Phone calls are scary.

I had my first real half day of work today. I say "half day" because the morning was filled with my training group doing two things: 1) completing our phone training, and 2) frantically asking questions and taking notes.

It was moderately terrifying.

For those of you who don't know, I was hired as summer help at the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center. It's an animal poison control call-in center for the entire U.S. and Canada. My job will eventually be to answer the hotline and take histories before passing the call on to someone else. This means that, after the last nine months of spending eight hours a day, five days a week staring at a computer screen while sitting in a semi-dark room, I will be spending eight hours a day, five days a week staring at a computer screen while sitting in a semi-dark room. The difference, you ask? I GET PAID.

Last week was my first week of work, which was pretty much all training. Let me sum up what we learned by the day:

MONDAY: This is a phone. This is how you answer the phone. This is a computer. This is how you sign into the computer.

TUESDAY: This is how we look things up on the computer.

WEDNESDAY: This is how we ask people on the phone what they're calling about.

THURSDAY: HOLY MOTHER OF GOD LEARN ALL THE THINGS! ENTER ALL OF THE THINGS! HAVE YOU GOTTEN DOWN ALL THE THINGS? WHY HAVEN'T YOU WRITTEN DOWN ALL OF THE THINGS?! TYPE FASTER, PEON!

FRIDAY: These are the things you'll be doing on your own on Monday, but there's no one available to actually tell you how to do those things right now.

The no-trainer situation is what caused the group panic this morning; we were basically calling people back to ask if their pets were doing OK, if they took their animal into the vet, if they did something completely nonsensical like feed their dog rice and yogurt for the last five days, etc. After lunch, they showed us to some open stations and turned us loose.

As I said before, it was terrifying.

I'm pretty sure the person on the other end of my first call could hear my heart beating. I sure as hell could feel it in my throat (bounding pulse - check). I stammered a lot, said a whole bunch of "ums" and fucked up saying ASPCA about three times, but I got through it! After about the third call, I stopped being semi-paralyzed whenever someone picked up at the other end of the line. It occurred to me that the staff goes through the newbie vet student hires being complete morons every summer. They're USED to having to clean up our messes and wipe our noses for the first week.

I apologize to whoever has to waste a few hours fixing what I did today.

In other news, I have things! In pots!

Parsley!

Lettuce!

Wussy-looking chives!

I also have a small patch in the ground, with some other growing things. I did this over the weekend because SOMEONE keeps putting her fat feet where she shouldn't:

Her Stompy-ness is mourning the loss of her ability to play Godzilla in the peas.

And this, but that's because I want to make my own compost. The dirt in my garden is pretty clay-y (how are you supposed to spell that word?), so I want something to mix into in this fall/next spring to make it not suck quite as much.

I realize that my chicken wire fence is incredibly ugly and slapdash. Stop laughing. It was hot and I was cranky.