Shit Finally Goes Sour, and The War of Pretension on the Morning Commute

My most recent description of SBLB as a great place to work thus far, with nicer customers and an overall better work environment has proven to be exactly what I feared it would as I typed the words: A terrible jinx I knowingly put on myself.

Today started like any other, spending the first half hour in our office chairs in a lazy and distracted circle around our new trainer (Karen’s boss) while she droned on about something I fail to recall, and then telling us to “go get ‘em!” on the phones. I took call after call, and around call number 22, I finally got a customer who said what I was wondering if anyone would say:

”This is just unacceptable. I’ve started banking with Big Bank, and they are just so much better. SBLB doesn’t know the first thing about customer service. Big Bank would do this for me. I can’t believe you won’t Fed Ex a replacement debit card for my daughter in Ireland. What is wrong with you people?! And Big Bank would never charge me for using a different bank’s ATM. This is absurd. I’m closing all my accounts. What, you can’t close it over the phone?! I HATE SBLB!!”

To her credit, Big Bank would Fed Ex a replacement debit card to a foreign country, if the banker had a sympathetic supervisor to approve it. And I could close accounts over the phone if certain requirements were met… but ATM fees? Come on now.

Anyway.

The worst part of the day was when I raised my hand for a “helper” to come over and look over some paperwork I had filled out regarding some account maintenance I had completed. Every question I asked was met with, “We do not need to explain this to the customer.” “It doesn’t matter.” “I don’t know the answer. Just tell them this, again.” “I don’t train that up here.” Then the incredibly frustrating incident where I had left required notes on an account after reversing an overdraft fee, manually typing in the customer’s account number into the appropriate system, and Alicia, the helper who saw me first, told me to go back and check if the notes had posted correctly. Assuming I had copied the account number I was notating, I pasted the number into the field and hit enter. A different account came up, showing no notes. I immediately realized the problem and was about to go in and type in the correct account number that I had notated, but Alicia freaked.

“No! Don’t do that! Just type in the account number over here, and delete the notes you left in the wrong account!” She grabbed for my mouse, which for some reason makes my skin crawl and starts a bubble of irrational fury well up in my chest, ready to attack the offending hand of Alicia. Luckily, I refrained. I hate when people try to takeover my damned mouse.

“No, Alicia, I left notes in the correct account. I typed it in, and didn’t realize when I went to check—“

”Just do this for me PLEASE.”

I do as she asks, and am proven right. She still doesn’t trust what I say (or rather, didn’t say, since she wouldn’t let me explain what happened) and tells me to type in the other account number. I say no, I type in the accidental one showing no notes, and then the correct one, showing the correct notes that I placed. She doesn’t even offer an apology.

This reminds me of several incidents at Big Bank where, upon being presented with a particularly difficult or challenging customer issue, I would call the Help Desk. 4 out of the 6 Help Desk bankers would often tell me that I ask too many questions that are insignificant, that the customer would never ask, anyway. This was usually their way of telling me that they didn’t know the answer to my question and were too lazy to use their resources (that I was told I wasn’t allowed to know about) to find out what needed to be done.

I ended up secretly accumulating several pieces of vital information during my year and a half at Big Bank that enabled me to avoid calling the Help Desk whenever possible when the issue required a system or phone number that only they had access to. With careful watching of keyboard strokes to see a password to a forbidden-to-lowly-phone-bankers system or web addresses of the “supervisor/helpdesk only” intranet site that detailed untold explanations of various policy and procedure, or utilizing my curious ability to quickly and accurately memorize random sequences of numbers to acquire more forbidden phone numbers to areas within the bank we were told didn’t actually exist, I amassed lists and lists of treasure, which I eventually spread out among my favorite coworkers upon my departure from Big Bank.

My view is that this should not have been necessary. I understand the need to provide customer service representatives with a basic role and not give too much responsibility or trust everyone with information that requires discretion, but to lie to me and the rest o the phone bankers about the existence of such things seems unethical.

I am beginning to realize that I am not a person cut out for convential employment. It's apparent that I want to know too many details about apparently irrelevant topics, that I am too quick to determine my superiors to be incompetent morons, and a bit too predispositioned have a bad attitude about whatever it is that I am paid to do, deeming me unfit for promotion.

I must quickly acquire the necessary motivation to beome my own employer.

As I went outside to have a cigarette on my first 15-minute break of the day, fuming over how I was fuming about something I expected to happen when I should keep a positive attitude about it all and just suck it up for a while, a 30-something woman smoking next to me started discussing the weather. There is a digital clock and temperature display on the outside of our tower, which is reflected in the building across the street, and the current temperature displayed backward seems to be the main source of conversation among the smokers, who otherwise would stand next to each other, puffing away in awkward silence.

“Looks like we finally hit a warm spell!” (The digital display read 1 degree.)

