In which I bitch about the job market.

I work for a distributed call center. (Yes, I’m white trash like that. Ye gods.)

A year ago, I moved off phones into a chat pilot, which was great. They made us take three chats at a time for awhile, which was fucking insane, but chats are chats and not calls.

Well, it’s been cancelled.

No more chat pilot. Finis. (Actually, it’s been turned into a proper department, so that’s why the pilot is over, but the contract to work it was given to another call center in Mumbai.) So, tonight, I was moved back, by my call center employer, to inbound phones.

It fucking SUCKED.

Taking calls for Giant Cable Company’s home security product is rough:

– One guy was a dick to me because he failed to pay his bill and got disconnected. This was somehow my fault.
– Another only responded to 40% of the things I said, and was unintelligible when he did respond (because the mic on his phone was garbage). He grunted and panted a lot. I was not able to solve his issue and he refused a tech visit.
– Another claimed slow internet (that diagnostics did not support; I think the real issue was a virus-infested laptop). Did the troubleshooting, issue not resolved, offered to send a tech. Caller was enraged that there weren’t any tech appointment times she liked, took it out on me.
– Another person was pissed because an install appointment had been moved for no apparent reason, which I completely understand. My department doesn’t handle installation appointments. Customer demanded a call back from the appropriate department the next day. Well, I can’t schedule callbacks from any department, not even my own. Sorry for the frustration. (You’d think they’d build a tool for that, but no: customers can schedule callbacks on the website, but it’s automated and just throws them into the goddamned queue with everyone else. It’s a raging insult, but hey, that’s corporate American customer service for you.)

I’m nice to people. I listen and empathize. I mirror. I try. I have very little ego left about any of it and don’t really take it personally when people are mad, but there’s so little I can actually do to help. I get paid (very little) to be ineffectual, replaceable, and to get yelled at. That’s how my job is designed. And it’s disappointing and frustrating for me. I used to be a fucking sysadmin. I had root on boxen, FFS!

I don’t have any authority. I don’t know the why or how. The company is too big, too broken, and too greedy. I am a cog; I am replaceable. Anybody who can sit in a chair can do my job. Turnover is fantastically high and the job is designed to take any warm body. I am expected to have no expertise.

The job itself is hostile: by the time my extension rings, the customer is already pissed off about navigating the IVR, authenticating, and long hold time. Tools don’t really work, I can only support some things and not others.

I have to say “I don’t know” a lot (but I’m not supposed to because the Quality Assurance document says “take ownership” right on it). Volume is always really high, because that’s how call centers work: they have historical call volume for this half hour on this day for the past decade, and never over-schedule employees. The majority of items tracked by metrics are hostile to customers and employees both (the shorter the calls, the better? really?) but are measured anyway and treated as real data.

You can’t say “deliver world-class service” and “keep your calls as short as possible” and mean both.

There’s almost nothing that isn’t terribly, terribly broken.

I do get to work from home, braless and shoeless, with no commute. But I also get shit on by both sides: tools that don’t work, problems I cannot solve, angry callers rightly frustrated by standard corporate American bullshit.

Obviously they told me chat was going away, so I’ve been job hunting. (Turned out it went away in 4-6 weeks rather than 4-6 months, but they did tell me, damn them to hell.) One place turned me down, twice, no idea why. Three others didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my application. A few national work-from-home places that say they hire in Minnesota have no Minnesota positions available, likely due to a minimum wage hike (expected in four years, if I understand it correctly).

I live in Uptown, so there’s work in the neighborhood but it’s mostly food service. I applied at a deli and a coffee shop; neither replied. I’d never get a front-of-house job because I’m no longer young and hot, don’t even want to bake pizzas, I haven’t waitressed in decades, and the office jobs want young, enthusiastic, hard-working college kids to work shit hours for ten bucks an hour, or people with obscure licenses.

I’m feeling like shit about it. I hate my job and want a better one, but work, as I’ve been saying for years and years, is awful. Low pay, awful hours, and this horrific expectation of total devotion to the job on the employee’s part, with nothing whatsoever in return from the employer! Random scheduling, uncomfortable environments, no bennies, no holidays, no hope of promotion. You’re just supposed to bust your ass and say thank you for the abuse. It’s a shitshow.

I don’t want to get abused by angry callers five nights a week. I don’t want to apologize for shit that shouldn’t be broken in the first place. I don’t want to pretend my audits aren’t ridiculous, nor do I want to pretend enthusiasm for a shitty, hostile position that has never given me a raise or a holiday off.

But I also don’t want to get an equally shitty other job, with a commute. Working from home means you don’t have to spend a dozen hours every week getting ready, dressed (fully suited up in wintertime just to step outside), walking, bussing, and walking, just to get to and from work. Working from home means you have half as much laundry. My work-from-home job is awful, but it’s at home. I can forgo makeup. I can not wash my hair for a week. I can wear what I slept in.

I want a job where they appreciate me for being useful, intelligent, dependable, and friendly. I’d like to work efficiently, do well at it, and feel decent about it. I’d like to make more than ten bucks an hour. I’d like my schedule to be the same every week, or get a decent amount of warning when it changes; I’d like to get holidays off. I’d like to do this work in a reasonably comfortable environment, with, like, climate control. I’d like to be able to walk there, or take a single bus. I’d like to have tools that work, I’d like to be able to actually solve problems or produce measurable output. And then I’d like to go home and not think about work until it’s time to go back again the next day.

How the fuck is that unreasonable?

And yet, it is. If you’ve read job descriptions for non-specialist work in the past ten years, apparently it is.

(What I would give to have my old U-B job back! It was part-time, I had a desk, it was 5 blocks from home, decent pay, and I got most major holidays off!)