Any advice?
Hi, I was wondering if your Call Center was hiring Part-Time. I would very much like to consider that I never moved over to email marketing, and that I just stayed in the Call Center.
I do not want to go into my experience in Email Marketing, but I do believe it is unfair that I am the sole person who worked at TGC who learned zero applicable skills to any future job.
I do not want to go into it, but Lisa more or less kept me from learning anything relevant to the field. She kept me doing ad codes and all that stuff for years, and when she was not around, Abdallah would happily teach me coding and things that he knew. When she wanted to hire someone for Plus (to do their measly 1x per week emails), he posited that he could teach me and that I could take that job.
She literally scoffed in both our faces and said, "Why would I let her down it when she does not know anything?" Yes, she said I didn't know anything - not about coding, not about Photoshop, not about budgeting or Excel. But anything.
She had already decided she wanted to hire a young man, and she also had a vision of an "Email Marketing Department." When the people came around for the upgrade to the platform, my literal question was, "Could a person do this by himself or herself?" She looked at me like I was absolutely crazy, and she ignored me.
When Ginesi tried to teach me a pricing thing, she also made sure it was known that I was clueless and would not know how to do what he was talking about. When Lindsey put in her notice, she angrily asked me if I was going to apply for the job. In addition, she got angry that I went to Current Events meetings as well as Tier One.
On that note, for Current Events, while I did not totally align with the vision or see a great tie-in between current events and academia, I contributed greatly, and I am not just saying that. The articles I presented - actually - set the tone for how to tie courses to mainly Science and History. The topics that had been presented, albiet great, had been a little haphazard and lacked the tie-in that I directly provided. I do feel like I set a lot of the tone for those meetings, because John Rhyu, who had headed the meeting, had called it "The Amy Derr meeting."
It was a joke of course, and I didn't do that much, but it provided a semblance of pleasure to actually get to work and dig for things.
I just remember that after becoming involved with Tier 1 and Current Events, Lisa had always wanted me to skip the meetings, and sometimes for team lunches that were often very pointless.
I had started making a strike list of all the unfair and mean things she said to me. She gave me really great reviews, but when I applied for other jobs, she said, "What is it you want to do?" I said, "I want to learn how to code" and I remember I also wrote "Get MBA."
She shot down my learning HTML and Dreamweaver and said that anyone who had an MBA did not need to know how to code.
Anyway, I stuck with the job, but I was still learning and applying zero skills. If you look back at who used LinkedIn Learning (that the company paid for), you will see that I did and completed courses.
I would have happily completed more, but no one cared what I was learning.
This is despite what I wrote on multiple yearly reviews.
I guess the worst came when Covid hit, and I couldn't tolerate the silly meetings with Lisa any longer. I started to get on hour-long calls with Aballdah, where I filmed everything he taught me with the emails. It was very tough, especially from home.
I did almost call in a sexual discrimination complaint against her one day - I had had enough of her choosing men over me for menial IT tasks, and I had also had enough of never being handed any sort of role other than what I had been doing for three years.
Call it error on my part - but I did try, and without some push and motivation, I couldn't go anywhere. I made basically zero mistakes in my whole 3 years in Email Marketing. That's copy, PRICING, coupons, the site - everything. I cannot recall one mistake that I made, and I did make a few improvements to the emails themselves.
Also, I had had MAD ideas that I had shared with KG. If I had only had more access to data, then I could have played around more, and I could have gone forward with some of my ideas. I would have been excellent at propelling the courses in a creative way.
Instead, any kind of conversation like this with Lisa would have gone nowhere. She did not know any of the names of our courses. She said a Math course was called, "Math Made Easy," and she also did not know that the website only accepted one coupon. She made priority codes much more complicated than they should have been, as well as Black Friday and other things.
One thing I know she should have done was hold Design/Theme meetings so that we could at least wrap our heads around certain designs. They seemed to think this was important, but the one thing I knew was that I liked Title Cards (Mark Sirinksky) as well as the Red Button. I was down with Testing, but she really had a difficult time making much sense of things.
This is all to say that by the time Wondrium was introduced, I had almost had it. She pulled me into a meeting with Audrey that rather embarrassed me, but because it was "HR and People related," I guess she assumed I would do it. That was not at all what I was interested in doing. I didn't even understand what it was that Audrey wanted, and I basically balked and fell through, doing nothing. I think she and Abdallah did the formatting for the Internal Email.
When Wondrium was rebranded, I gave the forum a big fat no, and I told whoever may have read it (Cale) that The Great Courses Plus with the fire meant knowledge and was dorky and classic and what our viewers know. It's timeless, and some things are meant to be obscure and not stand out.
Things had been going really swimmingly but then Brad's job became available, and I wanted to apply, because I thought that it would finally give me an out to learn new skills (again, in case something happened and I needed them).
I did learn some things, and I learned THAT JOB. Easily, and I get that maybe there was some pressure, but it was so much easier than Brad led on. Both he and Toya wasted my time so many days and evenings, and even Chris Raedel did.
The worst thing was that they embarrassed me and made me feel like I either did not know or was not contributing. Really, I was trying to keep up with whatever thing they were trying to confuse me about.
Case in point - tiny banners and landing pages. We were pulled into meetings, sometimes with TS, and while I sat back because the meeting was not called on my end, I ended up looking like a clueless idiot. These were for things that did not matter and often did not come to fruition.
What would have been better would have been NOTICE or a GLIMPSE into Brad's dream of being in TS. He went about it all wrong, and perhaps he was trying to impress Toya and me, and perhaps he was trying to be our boss, but it was demeaning and annoying. The point was for him to come out more knowledgeable than me
