Baby Bell

Dave has requested that I write something juicy about my life involving "gas powered vibrators and sasquatch porn." Sorry to disappoint but there's been none of that. I will however punish you with the story of how I came to be unemployed. Bellsouth, it was the best of jobs it was the worst of jobs. So a couple years ago I was a substitute daycare teacher.(Yea this is going some where) And a manager at the local phone company (my moms bestfriend) told me to get my butt down to some second rate temp agency because they were supplying temps for her department and they needed more people. It was a done deal so I started right away in the HR dept scanning personnel files. For some reason, becoming a paperless society involves a lot of paperwork. So the temp job that was supposed to last 3 months lasted about a year. Then a regular employee left and I lucked up and got hired. It was great until a year later when cut backs came and I was the lowest totem on the seniority pole. Next after me was a lady with 10yrs service. I thought I was safe because there weren't any cuts in my dept. But thanks to the union contract two ladies in another department that were cut, were allowed to bump me and ms. 10yrs out of a job. That should have been the end of this story. But, lucky me, they were hiring in the sales dept and after a few assessment tests I got hired into THE WORST HELL OF MY LIFE.(to date) Basically if you owned a small business and needed to call Bellsouth for ANY reason you had a 1 in 600 chance of talking to me. No matter what you actually called for my job was to sell you something. I had no idea that the unwritten job description involved sucking up and becoming popular. It would be suffice to say I do not have the personality for sales.(or sucking up) Hence the hell of never making my quota. I lasted 13 months which is a long time in the sales world so obviously I wasn't completely lost either. After being written up several times for failing to convince hundreds of people they needed extra phone lines to run their businesses, I was offered 2 weeks pay plus unused vacation in exchange for a letter of resignation. Now had I been a good little girl and kissed ass properly the sales faerie would have mysteriously arranged extra credit on my sales report. But prove it. I lost my job knowing others that were favored in the office couldn't sell crack to a junkie much less phone service to business owners. The end, right? Right. Yesterday, I ran into a girl that worked with me at hellsouth. She took the same retirement package as me and told me that a week later they fired 7 people in one day including one of the top sales people. I can't tell you how great that made me feel! Not because others are now suffering but firing a top sales person(who didn't have many friends) proves (in my mind at least) that I'm not a screw up. And I don't kiss ass regardless of the pay check. Office politics can be cruel, especially if you don't realize it's not what you know or even what you can do, it is definitely WHO you know. Just a footnote: I have been in tears writing this, painful subject? No, every time the spell check gets to Bellsouth it offers "Bullshit" as an alternative. -No lie.