So I've been work­ing for TMO for over a year now. When I first started with the com­pany, I declared my inten­tions to chron­i­cle the devel­op­ments on this site. In fact, there was even an entire sub-site ded­i­cated to that sub­ject at one point — that's how gung-ho I was about it. Well, when check­ing my traf­fic logs one day, I saw a vis­i­tor hit that site that was from the par­ent com­pany and, well, I freaked.

With so many new things hap­pen­ing in my TMO career and the fact that I need some­where to express them, it seems appro­pri­ate for the re-launch of Retro to make this one of the sub­jects I touch on first. So I guess I might as well just jump in.

I spent over a year in a call cen­ter doing inbound sales for the national accounts line at 800-TMOBILE. In a way, I worked my way up in as much as I was a "tenured" rep, what­ever the hell that means. I was incred­i­bly reli­able as a rep, as I con­stantly helped out new reps and super­vised the floor when man­age­ment was involved in meet­ings and train­ing. Being one of the most knowl­edgable and longest-standing reps there, I was sure that when a pro­mo­tion oppor­tu­nity came up, I would be able to jump all over it.

That wasn't quite the case, unfor­tu­nately. Each time a high-level posi­tion became avail­able, they brought in some­one from another com­pany, and many tenured reps — not just me — ended up being overlooked.

After about six months, I real­ized that there was lit­tle to no hope of mov­ing up at the cen­ter so I started apply­ing for retail store posi­tions as they came up. Thanks to a friend at one of the Fort Collins stores, I was always noti­fied when open­ings happened.

Now, here's another hur­dle. TMO believes in hav­ing a web­site for fuck­ing every­thing — jobs being one of them. Each time I applied, I had to sub­mit infor­ma­tion on this site. Well, appar­ently this com­pany that TMO hired to process job and appli­cant infor­ma­tion had a major server crash and as a result, all appli­cant data was lost. The next com­pany that was hired went bank­rupt within a mat­ter of weeks, so again — all gone. It seemed as if each time I applied for some­thing, all my info was gone and I had to start over again.

All in, I had to apply four sep­a­rate times over a period of about seven months before I was offered an inter­view. Any­who, in mid-December, I started the inter­view and back­ground check process, which took about two weeks. Then a sec­ond inter­view. Then waiting.

Wait­ing…

I felt con­fi­dent about the posi­tion, but I started hav­ing sec­ond thoughts when over a week had gone by and I hadn't heard any­thing. I didn't have much time to think on it, how­ever, because I was prep­ping TromaDance.

While I was cue­ing video­tapes for the first day of fes­ti­val screen­ings, I received a phone call from the store man­ager, who said that the offi­cial offer would be in my mail­box when I came home.

By then, the horse was out of the barn. I made up for that wait­ing period in mat­ter of a few days. The day after we returned from Utah, I was to go to the call cen­ter, turn in my badge and clean out my desk and com­puter. The next day, I jaunted to Den­ver to fill out HR paper­work. The day fol­low­ing that, I started in the store.

At this point, I was extremely excited to be chang­ing over, but I also really sat down and thought that, how­ever monot­o­nous it had become, I would miss many things and many of the peo­ple I had worked with over the last year. I put it out of my mind as best I could because I knew that this move would be impor­tant for me and for my career with TMO.