I loved Entrata. At one point, I seriously considered working there forever. I was rocking my QA scores, I was a superstar team member, I had a team leader who made me (and everyone else) feel valued and appreciated, and I was being treated very well by the company itself. I honestly thought I could go on to be a manger, trainer, or more in this company. When my team leader was removed from his position however, I started to worry.
Sadly, it only got worse from there. I was put on call filtering; a grueling task where you filter hundreds of calls an hour that the properties themselves took. It was redundant, mundane, and I felt like a machine. I thought I would love being off the phones, but the hours were long and my anxiety was high as I tried to filter at least 100 calls an hour. I opted out.
Being on the phones wasn't much better. With so many agents doing call filtering, the lines got busier. MUCH BUSIER. From January to September, there was almost NO BREAKS in it for me. It was brutal. I wanted to quit every day. It was hard to be positive anymore. I was starting to lose hope altogether of a better life.
Why does this matter?
This matters because it made me realize that I *can't* do this the rest of my life and my family needs me to work. I was forced to think of other options. Then it hit me. My associate degree didn't mean much when it came to applying for a real job. I could possibly be doing jobs like Entrata or worse the rest of my life. I did however, have my bachelor's degree almost complete!
There was my hope again.
Getting back into school again was not easy. I literally had to petition my desire to come back to school, why I deserved to be reconsidered, what I would do differently so I don't quit again, why know I would not quit, etc, etc, etc. Fortunately, I was let back in! I began the journey again, only this time as a working mom, something I was unfamiliar with before. If I thought school was hard in the past, I never realized how hard it would be with a job.... and family.... and all their things happening simultaneously. The next nine months pushed me past my breaking point.
I had a lot of ground to cover if I wanted to be a teacher. I had licensure exams still to take, classes to finish, even more classes that were added to the program after I quit, one hundred observation hours (which is not as easy as it sounds), and as if that wasn't enough, everything else as well. At one point, I almost went back on my words written in my petition for re-entry. I wanted to quit. I wanted to quit SO BADLY. I just wanted to make the uncomfortable go away and make my life easier again - start later when all my kids were in school full time.
Tempting as it seemed, I still knew that I was doing the right thing and it was the only thing keeping me going. Maybe, just maybe, all the uncomfortable life lessons we were having happened because I was meant to do something better. I'm in my last week of classes right now. I met my requirement for observation hours and I'm ready to student teach in January 2020.
(More family updates to be continued...)
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