Out of Work

When I was hired at Yahoo! back in January, it was a temporary contractor position ending on May 31st. They hired me to fill in for one of the Brazilian agents while she was away on maternity leave, but she actually returned several weeks ahead of schedule, giving our Brazil team some much-needed extra manpower. Normally our policy is to respond to customers' emails within 48 hours, but for much of the time I've been working here we've been in such a serious backlog that it was literally taking us 2-3 weeks before we got around to returning some emails. In a lot of those cases we'd find that by the time we got around to their email they had already figured out how to solve their problem on their own, or worse - out of frustration they cancelled their Yahoo! account.

For most of the last month they have been asking us to do as much overtime as possible to help us clear out the backlog. As of this morning we officially hit zero. As in, zero emails waiting for a response. So, to keep us busy they have enlisted us to help the US Mail team with a major backlog problem they are having, but it turns out that I have to be granted permission from IT to be able to access the US Mail server, so I literally cannot do any work until that request is granted. And given my track record with requests from IT, that could take anywhere from 2 hours to 2-3 days. So I am out of work to do right now.

Thankfully, when this contract of mine expires, I will not be out of work.* After a few weeks of working here my boss told me that he was actively looking for a longer-term position for me on other teams outside of Latam (the name of my team - Latin America) that would have staffing vacancies around the end of May. He said that he wanted to help me out by keeping me working longer, but he also had a somewhat selfish interest in keeping me around. Just as today I am being temporarily pulled over to help the US Mail Team with their backlog, around here the different departments will sometimes loan out their employees to other departments if they have a serious need. However, the Brazil team currently doesn't have the option to pull in any extra help because no one outside of the team knows how to read and write in Portuguese. So by keeping me around in a different department he'll be able to pull me over to help with Brazilian emails whenever there is a need.

So effective June 1, I will start working full-time on the aforementioned US Mail Team. For the last few days I've spent a few hours a day shadowing team members over there, and it seems like it should be a fairly easy transition - it's the same work I've been doing all along, but now I'll just be doing it in English instead of Portuguese. I'm bummed that I won't get to stay immersed in Portuguese all day anymore, but in some ways it is kind of a relief. My supervisors have told me that they have been really impressed with my writing and that in some was it even surpasses my native Brazilian counterparts, but I can't escape that Portuguese is not my native language. It will always take me more time and effort to do the same amount of work as them.

But I'm really going to miss my Latam buddies. Our team is really small compared to other teams - 8 people total, 4 Portuguese speakers (3 Brazilians and I) and 4 Spanish speakers (a Mexican, a Cuban, a Peruvian, and a Puerto Rican**) - and we're really tight. We have outings all the time (my favorite was bowling - bowling is not really a Latin American thing so it was amusing to watch them figuring it out), and unlike any other team here we all go to lunch together every single day. But if I have too many saudades*** I can always just walk over to their area for a visit or head off to lunch with them.

Suggestion time: One difference on the US Mail Team is that each agent picks out an alias that they include in the footer of every message they send out. Picking out a new name for myself is not something that I take lightly, so I would love your suggestions and feedback. Speaking of bowling, the name I always enter in the computer when I bowl is "Quinn the Eskimo," so maybe Quinn would be a good name. Or maybe a name that would reflect my origins on the Brazil team, such as Paulo or Marcelo. Or something wacky like Cletus or Hercules (my apologies to any Cletuses or Herculeses - Cleti? Herculi? - that may be among my readership).

Leave your name suggestions in the comments below!

*If you were misled by the title of the post, then I am pleased because that was my intention.
** Just add "walked into a bar" at the end of that and you've got a good setup for a joke.
*** "Saudade" is a very common Portuguese word that doesn't translate very well into English. A close approximation would be "longing" or "yearning," but it's more like a noun version of "to miss" - "I have missings for you."

Update: Still no access to the US server, so I still can't work on anything (although I did do some brief translation work). While composing this post one (1) Brazilian email came in, but someone else on the team snatched it up before I could get to it.

Second update: I have spent the last few hours shadowing US Mail Team agents and though both of them were male, they both used female aliases. They explained that after a customer receives support from us they can fill out a customer satisfaction survey. The scores from those surveys factor into our performance reviews and bonuses. Apparently there is data to suggest that customers give higher scores to female names, so take that into consideration when suggesting names.