Despite me being a makeup junkie there is room in my life for other things.
If you’ve looked closely at the sidebar on this blog you’ll see a Goodreads widget. This is because I also obsessively collect and read books. I will read just about anything: classic literature, horror, YA, self-help, historical fiction (also nonfiction), biographies, science fiction, fantasy… pretty much the only thing I actively avoid is romance. I have around 150 physical books on my shelves, but I live in a small-ish house with another human who likes having space for his things too, so we’ve put a moratorium on book purchases. Ebooks, however, are still fair game, and I have hundreds.
I know a lot of book snobs aren’t about the ebooks, but I really don’t have a problem with it. For me, it’s mostly about real books being unwieldy. I travel a bit and I never know what I’ll want to read, so in the past, I’d end up with a bag of books in addition to a regular bag and that’s kind of insane. It’s bad enough that my makeup takes up so much space. I don’t need another addiction adding weight to my suitcase.
Another frequent past time is video games. I know what you’re thinking: only skeevy stoners and high school kids play video games, but a surprising number of adults do too. If you’ve seen House of Cards you’ll know that even the President isn’t above a little FPS action. Right now I’m working on the Assassin’s Creed Ezio Trilogy for PS4. I’ve played all three games before but I love them so much that I couldn’t help buying it. I also love all of the Lego games, and just finished Lego City: Undercover. I played this years ago when it came out for the Wii U but it’s a new enough experience on the PlayStation that I don’t find it redundant. Also, it’s surprisingly entertaining and adult for a game that’s rated for kids.
The last thing I do that takes up a ton of time but still love is my job. Weird, right? I’ve been doing this job for a little over two years and I still love logging in every day. As I mentioned in my first post, I work for a dating website. Everyone thinks that means I’m finding people matches, but we leave that up to the algorithm in the site. What I do is customer support: everything from banning anyone who harasses other members to billing, and it’s all done via email.
It’s definitely not the traditional way of handling support requests and so many of our members think it’s in an effort to maintain a sort of hands-off approach, but really it’s about efficiency. My eight person team handles all of the billing and technical support requests for over five million members. Five. Million. That’s a lot. I can handle anywhere from 100-150 emails in an average day when I work eight hours. If we used phone support it would be about 50 per day, so I’m essentially handling three times the volume as a typical call center agent. This is why we can afford to have so many free features on the site, where other sites demand payment for everything you want to do. Looking for love is hard, especially now, and we do everything we can to make it a little easier. This is a huge part of why I still love my job: at the end of the day, I’m not working just to line someone else’s pockets. Not only is the company really good to us, but we’re also helping people find… whatever it is they’re looking for. A date, a hookup, marriage, whatever.
Teresa's Big O(pinion) 
Leave a Reply