Give me a moment to reread my last post...
So, life continues to press on. After next week I will be halfway through transition and, according to my supervisor, I am well on my way to being a leading customer service rep and, after that, a senior rep. After 6 months as a senior rep or so you can move into whatever other department you choose! I have a contact in the Human Resources department (she's the sister of one of my college professors! Small world!) and she told me that she would be more than happy to meet with me after I'm out of transition to discuss my career path. Even if I don't end up in HR, my main goal is to have a job where I deal with employees instead of customers, or where I don't have to talk on the phone at all. There are all kinds of opportunities with Verizon once you've gotten started so all it takes is me persevering through another year of dealing with customers and blowing everyone out of the water while I'm at it so that when the time comes I can move on to bigger and better and more enjoyable things. In the meantime I do my darnedest to help everyone to the best of my ability, keep calm, and leave work at work so I don't dwell on escalations or stupid mistakes. This week, thank goodness, has been a relatively slow week but from what I understand, next week is going to be hell so I'll enjoy the slowness while it lasts. All in all it's a nice preamble to a weekend home in Ohio with friends and family.
As previously stated in the blog before this one, Neal and I took a trip into New York City to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We awoke very early on Saturday morning to take the train into Grand Central. As neither of us is very familiar with the city we began to walk to the Met... a location that was a good 42 city blocks from Grand Central. An hour later we arrived, sweaty and exhausted, but excited to see what was inside. Due to the train schedule and the evening we planned with friends we only spent a couple of hours in the museum before taking a cab back to Grand Central. Both of us fell asleep on the train on the ride back, though after 42 city blocks that's really not surprising. The evening with our friends was great fun, the food was excellent, and we have pretty much been cemented into people's minds as a couple.
Speaking of Neal, he has now signed a lease to live in the same apartment building as me! He will be living right down the hall, which will make commuting to work a little cheaper gas-wise, and he also intends to pay for part of the cable bill so he doesn't need to get his own internet. Also, the fact that I referred him means that I only have to pay just over $400 for my August rent. The extra $200, plus the extra holiday pay I earned for working on Independence Day, and the shift differential earned by working after 5pm every day will give me enough money to buy some new tires for my car and a wedding present for my sister and her husband! As my friend Kenny so aptly put it, I'll be rolling in dough... till I buy the tires, of course.
Speaking of friends... Not too long ago, maybe a month or so, I realized that one of my good friends from back home had suddenly and mysteriously defriended me on Facebook for no apparent reason. He detagged all pictures in which he and I were both present as well. This left me very upset and rather angry because not two weeks prior he and I had been texting amicably about his upcoming visit in the middle of June. I sent a couple of texts to find out what was going on and received no response, so I wrote him off completely, figuring that he'd found some new girl and decided to forget me forever. Until last night. Last night I went on my final break for the day and pulled out my phone to find a text from said friend. Basically he wrote that he was sorry he hadn't gotten back to me and that he'd just gotten through a trying time with a girl who had issues with him talking to his ex-girlfriends and he'd had no idea she had done anything. He and I sent texts back and forth for awhile until I got the full picture: he had been friendly with this girl who found the last text conversation he and I had had and she went completely berserk, deleting all of his texts and my old phone number, getting into his facebook and defriending any girls he was too friendly with, myself included, changed his email and password on the account so he can't get into it at all, and never told him. When I realized I'd been defriended I sent a text asking about his visit in June and apparently she received the text, deleted it, and then told him I'd written saying I never wanted to see or hear from him again. He believed her until this past weekend when she told him God told her they should just be friends, that she had changed and defriended and deleted on his phone and account, and then refused to give him the new user name and password in order to save him from his moral discrepancies. Basically, she's a super-Christian, controlling, psycho maniac and I told my friend when he explained this to me that he needs a screening system for the girls he meets from now on. He's in the middle of an email war with Facebook in order to prove it really is his account and that someone else locked him out of it. But once he explained everything life was good again, we had a decently long conversation, I told him that I'd moved and that I have Neal now, and he may still come for a visit. All I can say is that I'm very, very glad I was never as ridiculous as that girl when I was 18, and Neal is thankful too (he heard the whole conversation, since I was in the car with him at the time). In my personal opinion, people like that should NOT exist, or if they do they should be put into a commune so they can be tyrannical with each other instead of the rest of us normal people.
Anyway, that's my life up to this point. I get to fly out to Ohio on Saturday morning for my sister's wedding and write a check to my best friend so she can pay for gas. I'll be visiting my brother so we can chat about Verizon plans and phones and deals, and also my friend Adam, who has been begging for a back massage since the day I moved here. Oh! And I've been invited to begin practicing with the Praise Team at my church! My schedule will make attendance interesting, but I'm going to do my best. :-) So except for my job, all is well with the world, and I really can't wait for Saturday....
