The Nordia Narrative
Where the path forks, perspective grows — on call centres, satellite signals, and finding connection in the gap.
Before you can bridge new gaps, sometimes you have to lose the map you thought you were following.
I really didn’t want to post this one it seems. I’ve had it written, but I’ve been delaying over a month. It’s not profound enough... It’s not explaining enough... It makes me look shallow… But isn’t that everything I’m trying to move past? And honestly, this is a time I feel proud of, in hindsight. I should be accepting of all of it.
This is the story of the in-between — the pivot between local connection and scaled survival. Where I was bridging gaps, and identifying needs before I even knew what ‘first principle thinking’ was.
Full Circle Before Moving Forward
When I chose to work at Execulink, it wasn’t about convenience or location. It was something quieter. A thread tying back to the days I sat in front of a beige monitor, watching pixels load, feeling like I was touching the future.
Remember that 28.8k modem I mentioned? The one that made me the neighbourhood internet wizard back in grade seven?
There’s something I didn’t tell you about that provider — it was Golden Triangle.
The same Golden Triangle that eventually got absorbed into Execulink, where I’d just been let go.
My dad had always made sure we were on the cutting edge, or at least what passed for it at the time. He worked at NEC when I was little, brought home our first real computer, later sold golf simulators (in the nineties??) and satellite TV systems. (ok yeah… that checks out)
Technology wasn't just something I stumbled upon, it was stitched into my life.
When Plans Break, Pivots Happen
Sometimes survival means letting go of the story you thought you were living.
Where I last left you, I was three months pregnant and freshly unemployed.
Not just unemployed — fired.
Fired for standing up to management at Execulink.
In the blink of an eye, or so it felt, the regional connections I’d built, the sense of belonging I was just starting to understand, the systems I thought I was growing into — all of it evaporated.
And with a baby on the way, I didn’t have the luxury of sitting in that grief too long.
I picked up the phone and called Nordia — the company whose offer I'd turned down for Execulink just a few months earlier.
"Is the spot still open?"
They told me a training class was starting next week if I wanted it.
I said yes.
Not because it was what I thought was the right move for me,
but because I was down to a matter of days before my employment insurance qualification would be at risk for when I'd need to go on maternity leave.
If you missed the story of how I ended up at Nordia, you can find it here in my latest thread post: The Execulink Effect
Third-Party, First Principles
Nordia wasn’t Execulink. It wasn't neighbourly. It was a third-party call centre, contract-bound to Bell, built to scale service across the whole country — one disembodied voice at a time.
The customers I helped weren’t people I might run into at the grocery store anymore.
They were voices from provinces I'd never been to, names I'd forget as soon as the call ended.
I’ll be honest: at the time, I looked down on it a little.
It felt like a step down from the more technical, local small business world I had just left. I showed up there feeling overqualified, out of place, and embarrassed at the situation that brought me there.
But what I didn’t realize was just how much operational excellence it takes to run a company like that well.
The training was long and exhaustive. The turnover was frequent.
You can’t just open the doors and hope entry-level hires will figure it out.
You need rigorous training programs, systems that can teach total newcomers how to support complex products in a matter of weeks, scaffolding that helps them sell and overcome objections, safeguards that make people feel safe and supported enough to stay.
It was a different kind of complexity.
If anything, it’s more disciplined.
Because when you rely on structure to create success (not just exceptional individuals), the system has to work for everyone, not just the stars.
Instinct Runs Deeper Than Environment
When you're seeing how things play out at scale, it becomes a lot easier for an organization to understand the value of building bonding opportunities at work.
Larger corporations understand employee engagement is vital to counteract detachment.
There was a union. We had committees.
And there was always plenty of opportunities for you to step up in whatever way brought you a sense of purpose.
Then the missing piece fell into place when they asked for volunteers for the social committee. My hand went up right away.
We would do lunch activities, potlucks and dress-down events. They included us in strategies for incentivizing workers with call goal completions. We even rented a bus and put together a trip to the Niagara Falls casino one month.
Different company, different size, different stakes — but still the same me, still the same drive to make the place feel more human.
To make it something more than an endless queue of strangers asking for signal resets and satellite realignments.
To make it be somewhere where I was known, appreciated, needed.
Creating Systems in the Spaces Between
It didn’t take long for me (on a team with a pod leader, a manager, and many different colleagues all trying to do the same jobs and keep track of the same outcomes) to see that connection gaps can exist in more than just social dynamics.
Agents needed visibility into their upgrades and downgrades, not just for their managers, but for themselves, for their ability to engage in goals and competitive spirit, see their efforts in front of them, and advocate for themselves in meetings with their pod leaders.
They needed a way to track their own numbers, measure their own growth, take ownership of something beyond the next call in the queue.
Team managers and pod leaders needed clean reports and quick snapshots of this data to see the state of their overall team's efforts, and who was excelling versus who needed a bit more support or coaching.
Nobody was connecting the two.
So I built my first process.
Each team had their own living spreadsheet with a tab for each rep — calculations and formulas were automated, and all the rep had to do was plug in their sales when they happened on their personal details sheet.
It would populate the overall metrics on the team overview.
It wasn’t that fancy by 2025 standards.
But in 2008, it gave agents a way to see their impact and managers a way to spot trends, without manual collection or waiting for reports from HQ to come down the chain.
More importantly, It gave me my first real taste of what operational empathy looks like at scale:
when you can feel the pain points even when nobody names them, you can stitch across the gap before it gets too wide to cross.
It was where I realized I was starting to carry a skill I’d spend the rest of my career sharpening: The ability to see the gap in the road ahead, already planning for how to fill it before others even noticed it was there
The Path Between
Sometimes, the most important insights don’t come wrapped in a bow.
They come quietly, in the in-between — when you're still adjusting to the new light, not sure who you are yet, but learning how to see differently anyway.
If Porchlight was where I learned how systems shape behaviour, and Execulink was where I learned how community grows between the cracks, then Nordia was where I learned how to hold both sides at once:
The closeness of small systems, and the brutal necessity of large ones.
The beauty of neighbourly connection, and the power of scaled experience — if you have the right scaffolding to support it. That’s when I learned what customer experience feels like stretched across thousands of kilometres and hundreds of thousands of accounts.
And most importantly:
How a good system doesn’t automate empathy out — it automates the noise away so empathy can survive.
Thanks for reading the 3rd instalment of #TheThread in Clarity in Chaos! Stay tuned for the Rogers Reflection coming up next, (and hopefully a lot sooner :) )