Thursday, 30 August 2012
Thursday, 23 August 2012
today is the first day of the rest of my life
Today is my last day at what I hope will be the worst job I ever have.
Since May of 2011 (and for a couple of two-to-four months stints before that), I've worked at an outbound call centre doing surveys. Basically, this means that I am the person who calls you during dinner because I knew you would be eating dinner right this very second and I really wanted to ruin your night. This is a genuinely terrible job in that way that all minimum-wage jobs are genuinely terrible, except with much more yelling than I remember experiencing back when I worked at Loeb.
Compounding this is the fact that I work at what ratemyemployer.com suggests might be the worst call centre in Ottawa. I don't think this is necessarily the case, for the record, although it's worth noting that we have fewer chairs than booths and under ten working headsets. Every now and then we hear these Utopian rumours about one specific call centre just down the street where, allegedly, they are allowed to eat food and read and surf the web while they dial. These rumours stop just short of La-Z-Boy recliners and monkey butlers so I'm pretty sure they're not true, but the thought that our suffering might one day end or that we too might eventually make the pilgrimage down the street keeps us from losing hope during a five-hour shift in a chair with no back.
Given all of this, it's surprising that I'm actually a little bit sad to leave. Here's the thing: I am great at my job. I think everyone has certain terrible minimum-wage jobs that they're more or less cut out for, and if that is true, this is mine. Despite how quiet I can be in person, I am bitchily persistent on the phone. I greet you with "Hi there!" and sound like every overly enthusiastic restaurant hostess you've ever had. I am a fantastic voice actor and know when to drop my voice a few octaves so men stay on the phone with me. I know when to politely laugh and am super patient with confused elderly people/non English-speakers (even though everyone around me at work can see that I am making faces and banging my head against my desk). In short, I have surprisingly little shame.
So, I thought that I might compile a list of things I won't miss about work, just for when I'm feeling poverty-stricken and unproductive as a member of society.
THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT WORKING IN AN OUTBOUND CALL CENTRE
Since May of 2011 (and for a couple of two-to-four months stints before that), I've worked at an outbound call centre doing surveys. Basically, this means that I am the person who calls you during dinner because I knew you would be eating dinner right this very second and I really wanted to ruin your night. This is a genuinely terrible job in that way that all minimum-wage jobs are genuinely terrible, except with much more yelling than I remember experiencing back when I worked at Loeb.
Compounding this is the fact that I work at what ratemyemployer.com suggests might be the worst call centre in Ottawa. I don't think this is necessarily the case, for the record, although it's worth noting that we have fewer chairs than booths and under ten working headsets. Every now and then we hear these Utopian rumours about one specific call centre just down the street where, allegedly, they are allowed to eat food and read and surf the web while they dial. These rumours stop just short of La-Z-Boy recliners and monkey butlers so I'm pretty sure they're not true, but the thought that our suffering might one day end or that we too might eventually make the pilgrimage down the street keeps us from losing hope during a five-hour shift in a chair with no back.
Given all of this, it's surprising that I'm actually a little bit sad to leave. Here's the thing: I am great at my job. I think everyone has certain terrible minimum-wage jobs that they're more or less cut out for, and if that is true, this is mine. Despite how quiet I can be in person, I am bitchily persistent on the phone. I greet you with "Hi there!" and sound like every overly enthusiastic restaurant hostess you've ever had. I am a fantastic voice actor and know when to drop my voice a few octaves so men stay on the phone with me. I know when to politely laugh and am super patient with confused elderly people/non English-speakers (even though everyone around me at work can see that I am making faces and banging my head against my desk). In short, I have surprisingly little shame.
So, I thought that I might compile a list of things I won't miss about work, just for when I'm feeling poverty-stricken and unproductive as a member of society.
THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT WORKING IN AN OUTBOUND CALL CENTRE
- Having to hide my rage as respondents make ethnic slurs
- Having to hide my rage as respondents make homophobic slurs
- Having to type your racist and homophobic comments into open-ends verbatim
- Questioning my integrity
- Having to pretend I don't know what you mean when I give you a scale of Strongly agreeand you pick Somewhat agree. I understand that probably you mean the option between Strongly agree and Tend to disagree. But I am paid $10.40 an hour to clarify your answer and maintain quality control and so, unfortunately for both of us, that's how this rodeo is going to go down.
