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.

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~ by Shane on September 24, 2009.