Work

2 weeks ago I began my new position at Research In Motion. My formal title is "Associate, BPTS" (BlackBerry Partner Technical Support).

I came into the job very excited and still am. Moving from my previous position into this one, within the first year of employment while lacking any formal technical training, is unique and I've been given a lot of support and encouragement from those I work for.

A year ago I was strongly considering enrolling at CompuCollege and spending $12,000 just to get into a job like this. It seems opting to take the position RIM offered to me while continuing my degree turned out to be a wiser decision.

In my new position, I'm troubleshooting issues our customer's are having with our BlackBerry smartphones or our software. Customers that I speak to typically have been on the phone already with their carrier support. When the carrier reaches a dead end and can't fix their customer's issue, they call Research In Motion and I'll answer the phone and take ownership over the issue.

I spent half of the first week listening in on phone calls, and the last half of the week taking calls with someone sitting behind me.

This week I spent the morning in formal training sessions. Our trainer appeared to be very well trained to be a trainor, but not very trained on the technical material he was teaching. On multiple occasions others in the training class (those with formal technical training) stumped our trainor, and on multiple occasions he provided information even I knew to be false. Its hard to learn from someone you know has already provided the wrong information on a number of instances. I got the impression most of what he knew was taken directly from the Power Point slide. At least he was a bit entertaining so the mornings went by quick.

Most of my learning really took place during the afternoons when I was taking more calls with a seasoned representative sitting with me. By the end of this week I started to feel overwhelmed with the amount of information I was not yet familiar with and today I opted to just listen into calls again so that I could focus on the information without worrying about the customer I had on the phone.

So overall the first couple of weeks have gone well.

Sarah has been left in charge of her day care this week and next week as her boss has gone to Florida. She seems to be enjoying the responsibility she's been given, although she is still very tired at night due to the stress and rambunctious little ones.

Tonight her and I are sharing a bottle of wine and just crashing, probably going to watch a movie.

(she's already napping next to me, so maybe I'll watch the movie alone)

I'm out.