There are two things I never thought would happen in my
lifetime. One is living in Las Vegas and
the other is working for a corporation, yet both happened, not necessarily in
that order. In 2008, I was still working
at the school and loving my job, and even though there were some things that
were somewhat of an irritant (isn’t that so of any job?), for the most part, I
absolutely loved getting up every day, walking into my home office, and having
a pile of tests to grade, projects to work on, and a stack of emails to answer.
For me, that was a perfect day! I often
worked well over 40 hours a week, but when you love your job, the extra hours
don’t matter that much, at least that was the case for me.
In October of that year, I got a call from one of the
directors—the school had been sold to a major MT service. I knew at some point the school would be
sold, but it was always in the back of my mind that probably another school
would buy it and combine it with their curriculum and maybe take on our name or
some type of merger name. I was happy
for the owners of the school, as this is what they had been working
towards. Selfishly, I was not happy for
me because I don’t like corporations.
Well, I guess that is not true across the board. There are some good
people out there doing the right thing by their employees, but unfortunately
that is rare. Just as there is a
standard of care for patients, why can’t corporations have a standard of care
for their employees?
I honestly did not know what was to come, and since I loved
my job and was told that would not change, I made the decision to stay on. After all, I really knew very little about
this company that bought the school other than it was very large, but you have
to give the employer a chance, right? If
it did not work out for me, well, the best time to look for a job is when you
already have a job, so that was my plan.
See how things would play out, especially since it looked like my job
would not change in any way, even keeping my independent contractor
status.
In January of 2009, I got the promotion to instructor
coordinator. I was very excited about
this position. I did have a similar opportunity
a few years back for this same position, but at that time, it called for a
relocation to Akron, Ohio, which in one way would have been wonderful since
that is my hometown, but my husband and I were now happily living in Idaho and
did not want to move back East. Once you
live in the West, you tend to not want to leave. This time, relocation was not necessary, so I
was thrilled to say yes and take on this new challenge.
As faculty coordinator, I did not want to take on the aspect
of being anyone’s boss. My position was not really one of “me boss, you worker
bee,” anyway, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew that. I wanted to be the support member of the
team, so that is what I worked towards.
I took some time to determine how I could be that
reinforcement for the staff and took some ideas to the new director of the
school (the previous director and former owner had retired in August of 2009). I became the coverage for instructor
vacations so that way students would not have any interruptions in their study
schedules and also so that the instructor would not come back to a mountain of
work and thereby pretty much negating all that relaxation from vacation. I developed extra assignments for struggling
or failing students, maintained test keys and practice dictation keys. I helped with any extra researching that
needed to be done if the instructor was short on time and sometimes helped with
a difficult student. All of this was developed
over a period of time. In fact, I spent the first year just getting used to my
new position and what new responsibilities would be added along with also
keeping up with a full student roster.
