First up, a very Happy Birthday to gaming friend (and soon to be psychic prostitute), Sam! A very, Happy Happy Birthday to you! I can't wait for our Trinity game to start! Wheee!
Current NaNoWriMo Word Count: 41,085 words. With luck, I won't be too busy at work tonight so I can sneak in some more writing. There are only 3 days left until the end of the competition this weekend is going to be do or die for me. Gah! But I remain confident that I can manage this and I'll be able to pull this off. I swear I will! Go, go, NaNoWriMo! =D
Work was a lot busier than expected, but then I suppose that's normal given I didn't go to work last Wednesday. There were long meetings, various consultations, challenging people to perform even better than they are now and thinking about 28 Google Wave invites and who would actually try
my little contest.
One more work shift tonight. I can do this.
It's hard being a member of the support teams in a call center. Not just any support team, but one of the teams that have stronger operational ties like Training and Quality Assurance. The challenge with such groups is that holidays become a thing of the past for the most part. Here's what I mean:
When you're in Operations, like when you're an agent, if there are no calls, then you don't have work. This normally means that a lot of local holidays get trampled on while you at least you get to enjoy the holidays of the home country that you support. US-focused call centers get Thanksgiving off while other groups get to honor holidays in the UK or whatever. It's just how things go.
When you're in a more traditional support department like HR or Recruitment, you tend to get the local holidays off in order to honor your nice little daytime schedules and to save on holiday pay. You don't get the US holidays off since it doesn't make sense for how your job is defined.
Support teams like Training aren't so lucky, at least in terms of my working experience. When you're in Training, as long as there's a class, you have to work. Since we are not directly tied to Operations by things like call volume and such, training classes can always continue regardless of whether or not Operations has work. We also can still work despite local holidays since we have hard targets that we have to meet in terms of graduation dates and naturally we must continue to deliver quality agents to Operations. The best that we can manage is to offset holidays by declaring 11 hour work shifts for a 4-day work week or offsetting class schedules to Tuesday - Saturday in order to avoid a Monday holiday or whatever. It's just how things go in our industry.
So it's hard to figure out which holidays you'll get to enjoy, if any at all. More and more we seem to have acquired programs that have work even on major holidays like Christmas and New Year, and thus the expectation of coming to work seems to get even worse. It's a hard life but somehow the higher pay is supposed to help make up for the stress and loss of personal time.
June of next year will mark my seventh year in the call center industry, and I don't think I'll ever get fully used to this consequence of our jobs. Oh well.

Do NOT mess with gamers while they're gaming under ANY circumstances. =P