Tend to agree
Tend to disagree
Strongly disagree - Dying inside a little bit every time the aforementioned exchange happens and the person who had previously picked the non-option Somewhat agree suddenly changes their answer to Strongly disagree and is as emphatic about it as if it was the first answer they'd picked, completely refusing to acknowledge their sudden ten-second turnaround in dogmatic fuck-you opinion
- Super Fun Bonus Round if the new, polar-opposite answer they pick is also not on the list, e.g. Totally disagree. It's at this point that I start using my super-calm Scary Teacher Voice because I'm excercising breath control in an effort to restrain myself from screaming at you because holy shit making $10.40 has never been so hard.
- Questioning my integrity
- Being called "lady" in an angry way
- People who pick up the phone and in lieu of saying hello simply breathe into the receiver
- When people have their children record the answering machine message
- Being hung up on three demographics questions away from the end of a survey that never should have taken half an hour but it did because you are (and I say this with as much respect as possible) super elderly/unable to speak English/a beligerent moron
- Super Fun Bonus Round when you not only hang up on me three questions from the end but do so by saying, "I don't know what to tell you. Leave this work, find boyfriend."
- Having to hide my angry and derisive snickers as respondents actually say things like "I thought the greenhouse effect was a good thing?"
- The sick feeling I get when I've spent fifteen minutes recording the fact that you think the biggest issue facing America is the breakdown of family values due to the oppressive presence of gays, Mexicans, and hairy-armpit feminists...and now I also get to record that you have a Ph.D. Lovely. Education at work.
- The malfunctioning space bar in booth 15 that causes one to recordopenendslikethis
- Threatening calls and emails from my employer regarding my legitimate doctor's-note-certified illness that meant I missed one week of work over the course of sixteen months
- Inconsistent presence of soap in the bathrooms
- Questioning my integrity (and cleanliness)
Friday, 10 August 2012
inaugural blog post
Well, hello there!
Lately, it's occurred to me that I might need to increase my web presence. I'm not on Tumblr. I don't fully understand what Instagram is. My Facebook usage is at an all-time low, which, to be honest, I'm actually a little bit proud of...but all the same, I worry that the internet might be forgetting I exist.
What I do have is a Livejournal account which I've been using since I was fifteen years old. I am an essentially geriatric twenty-four now, so you can imagine how embarrassing those 796 entries are. Most of them are about boys. While I have such reverence for this humiliatingly earnest realtime account of nine years of baby-steps toward becoming a grown-up, I think it might be time to expand.*
Thus, this is where I hope to continue becoming a viable candidate for adulthood, just documented in a slightly less incriminating sort of way. I intend for this to be a place where I start sentences with capital letters and use correct punctuation. It will be a blog that my mom can read (though I assume she has much better things to do). And, perhaps most significantly, it will be a place where I only talk about my super-cute boyfriend sometimes.
*But don't worry; I'll still keep my Livejournal for the goriest stuff.
Lately, it's occurred to me that I might need to increase my web presence. I'm not on Tumblr. I don't fully understand what Instagram is. My Facebook usage is at an all-time low, which, to be honest, I'm actually a little bit proud of...but all the same, I worry that the internet might be forgetting I exist.
What I do have is a Livejournal account which I've been using since I was fifteen years old. I am an essentially geriatric twenty-four now, so you can imagine how embarrassing those 796 entries are. Most of them are about boys. While I have such reverence for this humiliatingly earnest realtime account of nine years of baby-steps toward becoming a grown-up, I think it might be time to expand.*
Thus, this is where I hope to continue becoming a viable candidate for adulthood, just documented in a slightly less incriminating sort of way. I intend for this to be a place where I start sentences with capital letters and use correct punctuation. It will be a blog that my mom can read (though I assume she has much better things to do). And, perhaps most significantly, it will be a place where I only talk about my super-cute boyfriend sometimes.
*But don't worry; I'll still keep my Livejournal for the goriest stuff.
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