Our Modest Beginnings (Part 7)

To read more our beginnings go here

Jobs:

As would be expected for young kids with little education or experience doing much of anything, we started out with some less than desirable jobs. I tried to get Kizzie to come up with some funny stories from her first job, but she was unable to do so (perhaps her post-traumatic stress is so great that she is just blocking all of those memories out).

Anyway, here we go.

Kizzie: Quickdown.com

Never heard of it? Neither has anyone else. Quickdown is a down-payment assistance provider. (I think they essentially do something to roll the down-payment into the final purchase price, or something like that) Kizzie worked there for about a year and a half (joyfully quitting the month before Avery was born) and had a couple different roles here. For the first while, her main task was to get registrations. For this she had to call up loan officers and try to convince them to sign up for their program (for free). Later on, she would just call those who had already signed up and get them to do something (I don't know... and frankly I'm tired of writing about Quickdown... BORING!).

-Kizzie Here, I took over to write my funny stories....or whatever-

From the begining my experience with Quickdown was crazy. I never had an interview, some guy names Mark just called me and said I was hired. (I applied for the job before I moved to Utah)

When I got there my training was crazy too, I can't remember specifics, but some really weird and off the wall questions were asked that had nothing to do with the job. Mark was crazy (can I get an Amen? Cari-Ann, Lindy, Jess??) It was all very wierd. And boring.

So mostly at first I was a good little worker, making my calls trying to stay focused. But I sat next to Lindy, so we talked a lot. And I think I braided her hair a few times too.

When I got comfortable with my job and the people I worked with I started doing cross word puzzles and word searches. I think I finished 2 whole books of those babies in a year.
I also took the Ikea catalogue with me when I got it in the mail and would pretty much spend the majority of my shift dog earing and underlining things I thought I had to have.

We made a lot of trips to Will's Pit Stop on breaks, but I think we got in trouble for that once, so we had to stop.

There was also a Secret Book that floated around. People wrote secrets in it and tried to disguise their handwriting. But if you read something in it you had to write something. I read it a lot, but I don't think I ever wrote anything. There were some messed up people that worked there!!

Towards the end I was a "supervisor" or some word like that, they were trying to fancy it up to make us feel important and special. But it basically meant I didn't have to do anything. I got to observe people making calls. So I did some crafts and read and during breaks I would make everyone have word search races. It was exciting.

After Avery was born we went back to show him off, and I got a little bit of anxiety as we drove the ever familiar route to QD. I was afraid they were going to try and make me stay!!

I did meet some really good friends there, so at least I got something good out of that job. And a few free dinners and movies. Those were good too.

back to Andy

This may make Kizzie look like a bad employee... but she was actually really good at that job (though I'm not sure what that says about her). She was always one of the top (if not the top) employee at getting people to sign up, which meant lots of bonuses and even some prizes for us. Her starting pay at this job was $8, and she was making $8.75 by the time she quit. However, with her bonuses, she probably made at least $10-10.50 per hour... which isn't bad for around here I think. It did, however, build in her a hatred for the phone. She cringes everytime I ask her to make some phone calls. Anyway... we'll talk about my jobs later this week.