Hello everyone! For today’s Thursday Tales, I thought I’d share little stories from my first week and a half of my new job!

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I don’t have too much because I’m literally brand new, but I thought sharing some stories from my first almost two weeks would be fun.

Oh! If you’re new here (newer than May 2020) you might be wondering, what’s BirthMay? Well, every year I blog every day in May because it is my birth month. I just figured it was something fun to do, and it has proven to be really enjoyable for me. This will be the fifth BirthMay on my blog! No matter how many BirthMays you’ve been through with me, thank you for being here this BirthMay and thank you for your support!

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Zoom Tour

So late on Friday of my first week, there was a “zoom tour” scheduled. So the different schools each have their own “all day zoom” which is meant to be a sort of online office space for the team to hang out or for people to visit to ask questions or get to know each other. No one was in my school’s zoom, since I guess they don’t hang out in there much, but the others did have usually at least two people. It seemed pretty cool and I really enjoyed it! Some people had their cats on screen, others were chatting about their weekend plans, there was one team that choses a different theme for each day for their zoom backgrounds, and it was just a really cool and fun idea to tour them all.

My School’s Game Time

So some background, each school gets an hour of dedicated team time and my school split their hour. Half an hour on Wednesday is dedicated to team updates, sort of like a general announcements or check in time. The other half an hour is on Thursday and is game time.

There are two other newbies that started the same week that I did and they got invited to my school’s game time. One of them was so confused what game time was but afterwards she did say she had fun!

Our game time was charades and we started with “easy”. I got the word “blanket” so I first showed that I was cold, then shook out my “blanket” before wrapping it around myself and everyone loved how they got a full on story with it. We eventually moved to the harder words and had fun trying to find something we felt we could actually do. We had a lot of fun and everyone was super into it, so that really helped!

Another School’s Game Time

I was then invited to another school’s game time, along with the other newbies. So for reference, my team is about 10 people, but the other school we went to was maybe 20 or so? And they were so full of chaotic energy!

I arrived to the zoom and there were at least three conversations going in the audio and another two in the chat. We were sent a link to a pictionary sort of game and everyone took turns drawing while everyone guessed what it was. Some of the art was phenomenal! I got “circus” so I started by drawing a circus tent, with red stripes, and then tried adding in a popcorn bucket? Most people got it but a few only did after getting hints like The Greatest Showman and other circus themed films. It was a really fun time though!

Oh this was the team that had the most active all day zoom from the tour, so I totally want to visit them again in the future!

FAFSA Password Struggles

So, if you are in the US and have experience in higher education, likely by attending college, you’ll know FAFSA is annoying. If you’re not in the US, FAFSA is a government site that college students go to in order to apply for financial aid because our schooling is expensive. Well, let me tell you, it’s so annoying trying to use it from an advisor’s standpoint!

So the issue was that first in order to request access I had to print and then scan two pages of signatures. The guy helping out stressed that it HAD to be PRINTED and SCANNED. Not electronically signed nor could it be a photo of the page. Nope. PRINTED. SCANNED. Um what? I thought we’d collectively decided that everything had to be done electronically because, you know, pandemic? But as the guy pointed out, we weren’t about to start arguing with the government. So I forwarded the email with his scanned pages to my personal email, since I couldn’t print from my work laptop, printed from my personal computer to my personal printer with the paper and ink my parents paid for personally (I never use the printer if I can help it so I don’t pay for it lol), scan them to my personal laptop, and then email them back to my work email from my personal email. Finally, I sent them to the guy from my work email and that was that! Or so I thought….

Then I had to create an account. No problem! Until… I had to create a password. It took three days for me to find something the site would accept. There could be NO words from the dictionary and had several other requirements, all of which I met, and it still wouldn’t accept anything! I even went to a random password generator to ensure I had absolutely random letters, numbers, and characters but it still said it wasn’t good enough. Again, I met the requirements like character limits and stuff like uppercase and lowercase letters. But it still took three days of attempts until I got it. I was going BONKERS!

Oh, and then my manager told me that the password expires every three months or so and I just about lost it. Someone else told me that I could just change a number at the end and then go from there, so I was grateful for that. I will add that everyone tried to give me tips over the three days too. Some advice people gave me was that they used words but replaced the vowels with numbers or characters, used Harry Potter spells because those weren’t recognized as words, or even used backwards words. The one that worked for me was the vowels but geez was that so stressful!

Oh, the really fun part was that my five security questions and answers were cleared out every single time too, so it made the process so much more difficult and painful than it needed to be!

Spirit Guide Deleted His Homework

So a large part of my training is shadowing people as they do their work. One of these sessions I was shadowing someone answering emails and she was so confused by one! In the email thread, there was a guy who was kind of all over the place and seemed to be complaining that “someone” deleted his homework, which is why he wasn’t doing well in his class. First he tried to blame “IT” and said it was rude of them to delete it. The advisor who was helping the student asked for documentation of IT deleting the homework so that he could get an exception for the late work.

Suddenly the guy changed his mind, instead blaming his “spirit guides” for deleting his work. I don’t know much about spirit guides besides what I’ve learned on TikTok (I’ve been on witchtok for a while), but I’m pretty sure spirit guides don’t go around deleting homework from people’s laptops. Someone correct me if I’m wrong though!

Anyway, my trainer decided to send it back to the guy’s actual advisor and as she typed her response I joked “tell him that your spirit guides thank him for taking back this student’s email thread”. She laughed and then she did! Later on, I saw his response about how his goal was to make spirit guides happy. We all had quite the chuckle at it. Well, except the student presumably.

Birds Attend a Meeting

So if you’ve followed me for awhile, you’ll remember that I live in front of a small forested area. Due to this, there’s a lot of wildlife in the area and in the spring/summer/fall there’s sooooo many birds singing in the trees back there.

For the most part, I close the windows in my home office as the room I’m in faces the street. I live at the very back of the subdivision so it’s not really super loud but every so often there’s a truck or something delivering packages or kids being loud (although I think they’re back in school everyday now) or just noise in general. So I like to close the windows to try to keep it as quiet as possible.

Typically, if someone else is home I close the door too, so to not disturb them. But one meeting I was the only one home and it was so warm I decided to leave the door open so the breeze from the other windows could come in but the windows closest to me were closed. I totally didn’t think my headset would pick up the birds back there at all!

But then, a little bit into the training, my trainer asked “do you have a lot of birds near you or something?” She wasn’t annoyed by it, just confused I think. I laughed and told her I didn’t realize she could hear them but yes, and explained why. She seemed to love that!

I will have to close the door going forward though because the birds can get pretty crazy with their tweeting. It’s beautiful but I imagine it would be very distracting for those who aren’t used to it!

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So those are just some fun little stories from my first week and a half of my new job.

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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