It was the first full week of work after the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, it was the first full week as a true member of my new work team (gradually, all the little hold-overs and pending stuff have dropped away), and it was my first full week of relatively good health after getting through a nasty, brutish, but mercifully short bout of sinus infection-with-cough.

It was a good week, all told. I like my new team, and I’m having a lot of fun with my new neighbors. I feel like the last… five years or so on my original team has been one long slog, and I was never really accepted as a buddy by the clicques, although I was well liked by anybody hired recently. Not that I can blame my former teammates: about 6 years ago, I was the Quality Enforcer and was keeping track of agent error rates for the team leaders to use in counseling agents that put me at the top of some people’s Shit Lists (these were simple format errors, not true customer service issues).

Well, it was kind of mutual; the people who made the most errors were the ones who left messes for others to clean up, quite often me or one of the other agents for whom “quality” really was Job One. Because of my “in-between” position (especially when I wasn’t on the phones, just hassling coaching people about using correct formats) I became the de facto troubleshooter; some teammates appreciated the help and some, not so much. The younger ones tended hand off with a big sigh of relief; it was partly gratifying, partly annoying. Especially when I was no longer an official troubleshooter… but because I used to be one, people tended to assume I knew how to fix stuff. And they were (mostly) right.

I left that baggage behind, it’s in a metaphorical Lost Luggage office now. Fresh start, and all that. It’s all good.