Meet the solicitor

Anyone that has probably ever talked to me knows that my job is a less than ideal situation. It's not a fact that I conceal. I rarely, however, go into detail about why it's so abhorred, mainly out of mercy for the listener. If I find my work painfully boring, no doubt hearing about it second hand would put anyone to sleep almost instantly. Today, though, prepare yourself. I'm about to divulge.

Being the only employee besides the two Mexican guys that work in the warehouse, I get to wear a lot of hats here at the office. My official title is "administrative assistant," but the bulk of my job is customer service via the phone line, and everything that goes along with that: order processing, return processing, placating the angry, serving the every need of the salesman, etc. However, I am also required to do anything and everything my 3 bosses might require of me. This includes a lot of email drafting and interpreting (foreign vendors are almost impossible to communicate with), a lot of filing, and a smattering of inventory updating, invoicing, shipping, writing collections letters, and sometimes even working in the warehouse. I also design and email fliers on a regular basis.

Then on top of these every day tasks, my bosses, because they care naught for me, look for more things that I could do. Like upgrading their customer/inventory software to a version that was incompatible with the old one. Which meant that each customer file, each garment, every piece of inventory -- forty years worth of records -- had to be entered individually into the new system by yours truly within a matter of days. That was last month.

This month they decided to update the website. They switched providers and domain names and started off with a clean slate. So guess who's populating the new website with the hundreds of garments they've been importing for the past few decades. That's right. No training in website maintenance did they offer me. They just said, do this asap, and I said, bloody hell, but not to them.

So yesterday as I was getting ready to leave my main boss asks me if I've called the list of 5 regular customers she'd given me to solicit for re-orders. Yes, I have, but none of them need new merchandise right now. Ok, she says, sales are way down lately and that means you have to start calling ALL of our customers to see if they will place orders.

Ok. ...

Which means that today I am a fully fledged solicitor. Or saleswoman, I guess. Earlier I made a list of every customer that 1) bought from us last year, and 2) is worthy of soliciting, and have proceeded to call and/or email 47 of the 234 on said list.

Suffice it to say, I am not looking forward to the next few weeks at work.