New Job

In all of this house happiness you might have missed that I have a new job as well. The job has come in handy paying for all the trips to Home Depot lately. I wanted to take a little opportunity to tell you what I do.

I am still a tech support monkey answering phone calls, emails, and live chat requests for a company called Wiley Publishing. Wiley are known for their Technical, Educational, and Business books with a number of subsidiaries. The Dummies Books, CliffsNotes, Programming for Programmers, and Frommers Travel guides are some of the more well known branches of Wiley. My job is to answer questions that people have on those or any other title, software, supplement, or companion site that Wiley produces.

Yesterday I got a call from a guy who was looking at the Owner’s Guide to Short Haired Spaniels and swore that his missing dog was pictured in the book. Unfortunately he was calling from a pay phone and we could not call him back. The day before, I took a call from an elderly lady who moved to Denver and now her recipes don’t taste the same, we publish the Betty Crocker Cook Book as well, turns out she was not adjusting the recipes for the altitude. Today I walked a father through the CliffsNotes Pre-Algebra Study Guide so he could help his son with the problems. We went over how to solve problems like 4² x 2 + 12 / 2. Squared first, then Multiplication and Division, then Subtraction or Addition. Mr. Heidaman would have been so proud of me on that call!

I inhabit a single wide cubicle while all my other co-workers have a double wide. I have my array of pictures up (a wedding picture, the one of my family in Big Bear, Kyle and Aaron, and Cecilia sitting on my lap) and the old wooden kangaroo wearing a sign that says James around his neck. I have a shelf full of books including a couple accounting text books; Dummies books for Windows XP, Mexican Cooking, Mutual Funds, C++, Photoshop, and iPod; and Frommer’s Guides to Paris, Amsterdam, and Isreal.

I don’t talk to co-workers much at work. They are nice enough people but because I am off in a corner they don’t come to see me much and I am usually lost in a book or three and content to field calls between chapters. There isn’t a Jesse, James, Troy, or Ben equivalent here. No one I can talk to about sports, music, silly noises, or obscure data collected in our secret databases. I am enjoying the job so far and I know I will get to know people here more and more and find out what things we have to talk about. Until then I will hide away in my single wide and read up on anything and everything.

Great Line from a book I am reading:

“And so it was that, about a week later, we crossed a strip of warm, black tarmac and I brought Hassan’s son from Afganistan to America, lifting him from the certainty or turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty.”