VII: Management

A few of the managers had gone to university, done degrees in business management and started aeons ago when it was a respectable job. Most of them were the aforementioned sociopaths with delusions of grandeur.

I worked in a part of Derry that was predominantly Catholic. As such, very few Protestants worked there, but when they did, you knew it, either because some of the hard line republicans made their jobs uncomfortable, or they voiced their concerns. Loudly. Not that every Catholic-Protestant mixing ended in fighting, but in this area, it did. The Catholic managers were sure only to appoint Catholics to their teams and the same went for the Protestant. Being raised in a mixed area, this disgusted and confused me. I wasn’t used to people hating me just because of my name and I certainly wasn’t used to people assuming that my name meant I hated them back.

If the management weren’t being sectarian, they were usually on the doss. Which was fine by me: I was just a big a dosser as the rest of them, but many took it to new levels. Smoke breaks were plentiful, talking in huddled corners and drinking coffee was the order of the day. Any real work was usually pushed onto the mentors, who usually took it out  on us, the grunts. Not that all of them were like that, some were hard workers and were always pacing about, keeping people in check. The others just read the news online and complained about it. Sean, known for his gruff demeanour, was exceptionally well read and spent hours talking over the finer points of the middle eastern conflict before growling. Caroline was a spinster who owned about eight hundred animals. Billy had fingers like a spider.

VI: Customers

If it’s hard being on the business end of a call, imagine how it feels for the lowly operator. Yeah, most are, as I stated, sociopaths with delusions of grandeur, and many are just angry jackasses, but a portion are, like me, just trying to get on in the world, make up some money and do bigger and better things with their lives. Well, most of us want to; some of us actually do.

The customers aren’t bad people. You know yourself, most are just frustrated; many don’t actually know what they’re doing and they’re embarrassed or confused; some think that they’ve tried everything; others are, like the agents mentioned above, sociopaths with delusions of grandeur or angry jackasses. You can sort out the peas from the beans pretty quickly.

I worked in quite a new ISP, having only opened three months before I started. Being an established brand in telephone lines, a lot of the customers were elderly, and, as such, were named “silver surfers”, which is a bastardization of a Marvel character if ever I heard one. Some didn’t know how to use a mouse; many had to be instructed on the correct manner in which to open a web page and a select few needed to be reminded that “wireless” didn’t mean that you can throw the router in the bin after you get it: it still needed to be plugged in. Yes, I know, Mrs. Jenkins, with wires.

You do get jackasses, of course, and it’s fun to find out that they’ve forgotten to do something quite simple like turn on the wi-fi or use a splitter. The worst were those who you couldn’t help. Their problems lay in the actual wiring of the house or the exchange or somewhere in between. Many simply couldn’t have broadband, and are shocked why they were sold a product that had no use in their area. Others still had a problem with their order. A great big song and dance. Like I said before, even if you couldn’t help them yet filled in the form incorrectly or forgot to ask one tiny question (“Built in splitters, perchance?”) then it was your fault and you were in super shit trouble.

I did get lovely people as well, people who just wanted help. I got old ladies, thankful for the help now that their husband had passed on. I got men who were eager for a laugh, children who wanted to play online, single mothers who wanted their daughters to do well at school, men who sounded like women and laughed about it and vice versa.

I also spoke to Jade Goody’s mother, who, incidentally, fell into the latter category.

V: Procedure

You’ve probably rang up a call centre at some point in your life. I’ve been on the phone to several hundred, most of them during my time in Stream. You know when you ring them up and they transfer you to a different department? Probably not their fault. The phones are rigged on a queue system. They add you to a queue and all the calls come through in order. You can be on more than one queue at a time if they want. You could be on Tech Support and Customer Service at the same time, even if you’re not trained in both. A call could come through for bank details and you’d have no choice but to put them through to another department. Not your fault, not the customer’s fault, but you’ll probably get your face bitten off anyways.

You might call through to get your computer fixed and have to go through stupid steps like jump up and down three times, turn north and yodel. Like I mentioned before, there are usually a set of instructions that must be adhered to. If you’re caught skipping sections or going on instinct, you can get in a lot of trouble, especially if you’re wrong.

