I write mostly in my mind, so rarely does anyone get the benefit of my world class skill and wisdom. Many of the folks who have been here for awhile know that I spent a lot of 2008, all of 2009 and until May of 2010 unemployed. I wrote a few blogs, wrote comments to those who are much more prolific, then cheered mightily on just about everyone’s blog when I got hired at that huge company that invites possible to be rethought.

Well, I dropped off OS because what was possible for me at the time was to finally get back to work doing something I am good at: helping people having trouble getting online, general technical help to folks whose first typical comment would be something like, “you people suck!”, or ‘I have no technical abilities whatsoever, so even though you suck, you better get me online, because I can’t find my email!” To which, I would apply the proper amount of both apologetic empathy and confidence building to assure them that we would work as a team, and get this pump a’suckin’. Or, their modem turned back on, or whatever.

There were a couple of drawbacks to this hard won position.  They did not immediately present themselves to me, except the one where it took me 90 minutes of highway driving to get there. And, of course, back home.  That in itself is not insurmountable, but it did mean a super long day. The other was that the work was stressful. It was not difficult; I have done telephone tech work for many years.  The stress came from what the company lovingly calls customer satisfaction surveys. I am used to these also, but the capricious policies we were bound to follow created bad customer experiences that did not result in the customer loving the messenger, um, me.

But, I was excited. I was committed. The fact that I was accepting a position a full 6 dollars per hour less than my previous one and was capped at a few cents more than my starting pay was startling, but not a reason to refuse the only thing offered after 2 years and three months of searching. Lots of people are taking less just to have a job. I felt lucky and blessed.

My training class lasted three months and while it was fun and there was candy, there was little in terms of the technical work discussed. Most of the training was about professional behavior, our code of ethics, and attendance policies. I sucked it all in, every lesson matched my own personal code of how to deal with people who were not technical. I passed all their module tests with flying colors. I knew I was on my way, and felt this would be the last job I would ever have. I was prepared to retire from there in twenty years.

After the training was over, I was assigned to a great manager. I was on a successful team. I was tired a lot, and getting online at night was the last thing I wanted to do. I faded away from OS and Facebook, sure that I would eventually get back to it after getting used to the job.

One day, my husband got a backache. This wasn’t strange; he has had back trouble for years.  He has regular medications he takes to cope with the pain he has a lot. But the medications were failing to address this new pain. He was more tired than usual. His appetite disappeared.  He kept waiting for the pain to go away. It wasn’t. He made an appointment with his new doctor. They could see him in three weeks. He tried to hold on, but on August 2, he decided he couldn’t wait any longer and took himself to the emergency room. He waited for 5 hours to be seen. Desperate, he wandered over to the triage nurse and told her he was having chest pains. Things began to happen fast after that. They got him into a treatment room and he described his symptoms. His blood pressure was elevated, and the ER doc was concerned about the pain  he was describing. She ordered a CT scan and an MRI. She called his doctor. He ordered some more tests and got him a hospital room. Pancreatitis was determined. They were going to keep him overnight and do an endoscopy. Dilaudid was ordered.

The next day, the doctor started talking about a small shadow on the pancreas that he wasn’t happy about. A transfer to a larger hospital was arranged. The endoscopy would happen there. The potential for exploratory surgery was discussed. The bigger hospital was better equipped to handle the procedures. On the first day, the emergency room bill was over 12,000 dollars. It seemed to exponentially increase by the minute.

About the same time, the company created some new policies which restricted the consultant’s ability to do what we call third party technical assistance. Any issue that was not specific to the company’s provided equipment must now be referred to another level of assistance which required a significant payment.   In a world where customers were finding their own equipment at a much lower cost than what could be acquired from the company, this meant a lot of calls were supposed to be referred to this costly service.  This was enraging to many customers. Many of them, long time with the service were used to having their third party routers, gaming equipment, and computers problems resolved by us.”You did this for me last year, why do I  have to pay for it now?”, was a frequent comment. Why indeed.