I agree, because it’s true, it feels much warmer today than it has the previous few days. She says that without the wind, it’s not so bad at all. On a whim, I tell her about a passage in a book I was reading on the bus this morning, where the author, living in Chicago, describes a summer day where the humidity and warmth seem to reach the rare Midwestern agreement, creating a beautifully comfortable day. I say this is similar to winters here, where the cold isn’t nearly as bad if the wind didn’t have to sneak up on you and freeze your face off.

Unfortunately, my attempt at conversation outside of the socially acceptable Weather Box that is the topic of nearly all conversations with strangers or acquaintances in this state falls on deaf and perplexed ears. She looks at me, surprised for a short moment, and starts a story that you can tell she was dying to share about her recent family reunion up North, where it was so cold that they weren’t allowed to hold their annual tubing activities outdoors as they always had.

I realize I have heard this story before, almost verbatim, as though she had rehearsed it or told it too many times throughout the week, because she was the random woman who told it to me on my smoke break yesterday morning, only she obviously doesn’t realize that I am the same person. I act and respond as though I did not already know that, upon being told there was no tubing that night, the family traipsed into the resort bar to warm up by way of root beer liqueur shots.

I wonder if she’ll tell me the same story, after breaking the ice with observations about the expected “heat wave” that is said to be occurring tomorrow, when I see her on my first break. Maybe by then she’ll realize that she’s already told all of the employees in the building and must move on down to Big Bank’s tower a few blocks down to share her too-cold-to-tube story with new ears.

The thing about where I work is that it's directly downtown, where I commute via bus caught at the local park and ride location, surrounded by sleepy working professionals with iPods and books and forbidden cups of gas station coffee that the bus driver graciously turns a blind eye to as we board. Although attempting to observe proper bus etiquette and avoid staring at fellow passengers, I can't help but steal quick glances at random people: their book titles, their newspaper of choice, their facial expressions, the way their heads jerk around as they accidentally fall asleep in the early-morning darkness. Most are wearing wedding rings, many women engagement rings, and most look patiently accepting of the long workday ahead of them. Their books are often fiction novels written by John Grisham or, in the case of a bold woman I noticed, Danielle Steel. The back of the bus is where you will usually find the more pretentious readers, in requisite Buddy Holly glasses, paging through worn-looking copies of books whose author is unfamiliar to me, occasionally glancing around to see who is paying attention to their choice of reading material.

On my third or fourth day riding the bus, I had a conversation with somebody about acceptable books to take with me. In the spirit of poking fun at the snobbery that runs amok in the back of the bus, we looked at the bookshelf, trying to find the most pretentious (and more than likely as of yet unread) book on the shelf. War and Peace? Nah, too obvious. Complete Idiot's Guide to Paganism? Got a good laugh, but deemed too likely to cause potential physical harm. Same goes for Complete Idiot's Guide to the Koran. How about The Jewish Mystique? No, no books about religion. Too controversial, likely to cause stares and provoke feelings of discomfort among the assumed sheltered suburbanites and soccer moms.

Simply bring along my iPod as an understandable copout was out of the question, as the stupid thing just broke, so I opted to just buy the paper every morning, as I had been doing already, to do the Times crossword. That is pretentious enough in itself; if it's a Monday or Tuesday, I'm like to complete the puzzle, which would make me look bookish and intelligent in a quiet, modest sort of way to the pretentious book snobs.

I win.

And So It Begins

Today is the third day of our real-life, on-the-phones training upstairs in the special training area, with our trainer, her boss, and two "experienced" call center representatives wandering around to help us with whatever problems we may encounter.

I was looking forward to this week after Hour One of classroom training, after coming to the realization that being read to by a 61-year-old woman out of a seemingly endless training manual in a dark and noisy basement, a half-assed storage room for IT equipment turned temporary training room, for two weeks straight was going to prove to be less than fascinating.

Admittedly, I had a bit too much to drink the Thursday night before the final classroom training day, during which we were to take our "final test," and called in sick Friday. Aside from waking up at 5:30am still drunk and quite belligerent, I also didn’t think I could sit through one more day in that classroom, so I utilized the company’s fairly liberal attendance policy and left two messages, one on the attendance hotline voicemail and one on the trainer’s, feigning illness. Turns out I didn't miss much, just more speakerphone calls and three hours of a test. When I came back Monday to choruses of "Are you feeling better?" I got to take the test alone, at Karen's desk.

It took me 2 hours, and this was after I went over and over each answer. When I finally turned it into Karen, she looked at my like I was loony and reminded me that I still had an hour left to take the test, and to please go back and check over my answers. I didn't tell her I already had, and decided to use the extra time to sit around, not taking calls, because even though I was excited to be done with classroom training, I also knew enough to understand that I would long for the days of sitting idly in a cube, staring at a computer screen without a phone attached to my head.

I scored 94% on the test. Apparently this was quite a feat, and I was one of only a few trainees to achieve this high a score.

Our on-the-phones training, thus far, has proven to be, dare I say, enjoyable? I don't loathe the minute that I have to log into the phones, and I have discovered that simply being incredibly kind and using a very quiet, yet clear voice in a very calm tone actually makes my customers happy, and makes me feel really good about helping them understand what's going on.

