The name is subject to change, but my hopefully weekly Friday update is on the air!

It’s a good week to launch this pilot, because it’s been one craaaaaaazay ass week. Let’s start on Monday, my return from vacation. When I got to work, I could already tell insanity was afoot, because almost everyone out on the floor was in Angry Grrr Smash mode. So I start working away at the tech email goodness, unaware of the fact that my week was about two hours from being turned upside down.

About 45 minutes later, I see Nicole (Our manager) entering a meeting with all of the new people that just came out of training….and one of the supervisors promptly being vocally ejected from the meeting about two seconds later, red-faced. At that point, I was starting to wonder if I came back from vacation a little too soon.

So fast forward to the end of that meeting. Nicole comes out of the room, and does the I’m Managerial, Important, and Angry powerwalk….right to my desk. “I need to talk to you.”

Rut-roh, as Scooby might say. Honestly, the first thought that ran through my head (as ludicrous as it was since I had been gone the past week and had never really interacted with the new people) was that I had done something horrible to one of the new people and they had called for my head, Roswell-style. So we meet…and the bombshell is dropped. The new trainees for tech are mad, frustrated, angry, struggling with the emails and all of that….will you train them on tech stuff?

Me: Mkay. Sure. Experience for the future, major brownie points for helping out the boss boss, all of that, it’s all good.

But - tech training is normally four weeks long…and I had a week to teach them. Really, 4 and a half days, considering Monday was almost to lunch before we even started.

So….uh…wow. What do I do?

Nicole at least gave me a start - she wanted me to discuss all the tools. So I drew up a plan. Go down the list of tools, one by one. Teach them what each one actually does and how it works. Get them into the tools and using them. Then throw piles of real email examples at them, make them think about it, and hope it stuck. It was a “Jay in Mallrats” style of plan considering I had 4 days to do what was normally 4 *weeks*, but you know, I didn’t make up the insane restrictions I was under. I came up with a plan on Monday night, and I thought I could get them to the point where at least they could understand most of the emails coming in by Friday.

The crazy thing?

It worked.

All of them are working at full speed, to glowing reports, and some of them are doing better work already than the established people on the floor. By all accounts, Rob’s Four Day Plan > the first 4 weeks they went through. I impressed Nicole so much that she pretty much told me on Tuesday to apply for the open trainer’s job, even though I hadn’t been in my position for a year and normally would not be eligible.

Which brings me to Tuesday. Fred and I both got her blessing to go after the job. Now, I mentioned this in the last posting, but Fred is the person who helped me get the job here in Lenexa. He worked in Fort Worth Tech with me for a year plus and he moved to Lenexa in March 2007. He’s been here almost a year…and he’s dying to do something new. And he’s pretty much as smart as I am, tech-wise, and pretty much just as qualified.

So far, this hasn’t been a huge issue. Good to know friendship still counts for something. It still is a little bittersweet that if I cash this one in, it will be at the expense of a lost opportunity for the person I owe for even being here, but the good thing about that is, his year in position is up April 1st, so he will be able to go after anything he wants soon enough.

And even if I don’t get it…the indication is that I will be involved with the training side of things even if I stay in E-Care to some extent.

My first interview for the trainer position was today. As those things go, I’ve never been a good interview, and it’d been almost three years (when I first applied at Sprint) since I’d been through a formal, dress-up, holy shit new job Batman type of interview. But I did well and I’m already hearing unofficially that I’m moving on to the second interview. So it’s been a very exciting week for me. This kind of job is right up my alley, and now I have two very big managers in my corner.

So that was my week. How was yours?