You also get timed on every call and the time between calls when you should be writing up a synopsis of the call but you’re probably goofing around and making fun of the customer. If you take too long on either, you can get in trouble. Again.

Even if you talk a customer through all the different steps and get the call done in record time, yet keep a bad log, you get in double trouble.

If you do everything right and send the details off to the next level and, God forbid, forget to ask the wind speed or the colour of their hair, you get in – Christ above! - triple trouble.

As you can see, the number of pressures upon a call centre agent are stupidly high for such a low-rung, low-paid, low-respect job. For a call centre agent, each call is as gruelling for them as it is for you.

IV: Friends

I started with a bunch of people, most of whom stayed until I eventually quit. Dan, a guy from Mayo who had an awesome goatbeard and kind of looks like the devil that appears on your shoulder when you’re faced with a moral quandary. Craig, a local Derry lad who had many piercings. Many. Tony, a Wexford or Waterford man who lived with his ex girlfriend and their two boys. Added to the motley crew were such characters as Greg, another pierced Derry lad; Allan, the sleazy Scotsman; Alan, a suicidal giant whose mother wouldn’t let him shave his own head; Emmett, a quiet guy who had drunken nights filled with public urination and fighting; Ryan, a South American thrash metal enthusiast; and Kieran, the asexual chain-smoker who wanted to be a robot.

I still speak to many of them today and a few are some of my best friends. Dan and his girlfriend Kyle are in Korea, with Craig joining them shortly. Ryan is on his way to America to start a new life.

If you learn anything from working in a call centre, it’s that the ones that are happy there have been there for a long time and are there for a reason, either financial difficulties or because they don’t have  anything better to do. If they’ve been there for more than a year, they either love the place or they’re saving for something better. Others don’t last longer than three months. I lasted nine.

It’s fun to listen to their stories of the weekend. You don’t just get struggling single parents or stop-gap students there, you get people who have nowhere else to go: people who have dropped out of school; people on leave from the army. Many of these people go out on the weekend because they don’t have anything better to do. They are not stupid, they are not ignorant or arrogant, they just don’t have anything planned, other than the next drink, next holiday, next child.

When they went out, they would have parties in their houses afterwards, drunkenly bringing back people they had just met, which occasionally led to altercations. Stories of girls being taunted about their breast implants leading to fights where other girls had their earrings and hair extensions pulled out; people pissing into other peoples drinks; self harm and spousal abuse. Dirty, awful, vile stories from individuals who are not scum, not the bottom of the pile, not criminals.

The fact that people in my position, university graduates, educated, good people could be capable of such casual acts of anger and violence scared me. It made me not want to be there. But I stayed, because, like them, I didn’t have much better to do.

III: Stream Ltd.

So I started looking for work in a call centre. I thought it would be a stop-gap, and in many ways, I was right. It was a hell of a long stop-gap though.

I popped into Grafton Recruitment on a Thursday, had and interview on the Friday and started training on the Monday. Adam had started working in Easons and was loving the extra cash. I didn’t need money for anything other than rent, the internet and food, so any extra funds could be put into buying new games for the Xbox 360. I had been given Bioshock and The Darkness for my birthday, had completed both and, dare I say it, I was bored. Gone were the days when you’d play Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog for hours, turn off the console and start again the next day from the very first level. I needed new gaming experiences.

The first thing they teach you in training is that the customer is not always right. They’re not. They’re jackasses. I was training to work in Tech Support with about ten other people, with a further eight or nine being trained in taking sales orders. We were going  to be on the phones in a week and I was nervous as hell. I had been on stage hundreds of times as part of my degree in Drama and yet talking to someone over the phone that I could not see or get attacked by was destroying me.

