Resume Entry October 1, 2004 - August 23rd, 2005

Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI)

How do I love REI? Let me count the ways.....

I have been staying at home for a few years when I stumbled onto this job. I didn't really consider it a long term thing. Just a part time job to get me back into the swing of working outside the home again. I had been looking and looking for an oppurtunity to get back into the workforce.

And honestly? I wasn't having any luck.

I had decided that the smartest thing would be to get back into the Finance Industry where I had the most recent experience. It really made no sense at all for me to go back to work for less than $16 an hour. Otherwise, there would be no way to pay for care for the kids and all that.

After looking for MONTHS and not finding anything that would bring me in at what I needed, I decided that I would take the next damn job that came down the pipe. That morning I opened the newspaper to the Classifieds and there was a large ad "REI Hiring Seasonal Call Center Employees".

It was a part-time, seasonal job. It would get me through Christmas while I was still looking for something else.

I interviewed and got the job.

And the variable , every-other-weekend-start-at-4-am-shift.

But I still loved it.

I took calls from people who ordering out of the REI catalog. That is all I did for the first 3 months. It wasn't the job that I loved, per se, it was the atmosphere.

It's all about product knowledge at REI. We needed to know everything about the majority of the items we sold. If you were to walk into the REI call center you would see people messing around with stuff like climbing hand strengtheners and star seekers and GPS units.

They would actually have clinics where they would hide treasure around the warehouse and we would have to find it with GPS coordinates. We also had to set up entire campsites in our lunch room - tents, sleeping pads, bags, stoves.....all the way down to the french press coffee mugs.

Nearing the end of my "seasonal employment" I began to panic.

I did not want to leave this low-paying-crazy-scheduled job. Well, at least I didn't want to leave the company.

They always keep some of the seasonal staff and I was hoping and praying they would choose me.

They did.