Work it, baby, work that mouth…

Well, I think the subject line for this blog says it all, doesn’t it? 🙂

 

I finally started working, about 2 weeks ago.  This is a tech support ("helpdesk analyst") position, which means I’ll be on the phone for at least 9 hours a night… – Hence the "work that mouth" remark.

 

Some more details about the job: As said, this is a helpdesk (1st level) support for a pharmaceutical company – one of the largest actually – called Merck (AKA Merck-Frosst in N.A., and M.S.D. in Europe). 

We (the helpdesk analysts) actually work for an outsourcing company called Ajilon, which is a subsidiary of Adecco – a global human resources company with offices all over the world (including Israel, of course).

 

The job is actually supporting Merck employees in the EMEA (Europe, Middle-East & Africa) regions, which means that it’s a night job – corresponding to the regions’ business hours.

The funny thing is, the company also has an office in Israel (Petach-Tikva), and so my part in the team of analysts will be to take any Hebrew calls that may arrive in the support queue.  Who would’ve thought that knowing Hebrew would eventually land me my first job? (especially as I’ve tried to avoid it so hard).  Anyway, all other analysts are bilingual as well – French/English of course. Which also means that I have a good potential for learning French on the job as well. 

 

As it is an internal helpdesk, the "customers" are pretty well-behaved, so there shouldn’t be a problem there.  We are currently learning the job, gaining/refreshing our knowledge on different products and softwares used by the employees so that we can help them once we "Go Live" with the support lines (we’re actually taking the place of analysts working from Brussels, Belgium).

 

Part of the training has been, for the past three days, "shadowing" live siupport people at the local Merck offices.  This was done to let us see how the actual support is currently being handled, and so we can get tips on using the internal case-recording software (built on top of PeopleSoft CRM), as well as troubleshooting techniques in case we forgot how to do those…

 

There are currently 7 people in my team – 4 native Montrealers, a Korean girl, a Pakistani guy, and myself.  The company is still searching for another Hebrew speaking person to fill the second opening they have for this part, and I’m trying to help them by looking for someone myself, among my <very limited> resources.  All the people in the team are very nice and with past experience in the field, so the atmosphere is very good, and we all get along pretty well (for now…).

 

Apart from that we have of course a Team lead who is new to the company as well and will be probably go through the same hardships we will in the first few weeks (although he does have previous experience managing helpdesk teams).  This guy is also very nice and makes no effort to distance himself from the team, which is very important to building a good relationships with the team members.  The same goes for his boss as well, so overall, it’s a very relaxed, although businesslike environment.

 

Being paid every Friday for the week before (one week lag) means I just got my first Canadian paycheck.  Very exciting, and much needed.  To "celebrate" this, I bought myself a new hard-drive, as my old one decided to die on me just a couple of days before… It goes so fast…

Nevermind – within a few short weeks I will have not only enough money to pay next month’s rent, but also to buy myself a decent TV set which I’m sorely missing, and also probably that much coveted XBOX360 I’ve been putting my eyes on for quite sometime now. Yeppee!

 

I guess that’s it for this update.  I’ll probably make another entry next week to cover any other aspect of my life here that might deserve a mention. (we’re probably looking at quite a short entry there…  ).

 

Ciao.