I know you better than that, Oh Dozen Followers (hey, it's enough for a round table, hint hint). Even if I write something on here that's is overtly technical, you do have the magic of Google at your fingertips...or you could hope that there's enough context for you to get the gist (and if there isn't, well, shame on me).
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What do you do for a living? It's a common introductory question, and lately I appear to be meeting new people by the...fours. Giving my ten second career overview in between sips of vodka tonic/beer/scotch usually ends with some self-effacing comment like "it's really very boring", which is a terrible thing to say to a person you've just met, because you implant the idea in their head that you must be boring for having a job that you're quick to describe as boring.
But, it's not boring. It's a healthy mixture of hour-or-two ad hoc reports and project-based...er...projects, which means I get little ego surges throughout the day and then a big finale, like the end of a fireworks show, when I finish something more comprehensive. It's not secret agent work, nor does it really provide any significant benefit to humanity on even an arbitrary level (which is first on my list of drawbacks), but I'm getting paid to do something that caters to my skill sets, and occasionally makes me proud. It could be worse.
This post is about to grow in nerditude exponentially. You have been warned (and I will do my best to avoid confidential/proprietary information, although the former is much easier to determine).
First: what the fuck is a "retail energy provider", or REP? You've probably had a few knock on your door over the years, offering cheaper rates than Duquesne Light or Allegheny Power or wherever you might be located. REPs, primarily, purchase blocks of power at a wholesale cost off of the commodities market, and then sell slices of that block to consumers at a retail cost (i.e. including cost of general service, commission, etc.). It's best to think of a commodities market as a stock market, but where the price is almost entirely dependent on weather (and supply, especially for natural gas) instead of CEO ousters or the new line of iPads or whatever.
So REPs like the one I work for can save you money because your default provider does not buy off of the commodities market: they charge you whatever the going rate was for whatever month they're billing you for. For a residential customer (which I'm sure 100% of you are), the savings isn't significant, but it does allow for some budget certainty. For commercial and industrial customers, the savings could be in the millions each year.
So there's REPs, and there's default providers, and there's also brokers, which are dudes that basically shop around among many REPs on the customer's behalf to get the best value, at the cost of a few mills (tenths of a penny per kWh) tossed into the going rate. These brokers are why my job exists, as the REP is responsible for paying these brokers, per agreements they sign with each REP, based on the customer information. In my REPs world this is called channel operations, in which I am an analyst (a senior analyst, if we're into arrogance/geriatrics).
Besides providing retail electricity and gas to commercial, industrial, and residential customers, the #2 objective of this company appears to be "buying other companies that do the same thing", since that is a pretty slick way to increase your footprint. And they've gotten quite adept at it. The company I used to work for was, in fact, bought out by this one, and over the years a few smaller businesses were acquired, as well as at least two kind-of-gigantic ones. For the most part, the motive of these acquisitions was to increase the customer base, although in a few instances there were bonuses that came in the form of a more robust proprietary customer management system, or the chance to incorporate people that were simply better at navigating the natural gas market.
But, when they buy a company, aggregating those customers is usually the last step, if it ever actually happens. There have been mergers where the customers they've acquired are moved into existing billing and contracting systems, and there have been instances where they simply said "let's just keep everything as is" and the company inherited a new billing/contracting system...and sometimes there's a mix. In the latest M&A, customers are moving both directions (into the newly acquired systems and in from the acquired business)...which isn't confusing at all.
So, connecting the dots a bit, I'm responsible for creating commission reports (and, in some cases, setting up their payment in our accounting software) for two specific billing systems that hold 99% of our small business customer base as well as our customers in Canada. Some of the brokers that have sold to these customer types have arrangements to be paid weekly, some monthly. Some are paid "on flow" (i.e. pay based on the billed usage in a given month), others are paid "up front" (pay based on the estimated annual usage of the customer), and some have a mix. Some brokers have incentive bonuses based on net sales, or even the # of agents they have in the field. All of these nuances have to be accounted for and aggregated into a handful of databases that will handle all of the protocols and spit out the results with ease (although the "with ease" part is really of my own volition, as manual work frustrates the shit out of me).
So while I'm trying to make heads or tails of that, I'm being leveraged by the rest of the department as the de facto "computer geek" to create simple methods of looking up data for their own benefit. Commission payments have to be bucketed for accounting purposes, so my first task was to create a way to automatically assign the buckets to our commercial electricity commission payment system, which handles about 70% of our total payments each month. Additionally I created tools that allow anyone in our department to find the codes they need for corrections, or ad hoc payments, simply by typing in the account number (this works for commercial electricity and commercial gas, I didn't do one for small business since I manage that anyway).
This part of my job is heavily IT-based, in the sense that someone in IT should be doing this work, but they have bigger fish to fry than turning around requests for tools that make our lives marginally easier. I'm not badmouthing that department in any way (not purposefully, at least). But they do have a lot of red tape involved, and they're handling requests for ALL departments, and assigning their own levels of urgency, and if it's something I can turn around in half a day I see no reason to put in on their plates and wait a few months for it to get finished.
The one thing I do like saying about my job is that my goal is to make myself obsolete. I believe everything I'm doing can be whittled down to a push of a button. It's improbable that I would ever completely reach that point, given the company's tendency to buy companies. And when I mention this aspiration to coworkers they take it as a personal affront to my necessity. Oh, but I'm sure you're more important around here than THAT. Prestige is irrelevant...actually I would feel MORE consequential if I was successful. I'd feel like a creator. An inventor. My impact would be measurable.
I guess that's the ten minute version (if I had to guess how long it would take a random person to read it) of what I do for a living. It's not flashy, but it's satisfying. I think that combination fits me like a well-tailored suit.
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