The Customer Is Not Always Right And They Are Jackasses. Even the most computer literate of individuals doesn’t understand what it is that ISPs actually do, and I was there to explain it to them. There are a series of buffers set up to limit human error in many cases. If a person couldn’t connect to the internet, I was there to tell them to switch their computer on and off, turn off their toaster and stand on their head. Anything extra was passed to another section and they told them basically the same thing and sent it on to another section until someone finally threw down their pencil in anger and wailed, “We fucked up, dammit, there was a problem with the order, I’ll flick the internet switch back to ON for you.”

We were being listened to all the time. Once a day, a random call would be pulled and checked. If we weren’t following procedures, we’d get cautioned. Even if I knew a customer just needed to reset their router or send their dilapidated 1996 computer off to the dump and get a new one, I still had to go through eight pages of dialogue before I did that. I started dreaming about computer screens. My mother once rang me up when I was sleeping and I told her that she had to verify her date of birth in order for me to help her. My ears started bleeding from the headset and once, I fidgeted with my chair for so long I wore a groove in the plastic armrest with my nails.

The beep of a new call in our ears became like a trigger word which would spout forth soulless nonsense from our mouths. To this day, I believe that I was being stalked by the tormented visage of BF Skinner.

II: Bollocks

Start at the start.

I graduated from university back in 2007 and decided to have a good summer, so I quit my job and spent the time with my friends in a house in Derry, Northern Ireland. I had recently purchased an Xbox 360 and we spent our time drinking, smoking and killing zombies in Dead Rising. I had recently split up with my girlfriend and decided I wanted to live a little, so I went on holidays with my sister to Crete, a holiday that my ex and I had booked before we parted ways.

Crete was good fun, we met some lovely people, had a good time and continued our tradition of smoking and drinking ad diabolicum.  Upon returning, me  and my flatmates continued to destroy our lungs and livers with suicidal gusto. The smokes were cheap, the drink was rum and the mornings were a painful haze of loud blending machines and forced smoothies. Once, I drank a whisked egg. It didn’t help.

The novelty didn’t last. Money was running low and  jobs were hard to come by. The recession hadn’t really started, but it was beginning to take root here and there. We needed jobs and we needed them post-haste. Either that or stop our vices. It was a difficult choice.

Micky was starting back to university for his final year and our lease was running out on the house. We needed a new place and, upon finding one, we continued our horrid ritual of painful mornings and forgotten evenings. Bank accounts were in the red and tempers were flaring. It was cold in our new house, three stories of single glazing and poor insulation. With Micky gone, we took on Mark, my best friend, who was doing a Master’s in Psychology. His bar experience led him to a job, but a washing machine incident caused him to be fired. He refused to use it all year.

Adam survived solely on oven chips and chicken nuggets. I had to live off pasta and cheap sauce. Shit was going down, big style. Dishes were piling, controllers were getting greasy and three guys living off of one internet connection was troubling. My new girlfriend left for London to finish her degree and being apart wasn’t as easy as I had expected. I had to get out. I couldn’t go to my parents, I had signed a contract for the house. I couldn’t get a job because nowhere was hiring. I had to do something constructive. I started driving.

Driving was fun, even though my instructor was awful, but it really tipped the scales on the money situation. I broadened my horizons. I looked elsewhere, away from retail. I had nothing on the horizon, I was just taking a “gap year”. I looked for office work.

Fucking call centres.

I: Introductions

Allow me to introduce myself.

I am a 20-something ex student who is currently working in a call centre as a sales representitive. You know those guys who ring you up wanting you to change your phone line and ISP? Yeah, I’m that bastard. I don’t like it and I’m not proud of it, and I swear to you, if something different came up, say, eating shit, I would take it. I would take it and I would thank you. I would rather eat shit than do what I do.

But I do it. I don’t do it for the praise. I don’t do it because I want to make the company I work for richer. I don’t do it for the hours or the status or the love. I do it for the money, the Benjimans, the cash. In this current economic climate, beggars really can’t be choosers, and call centres are more than happy to take people all. Even nowadays, their turnover is higher than Robert Downey Jr. in the eighties. He was a high man. And he wouldn’t get off my lawn.

Inspired by this post on Cracked.com, I have decided to chronicle my time in tech support and beyond.