You take the good, you take the bad, you take my job, and there be hell.

Yesterday I had another one of those “what the actual fuck?” moments that was so strong, I literally thought my face was going to curl in on itself.

First, let me set the scene. I started at this place about eight years ago as a sales rep. Back, then we were expected to do everything ourselves. We had daily call quotas, daily quote quotas, daily/weekly/and monthly sales quotas, a contact quota. Then there was the quotes that had to be done, the vendor calls that had to be made, the revisions that had to be done, the call logs that had to be entered, and let’s not forget that we were required to spend half of the day in “call block” where we were not allowed to do anything but make outbound phone calls.

I have yet to figure out how someone with a degree in business management thought that calling a bunch of people who told you to stop calling them was a good idea.

And yeah, in case you are sitting there scratching your head thinking we sound like a bunch of telemarketers, that’s basically what we were.

Also, math didn’t work like normal math in this place. We were supposed to make 50 outbound calls a day. Under normal math, in 5 days that would be 250 phone calls. But this isn’t regular math, it’s work math, so we had a weekly call quota of 300 calls. So for those who do regular math, that’s actually 60 calls per day, but we were told 50. So 50 calls a day would keep your ass safe Tuesday-Friday, but come Monday if you didn’t 300 or more dials from the week before, someone’s ass was going to get chewed out.

Fourteen months into that shit-show, I’m sitting in the #2 overall sales position for the department, and yet I still got wrote up and threatened to be fired because my sales numbers weren’t where the VP thought they should be for my territory.

Facepalm? Yeah, no, screw that. There weren’t enough facepalms on the planet to get me to wrap my brain around that train of thought.

So anyway, you get the idea. After fourteen months I basically said either transfer me or cash me out because I’m done.

Enter the next seven years of my face looking like this:

Then yesterday comes around, and I’m sitting in yet another lengthy conference call with a bunch of people who make a whole hell of a lot more money than me. We are in the process of implementing a new way of getting project orders to order entry, and we get to the phase where the sales reps are going to do the following: instead of attaching their paperwork to an email and emailing it to order entry, they are going to attach it to a report database that goes directly to order entry.

The purpose: so all the paperwork that is flying around in emails will be accessible to everyone instead of just the person who received the email. It’s streamlined, all the documentation is now in one place instead of floating around a dozen different email accounts and files on computers, and when someone comes back six months later asking who made a mistake, we don’t have everyone digging around trying to figure it out because all the info isn’t in one spot.

Now, remember, the reps are already having to attach this crap to an email, write the email, and send all this into order entry to get their customer orders placed. We just took it from being all over the damn network and a bunch of different computers to all being in one set place.

Streamlined = saved time, saved money

And then these words come out of my manager’s mouth: “I don’t know who is going to be uploading all that but it won’t be the sales reps. Maybe someone in operations but the sales reps can’t be spending their time doing redundant tasks.”

But.

They already do this exact SAME. DAMN. THING.

Through EMAIL.

And so I left the meeting with my face once again looking like this: