BWE 3: Mastering the Hill, Blackberry

Note: Best Week Ever (BWE) is a summary of the prior week.

So how does a three-day school week feel? This sums it up:

I had two oral arguments on Monday. My moot court section has an odd number of students, so I volunteered to argue off-brief.
It was slightly awkward waltzing in and arguing for the other side:  “May it please the Court, forget everything I said one hour ago! These guys are so totally not guilty, and US Americans…”

It wasn’t so terrible, and I survived.

I spent the bulk of Tuesday’s school day in the Sprint Store. The Rottweiler ate my phone, and a quick lunch-time phone replacement turned into an epic customer service fail.

I made a point of not being snide or pissy with the Sprint customer service reps. It is embarrassing and stressful enough for a worker to look incompetent in front of a customer. Exasperating someone’s discomfort is not going to make them provide better service.

My politeness also allowed me to adopt a sense of moral superiority while watching the parade of rude customers that came into the store.

The worst guy was a very short man with a baseball cap who walked in with his arms folded:

Chipper customer service rep: “Welcome to Sprint! How may we help you today?”
Napoleon: (dramatic pause) “I have been a customer for over 15 years! I demand service! ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?”

I felt like I was on the set of a CBS sitcom, and it was hilarious.

We eventually got my blackberry working, and I spent the rest of the week playing foursquare and connecting with more Minnesotans.

Foursquare is this stalkerish, twitter-like application that uses your GPS to pinpoint your location and broadcasts the location to your facebook and twitter streams.

You can leave to-do tips for other users, and even see who else is at your location. This is awesome because when I “check in” at work I am instantly connected to new coworkers.¹

My workweek started on Wednesday. I’m not sure if this was a good idea.
I had the same problem last week: I went to work on Wednesday after an exhausting school day and I got behind on cases.
I did not want my quota to suffer, so I spent the rest of the week playing catch up and worked for free on Sunday.

Several of my coworkers had the same problem. You get behind, feel guilty for being behind… stress builds, productivity decreases, you wake up the next day with more to do than the day before…

I refused to get on the hamster wheel this week. I have always met my employer’s productivity quota and I’m not going to walk around like Raggedy Ann because I failed to live up to my artificially heightened expectations for one day. Cue Portia Nelson.

Friday was epic, Saturday was calm, and today is my day of work and homework. It is like prepping before cooking the feast. The more work I get done today, the easier my mini-school week will be. We’ll see how this goes….

¹ My connectedness level has increased with the blackberry. I have never been so up to date on my email. I think the best part of the PDA experience has been meeting more Minnesotans. I hate to use the term “networking” but that’s essentially what’s going on.