I’m Trying.

On January 6, 2020, I said goodnight to my mom and got into bed. Just before opening Spotify to listen to my ritual podcast before bed (podcast of choice at the time was The Adventure Zone), I had a random urge to check my email. When I was looking through the half-dozen or so new emails, I noticed the subject line:

“Customer Support Specialist Position at Reclaim Hosting

I thought this was an update from Indeed – another email to mark as read and delete. But then, I noticed the sender was Meredith Fierro. I opened the email, found out I was offered a job interview, jumped out of bed and ran to my mom to spread the news. By the end of that week, I interviewed at the Reclaim office with Meredith as well as Jim (via video conference). A week later I was coming in for orientation.

The first couple days at Reclaim felt like a huge test. You’ll need this website, and this one, bookmark all these, log in here, create an account here, etc etc. The sheer amount of new software and websites I needed to familiarize myself with felt almost impossible to comprehend. I could only think, am I really cut out for this?

I went home and went to bed, knowing the information needed to be taken out of the short term bins of my brain box and put into the long term bins. I kept reminding myself that before working in the Digital Knowledge Center at UMW, I hated WordPress. Freshman year I tried working with it, gave up, and hand-coded my own webpage instead (I have since taken down the poetry, need I explain why?). Little did I know that in three years I would be teaching other students how to build their own sites (predominantly WordPress) as well as teaching the likes of Photoshop/Illustrator, infographics, video editing, UMW’s video production studio, and timeline and mapping tools to name a few. And after that I would be helping people all over the world sign up for domains, hosting plans, and troubleshooting a seemingly infinite array of problems.

Within the past two months at Reclaim, I have learned so much more than I ever thought I was capable of just years (weeks) ago. I was happy to see that the whole company centers around continued learning for everyone, acknowledging that there is no ultimate level of I’ve learned everything, now I know all. Of course, I still have a long (long) way to go, but I am so excited to keep going and keep learning. I’m happy to say I’m at least at a place where most tickets that come in during my shifts no longer carve a pit of dread in my stomach.

Little by little, I’ll find my way.

4 Comments

  • Jim Groom

    Katie,

    I have to say I was blown away with how quick a study you have been. There is no question it is overwhelming, but the way you have already began nailing harder issues like syncing DNS in WHM and generally reading through ticket histories and piecing together prior knowledge to immediately be an asset to the team has been mind blowing. So let me say this, we are the one’s who are not worthy. En fuego!

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