manager to my duties. Then accounts payable and receivable.
Noticing that the three so-called sales representatives were padding their reports, both financial and sales calls, I began my own investigation. Learning that one of the rep’s would put her company car on some contraption to run up the mileage so it looked like she left home to do her job, and all were turning in receipts to me of which many were faked or padded.
When I brought this to our new management, the owners son-in-law, I was instructed to start following up on the sales departments call reports. Daily reports of who, what, where, when so management could “track” each rep’s progress. This is how they “knew” if the rep was working or not! More fools!
So I did what I was instructed to do and carefully and tactfully began calling the business on the rep’s reports to ask the “contact” how we were doing, when was the last time you visited with our rep, as well as investigating the receipts for food, lodging, gas, and such.
Two were fired almost immediately, the last soon to follow.
By now, we had a new in-house manager. You see, our parent company was in The Show Me State, and one of their plants was where I was working in Florida. They had no oversight for years upon years of being in business.
Now I was begging. The biggest career goal I had ever wanted was to work in outside sales. The new manager was very involved in the “End Timers Cult” driving hundreds of miles from home to work the days he did not sleep in the office. His wife was only allowed to wear dresses, all of the children in this sect are home schooled, all children delivered at home. My boss had delivered all of his five children and counting. They lived in a community unto themselves. He was the ruler of his family, a very sweet family, and they were so isolated that he did not know that women/females could whistle!
I was whistling in my office one day, and he asked me who was there? Me. No, who is here and whistling? Me. Thus the connection…
Anyway, I got the job with a very tiny territory. Thinking back, I was being test driven. Within months my territory began to grow and by the time I left the company seven years later I was working ½ the state of Florida and all of Southern Georgia! I had done it. My ambition come true. And while there, I invented a system of keeping track of each and every contact that I believe is still being used today.
Later, in a job I hated…selling paint to painter and contractors…I was asked to teach a class on my organization system to the entire sales staff. Felt good to share this part of me, and made it better for the company. If one of the reps left, you could pick up right where they left off without such as one wrong turn in the driving directions section!
After 20 years in the outside sales business, I was asked by my best friend to go to work for her boyfriends company where she now worked. No.
Knowing in my gut it would change things forever. However, DH and I were wooed, wined, dined, and promised things would never be like we worried over. Almost a year later, the company started loosing its suppliers to cash only, and mismanagement by my “best friend’ and her boyfriend turned my world upside down. My best friend had never said a word to me about the situation.
She was either giving me bad paychecks, paychecks to “hold”, or not paying me at all. I was let go via a long distance telephone call and to this day I am owed more than $10,000 and my grandmothers player piano that she was holding for me because she had a huge house and ours could not accommodate it. Had I known then what I know now, I would have found a place for my cherished piano. It was my grandmothers first piano, bought for her by my grandfather as a gift. It then was passed to the oldest of their children because his wife played. Then onto me. It was the first one I learned to play and took lessons on at home on Cape Cod.
A year later I was able to collect on two outstanding bad paychecks, when the company who handled their payroll sent me a W-2 including monies I had not received. Yeah for me!
Unemployment for months soon before 9-11 hit our country. Something you probably do not know, but I am super patriotic! Too old to join the military, I was desperate to do something to help to defend or aid my country when an ad in the newspaper grabbed me by the lump in my throat. The Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Department was looking for thousands to study under their new security program to become National Security Officer’s at our Nations airports!
One unemployment check away from no income, tested both physically and for visual acuteness, an extensive background check, fingerprinting, drug tested, interviewed, roll played, and so much more, I was hired with job security based on what was to come.
The group of us who passed the first few rounds of the above began grueling hours of training from dawn to well past dusk, traveling by bus many miles to and from the city where I live for an intensive and exhaustive training schedule. Business dress required daily.
If you were lucky enough to not be called out following the above, you had made it. However, we were not finished yet. Certification was next, and the most anxiety filled part of the process. Passing meant you had a Federal Government Job and Certification. Those of us who passed were given a security clearance, and some of us left two days later on a newly created “Jump Team” to travel the country aiding in the training of our counter parts at our Nations airports.
