Aftermath and retail work

Even though I feel pretty yucky, I probably won't get around to actually doing a little bit of work yet, so I'll write this up :).

So I quit the job at the call center at the end of May 2003. Because I quit my job, I lost my insurance, and then I couldn't seek further treatment. Looking at my reports later from the doctor showed that I was "noncompliant" but I really just couldn't afford to go. My boyfriend picked up the slack in the meantime. That led to a bit of credit card debt that we still haven't gotten rid of.

I applied at a few places and even had a HR headhunter find me. I made the mistake of being completely honest with what happened at my last job, so I wasn't hired at any of those places. Although I despised working through a temp agency, I felt I had no choice, and I once again joined up with one of them. The problem was, I was making decent money at the call center, and I would have liked to have made that again. And my boss through the temp agency was lazy. She never bothered to even try to find me something, so I was jobless from the end of May to the beginning of August. When I did finally get a job through them, I was making about $3 less than the call center, but it was better than nothing.

The job was where I was typing up insurance claim information. It was a government job, and it was funny because just down the street you could work at a private insurance company where you could make even more than I did at the call center. As such, people really didn't like to stay at the job I was at for long, and really only did because of the benefits. Often, people would work through the temp agency and be hired on later through the company itself. I specifically handled disabilities, so I would type in the name, what the diagnosis was, what kind of aid they were asking for (a wheelchair, prosthetic limb, etc). One time I had a guy asking for a penis pump "to save his marriage." I didn't really have to talk unless I had a question, and overall the job was ok, except for one major reason--my boyfriend had a girl who used to stalk him that worked there. I didn't know this at first, but when I was talking to my him about this girl and how obnoxious I thought she was, something clicked and he realized who I was talking about. Luckily, a family friend said she had an opening at General Nutrition Center (GNC) and I jumped on the job. When I told everyone I was quitting, I explained that I found out that my husband had a girl who stalked him that worked there, and I didn't think it was a good situation to be in. My boss glanced sideways at the girl, and I laughed and replied yes. Everyone understood.

September was when I started at GNC. My boss understood my voice problems, and she made sure that I only used the phone when I absolutely needed to. We were supposed to call out to Gold Card customers to remind them of Gold Card week, but she did all of that herself instead. Subsequent bosses would ignore this.

At GNC, we had many elderly people come in, and many were hard of hearing. Sometimes they would get mad at me if I had a particularly bad voice day and I was talking in a whisper. There wasn't much I could do at this point, because I didn't know what I had. A couple of other customers would whisper back to me when I started whispering, and then laugh afterwards. They didn't think it was so funny when I explained that I had some sort of voice condition. The job itself was easy enough, but dealing with the public when you aren't sure of when you will have a voice is hard.

I went through a couple of management changes because both my boss and I got pregnant while at the job, essentially at the same time, and my boss left on maternity leave for quite a while, where I came back after 6 weeks. It was while I was pregnant that I got married and got under my husband's insurance. During this entire time, though, I was more focused on getting the care for my baby than finding out what my voice problem was. My subsequent bosses didn't care that I was hired with the intent of not really using the phone, so any time I had to make calls out to Gold Card customers, I lost my voice. To this day, I still will lose my voice if I talk a lot.

I spent nearly two years working for GNC, but that was including maternity time off. I quit GNC after finding a decent work-at-home opportunity and because I didn't want to deal with the regional manager anymore, our commission rates went down, and the store was turning into almost all sport supplements instead of a good mix of herbs and sports, and I really couldn't care less about sports. My new job was writing and critiquing online personal ads from home, or anywhere I could access my account. I joined up in November of 2004, just shortly after I had my first daughter, and I actually got work in December of 2004. I quit GNC in August of 2005. At that point, I was making quite a bit more as a writer than when I was working at GNC, where I was essentially making minimum wage most days. It wasn't that I couldn't sell, as I had been proven to sell in the past. As I said, they changed the commission on us, and a lot of business had dropped off over time. Of course, shortly after I quit, the city's minimum wage requirement was raised by nearly two dollars.

Next: Discovering Spasmodic Dysphonia.