Rough Day

Randy is coming home this evening. His dad is flying out of Seattle tonight so he is driving Randy over here. Randy said he had a good time getting away and hanging out on the orchard, but he was ready to head home. Cass will be staying through Sunday. She has always loved it over there. It has been nice having the house to myself even though I didn’t do anything different than if they had been here, but I am ready for them to come back.

Today has been a bit of a rough day. Just a little background ~ 2 years ago, the company I worked for (Western Wireless), merged with Alltel. The transition was hard on those who had been with Western for a while because Western was a very employee oriented company. The two companies had very different cultures. I, as a supervisor, struggled a bit with going from a company that allowed me to structure my coaching and mentoring to the individual need to a company that micro-manages all employees. I am not saying micromanaging is a bad thing, I believe some people need that and others cannot work in that type of an environment. After Randy’s accident, I began looking at opportunities outside of the company, but then realized that with our current situation I could not go down in pay at all. Being with the company for 8 years, I have established myself there. So I made the decision to stay and made the decision that I needed to find away to balance out my coaching style with the Alltel micromanaging way. I have come to really like it there. I still don’t like the company, but I have really become involved with my employees and I have loved working with them to improve their performances and to help them find the joy in their job. Recently, we did a bid for new shifts and employees had the option to try to get different shifts with different supervisors. Almost all of my employees stayed with me ~ some even taking shifts they didn’t necessarily like. That meant a lot to me and showed me how far I have come as a leader.

Unfortunately, we got the news today that Alltel will be closing down our call center. There was no offering of relocating to any of their other call centers (not that we could take that because we would have too much here to leave behind). I will be out of a job as of October 1st. For those of you out there who believe in prayer, please pray for us, that I will have wisdom in knowing what to do to prepare for this.