Hired!

Well, with 3 interviews completed and 2 yet to go I got my second job offer, and decided this was the one I was going to go for. I am now working for TEKSystems as a Help Desk I for Boeing's internal help desk. I start 4 weeks of paid training on the 25th, after that I'll be working 40 hours a week at $15/hr anywhere from 3am through 11pm depending on my shift. We get paid weekly (I love TEK) and every 6 months I'll get a $1000 completion bonus. Most importantly, both TEK and Boeing have classes and online courses that I will be able to take free of charge to prepare for taking the A+ and MCSE and Cisco and all of that stuff. In the meantime, I'm finally getting something on my resume that says "this woman is a computer technician!" I'm locked into this job for at least a year, although they'd like for me to stick around for 2. The call center up here in Seattle is new and growing rapidly, I'm in the first group of 15 to be hired, but another group will be brought in in a month, and more after that, they expect it to be up to over 100 people by the time my year is up.

As far as the work environment, it's going to be great. Even in rushour traffic it's no more than a 30 minute commute from the apartment here in Bothell. Dress code is jeans and t-shirts, so I don't need to invest a lotta $$ up front into clothes just to work at the job. The people are all my age or a little older, nobody more than 5-7 years older than myself tho. Boeing generally uses other people's software and "Boeingizes" it, for example they use MSN Messenger as their internal chat software, but it's been modified to meet their specific needs (hopefully they managed to take the annoying ads off). This means that most of the stuff I'll be supporting I'm probably already familliar with, which is excellent. For anything I don't know how to troubleshoot (we'll be supporting EVERYTHING, from pagers to PC's to plotters to networks, so there's no way I'll know it all even after training) there will be supervisors and actual desktop techs wandering up and down the aisles, available to answer any questions. Some stuff will be pretty routine, take the ticket and escalate it to a local desktop tech (since we're supporing all of Boeing, everywhere in the world), but a lot of it should be fun to figure out, and they do want us to fix as many problems as we can, whether it's something rather advanced or not. Once a week we'll sit down with a manager to review how long we spend on each call as well as how many tickets we can solve ourselves and stuff like that. Since it's all internal, really angry people on the other end of the line will be pretty rare, and Boeing has a very strict set of policies that we "have" to follow, that we can use to protect our asses and defuse the situation (by blaming policy, which we all know everyone hates). Also, of course, if anyone is angry we can just wave over one of the wandering supervisors and they'll take care of it for us. In general tho, 90% of the people working at Boeing are mature and intelligent, so I'm not too worried about anything.

Oh, one sweet little bonus! Even tho I'm not working directly for Boeing, I'll get an official Boeing email addy! Boy I can't wait to forward that along to my old Riddle friends ;)

So that's the scoop, I wish training were starting earlier, since it means I won't get my first paycheck for another two and a half weeks, but that can't be helped, and I'm just glad that I will be getting a paycheck (and a VERY pretty one) soon.