Left at 7:05, got there at 8:05, needed to be there at 9:10, and I knew that's what would happen, exactly the same way I knew that if I left at 8 to be there by 9, I'd be late.
Tomorrow I'll need to be there at 7:30; I am reasonably confident I can leave around 6:15-ish and arrive on time.
The job looks pretty good. It's a call center, but it's quiet, and it's not paperless like the shithole was; the second thing they did was give me paper and pens. There's a bookcase of paperbacks near the door.
There are metrics on which we're tracked but they don't look impossible. My desk is a stone's throw from the cafetaria, which serves hot food until around 1:30. I can lean back in my chair--I do not have to lean far--and see outside.
The guy I shadowed today took something like a dozen calls while I looked on. None of the callers was an asshat about anything; they were all professional, even the woman from a vendor who was calling because she'd been charged $100 for requesting a paper invoice. Which is to say, once the charge was explained to her, she didn't go ballistic and start demanding a supervisor and screaming about not paying it; she simply wanted to contest it, and so the rep got that process started for her, and that was it.
Dress code is reasonable: business casual, no sneakers, no t-shirts. Jeans are okay as long as you're not meeting people from outside the company. I shouldn't be doing any of that, so if I wear a polo, jeans, and the black shoes I wore when I worked at Geek Squad, I'm fine.
The rep I shadowed handled one PC-related call, a problem with Excel; otherwise he mainly was handling inventory system issues: pick batches not clearing, not dropping, weird errors, things like that. Most of those calls went approximately thus: describe the problem, create a ticket, tell caller he'd be receiving a call back shortly. Sometimes he'd get a call from the team that handles those problems and call back the original caller to verify the problem was fixed.
Obviously these folks aren't worried about "one call resolution".
Sitting there watching the guy work was tiring, and of course I didn't get as much sleep as I'd wanted to last night. At 3:37 they said I could go home, so I did.
The drive home was horrible. As soon as I got on the ramp to 294 I ended up sitting still for more than five minutes, as in "sitting in park" standing still. I don't know what the problem was there, but it was then stop-and go to the next one: a place on 294 that had apparently been the site of a truly epic wreck, because all four lanes had oil-dry on them, the center barrier had black gunk all over it, and there'd been a fire to boot. Things sped up after that, but not for long, because I came to another place where there'd been a wreck and the left lane was blocked.
And all the way, I was fighting sleep. All the damned way I could barely keep my eyes open, having to slap myself in the face to stay awake.
Got home 1.5 excruciating hours after leaving work, had a snack cake, hit the can, and then went to bed. Slept for almost three hours. And I'm going to bed after this.