Another cost cutting move involved what was called a truck roll. The service is provided to neighborhoods by a signal which is routed to homes by big boxes situated in neighborhoods. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes, cars wreck into them. Sometimes electrical storms take them out. Either way, they don’t send the signal to the customer’s modem. Sometimes the cable transporting the signal from the big box fails.  The technicians who do the repair on these physical components are extremely well paid, and rolling a truck is expensive. To  reduce the number of these truck rolls, a new policy was implemented. First, if a customer had a modem that was over 30 days old, we were required to send a new one. Shortly after, that policy was tightened to 15 days. If your modem was less than a year old, and provided by the company, a replacement would be free. If it was older than a year and out of warranty, and purchased through the company, one could be acquired for a ‘discounted price’ plus shipping. If it was a third party device, you had the choice of replacement at a significant cost over what you might pay if you went to a store and purchase one on your own. If you chose to go to some-mart and buy one, you forfeit any support that could be provided should you need help configuring it for the service, and would be referred to the costly support group. Aren’t you loving me right now?

But wait! You get a new modem by whatever method you choose, and the problem is not your device! You are going to know this either that day if you go out and purchase one/pay for configuration instructions, or about two days if you agree to let me send you one. Well, call back in. (We’ll talk about you calling back in more later) Now, I can get permission to send a truck! But wait, it is going to be a few days. So sorry.  Are you still loving me? Or, do I really suck?

It is really important to me that you still love me and I can convince you that I rock. See, when you finally get back online, today, tomorrow or two weeks from now, it is likely that you are going to get that customer satisfaction survey I mentioned. And when I mention it, I am going to present it in a way that does not communicate to you how critical your score for me is. I am going to ask you to score me high with verbiage that does not seem to be requesting a particular response. Since every call is recorded and potentially monitored, it could be a fire able offense. So we have treated you as we have, you’ve missed whatever purpose the interwebs serve in your life, your kids are driving you crazy because they can’t play some-box live, and now I have the nerve to ask you to rate my service highly. Do you really give a crap if I need your good feedback so I won’t be fired?

Or even if you have been mightily inconvenienced, maybe you understand that your problem isn’t something I can walk you through, or maybe you have or have had a job that uses these types of surveys so you first approach the questions with a reasonable attitude. But, damn it, this is a big company which has profited from you for a long time, and even though the questions are asking about me, you can’t help yourself. Suddenly, you are responding to the questions about my professionalism with the hatred you feel for another big corporation taking advantage of you, the little guy trying to check his bank balance online. Vehemence is communicated. My score is now the worst. In this company’s math, it is possible to score a negative 0. Now that you have vented with your survey you feel better.  When my manager gets your survey, I need to hide under my desk.

Call center jobs place high value on numbers. EVERYTHING is measured. Say you call in with a problem and we fix it. I run all the tests I have at my computer, you get online and all is well. Tomorrow, you have another problem, or I was so nice, you thought of another question you forgot to ask. Well, you know you aren’t going to get me back on the line, right? You are going to get another colleague of mine, and hopefully you are going to get a good response. Maybe you won’t. Whether or not your next conversation is good or bad, you have given me a hit on a metric that measures the number of people who call back within a specific period of time, say 72 hours. If you make your call back the same day, that metric is a hit on me for daily repeat rate. To this company, I am now a liability, as proven by their numbers. It doesn’t matter that when they listen to my calls, they can’t hear anything that isn’t warm, professional, and competent.

Her husband has pancreatic cancer? What a looser. There is an administrative person in some office somewhere getting calls from the insurance company. They want to know why this newbie employee who has only paid premiums for 5 months is costing them so much in medical treatment. Do not fool yourself that this does not occur. Can I prove it? Of course not. Remote administrative person calls manager of looser for all records. Look at these horrible customer satisfaction surveys for this month! Only six 100’s and 2 negative zeros? Get her badge right now.

And that, dear friends and gentle readers is the reason I now have time to write and read again on Open Salon. To some of you it may have seemed like forever, but really it was only five months.