No matter our rank at hiring, we were all moved to temporary Supervisor status. Newbie’s, training newbie’s how to do the job we had not even worked at ourselves.
I was having the time of my life spending two weeks each in states and cities I had never traveled, using every spare moment of time off to explore, but most of all my deep, heartfelt desire to be on the frontlines of protecting my country had evolved. Uniform, badge, security clearance, watching ever so closely the passengers attempting to board flights across the world.
I, at 40 something had found a way to serve and protect the citizens of the United States of America, having held up my right hand up, in a group of approximately one hundred, to take the oath of office.
Six years later, well, I am disabled due to work related injuries. Physically and emotionally.
Aside: While on Federal Workers’ Compensation (OWCP), my assigned manager (three ranks higher than me) and another (individually) falsified documents to the OWCP and to the Office of Personal Management.
Taking almost two years, and finally seeing the need to hire a specialty attorney to settle the situation, less than a year ago OWCP admitted and accepted the additional emotional disability claim.
This and many, many other actions perpetrated by the powers at be caused me to have what I learned was a complete nervous breakdown. Severe depression, acute anxiety, and panic attacks. The physician/MD appointments continue, as does a multitude of medications.
Needless to say, I “see” the federal government now. I pay much closer attention to the goings on and know of a place south of here where many of them will likely someday reside.
My work. Taking care of my health and well-being.
Maybe I should have picked the "relax" carnival...LOL
Shop at:
Posts
11 comments:
What an interesting and varied work career you've had! After all that, you now certainly deserve to relax! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing so much Lily :)
Wow, what a great array of jobs!!! I had never guessed about your health and I wish you the best...
about picking the other theme... you never know more about a person than when they tell you about their work...
Jimena
wow lil, what a story! you've done a lot of catching other people in the act, and were put in some precarious situations.
And you were one of those security people? Don't travel much myself, but it seems like everyone was always mad, on both sides of the conveyor belt. I always felt sorry for the workers, being blamed on their actions..."but that's their job!"
"Maybe I should have picked the relax carnival"
AHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA
Yeah, work stinks. Sounds like you had really bad luck w/ employers :(
Stick to the beautiful jewelry :)
You have done a lot! It is always great when you do something outstanding, even if your supervisors do not show it. Too bad you had so many bad dealings with bad employers.
Wow, what a story! We had similar incidents in that I was working for a major trucking company in a typical man's job. I was rushed back from maternity leave only to have half my job done by a man and reduced mine to part time. I couldn't prove a thing, but I tried through the EEOC. Luckily I've been a stay-at-home Mom since!
Wow Lily! What a story line. :-)
Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. Sometimes life is no bowl of cherries, that's for sure!
I am glad to hear that you are taking care of your health and well-being. Feeling your best is so important!
Smiles!
Jenna
Wow, Tulip, you have been all over the place from one job to another.
I understand your feeling of wanting to do something meaningful after 9/11, and then the government trys to screw you. Sorry that it made you sick though, but now you have time to devote to all of us here.
ps - hope you get your grandmother's piano!
Oh my God, where do I begin? First of all, thank you so much for the EtsyMini!! To arrive at your blog and see my shop banner up there...wow...that was so nice of you...but then...after reading your post to then see my babies on your blog too...that was beautiful...I felt like I was home. And whoa, your Flickr photos ROCK!! How did I ever miss those? You continually surprise me, and I was fascinated by your post. I took piano lessons for a decade or so, and know what it is like to become attached to a musical instrument. I cannot even imagine the attachment you must feel for a piano whose keys were tickled by your Grandmother. You've got me friggin crying now Petunia!! Whenever you want to go get that piano, you just let me know!!!!!
My goodness -- what a story! Thanks so much for sharing so much. I have a deep fondness for player pianos... when I was growing up, a very good friend of the family was into restoring them, and every holiday we'd hang out around the piano and "play" the rolls. It was a foot pedal powered piano, and I was too little and light to even work the pedals by myself (the bench would always slide backwards, so somebody had to prop me into place) but I loved it. Your story made my heart hurt for ya ... I wish you the best of luck.
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