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My receptionist career started when I actually got a job working at an office my mother worked
at. She's a legal assistant and they needed just some summer help for some filing and
moving of boxes. Things like that. So I was kind of lucky in that aspect, that my mom
already worked there and got me a job. And I just kind of ran around for the summer as
her little gopher doing whatever they needed me to do. From there I sort of went on some
different high school type jobs and then I came up to Utah for school and ended up walking
into a place and getting a job there, not really because of any skills that I had as
a receptionist, but because I knew how to use Adobe Pagemaker, which was a program that
they desperately needed somebody to use that had some working knowledge of it for some
publications that they wanted to put out for internal employees. And I actually had happened
to use that in high school when I was the editor of my newspaper. So I was lucky in
that aspect that I didn't really need any actual skills to get that job. But it did
help that I had been in that environment before and that I knew how to work a phone system
and things like that. From there, I actually moved to a campground management company,
which was a little different than what I had been doing before, but it was the same basic
front line receptionist, being a secretary, kind of those aspects of it. Also just, I
did a lot of dealing with the public. I sold boat slips for a reservoir up north. So I
dealt a lot with the public in that aspect which actually helped me get this job here
at State Farm because we deal a lot with policy holders calling in who maybe don't remember
who their agent was, and we also deal a lot with the agents and their staff members, just
working to be a liaison between the actual agents who are independent contractors and
then our corporate office out in Bloomington, Illinois. So we deal a lot with public as
well as internal customers. We consider the agents and their staff our customers. So that's
our job, is to be their liaison and make their life a little bit easier.