I also realized today that if I allow myself to be such a nice person on the phones during the week that Aunt Flow comes to visit and wreak havoc on my hormones, I must try desperately not to bawl when a nice-sounding recent college graduate and hopeful entreprenuer needs $80 worth of overdraft fees reversed to pay his bills that are due tomorrow, and I am only allowed to give him $50 back. Since the customers at Big Bank were self-righteous, entitled business owners with too much money and too many Southern California McMansions, I didn't care about being nice to them because 9 times out of 10, they were mean to me for no reason other than I was the unfortunate soul on the other end of the 800 number, and I didn’t give a crap if I got to reverse overdraft fees for them or not. I'd be indifferent no matter what timeof the month it was. At SBLB, customers may have significantly lower IQs than those at Big Bank, but that means that they are a thousand times happier to have a "banker" explain the ins and outs of how a check card works without being condescending, and they hang up wanting to birth your firstborn.

I can’t help but think that my current elation at the apparent simplicity and relative ease of this job will quickly diminish once I am out of training mode, but so far, so good. Only 5 more months until I am eligible for a promotion.

Role-Playing Trainwreck

One common thing that happens in call-center training classes is role-playing. While many of the trainees have probably had some call center experience in the past, there are always those who have not, and they're usually quite terrified of the idea of answering a phone call after a brief couple of weeks nodding off while listening to trainers and near-illiterate trainees read aloud from a manual. And for those of us with prior experience, it's always a good idea to get a feel for how system navigation will work while you're on a real call.

Today was role-playing day at SBLB.

Karen partnered us up and gave us each a real account number that we were supposed to pretend was ours and think of an interesting and vaguely challenging question to ask.

Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I do not harbor any ill will toward immigrants or people whose first language is not English. I do, however, think that if I were a recent immigrant whose English skills were not too great, that I would try to find employment in an area that did not require eight hours of constant telephone conversations and script-reading, at least until I was more confident in my fluency of the country's primary language.

This guy is going to be cussed out on a regular basis. Abrafo's partner, Donald, asked very simple questions ("What is my balance in my checking? What is my balance in my savings? Do I have any kind of overdraft protection?")

It took Abrafo over 20 minutes to answer these questions. He placed his "customer" on hold 5 different times. Donald had to repeat each of his account numbers 2-3 times for Abrafo.

Most everyone else's role-playing went fine, really. Of course each of us had minor issues navigating the unfamiliar system while trying to remember proper scripting and whatnot, but overall, it went fairly smoothly. It was clear, however, that, with the exception of Jeanette and I, not many of us are comfortable enough with banking terminology and strict regulations to start taking calls as soon as tomorrow.

Which, unfortunately, is exactly what's going to be happening.

This seems a very ludicrous, if not outright insane, idea. We will be taking these calls on speakerphone, using the projector screen to see the account we are to be servicing.

SPEAKERPHONE.

This means that everyone in the room, all 9 of the other people, will not be allowed to so much as sneeze during any calls. I asked how this could possibly be a good idea when almost everyone knows when they're put on speakerphone and hates it. What happens when the already angry caller asks, "Am I on speakerphone?!" The answer to that is, according to Karen, lie to the customer. Say that you are having phone problems, apologize, and continue servicing the call. What happens when someone is about to make a blatant and disastrous error and half the class says, "No! Click the OTHER button!!"

"Oh... that won't happen."

Er... okay. Sure. Because I really trust my gutter-minded, lack of internal censorship, constantly chattering fellow trainees to STFU during other people's calls. I'm sure I'll have all sorts of great stories about the impending disaster tomorrow.

Almost There

At SBLB, we are issued a very large training manual, which is said to contain all information necessary to enable us to properly deal with our customers. This manual is comprised of about a dozen sections containing detailed information on how to complete various transactions and maitenence on customer accounts. It's thicker than both of the Bibles I own, although I guess that's not a very accurate comparison since the manual is standard-weight paper with wider margins and--

Okay, what?

Anyway, since there is no really good and/or effective way to learn this information interactively without boring the shit out of the trainees while simultaneously catering to each of our nine individual learning styles, they just don't bother trying to do so. Our trainer, Karen, a 61-year-old woman who has been in the banking industry for over two decades, reads aloud to us. Each page of the manual, word for word.

Needless to say, when I occasionally look around the room, it is not uncommon to see four of the nine of us with droopy heads and closed eyes, sleeping soundly to the constant drone of Karen's shrill voice.

When I was at Big Bank, we'd have each trainee read a section aloud and discuss the information as necessary. This is essentially no different, as you're still being read to the majority of the time, but at least it varied a bit. And if you were especially bored that day, you could just volunteer to read a lot. Furthermore, at Big Bank, most of my fellow trainees were intelligent, articulate people who were both comfortable with and competent at reading out loud.

Here, at SBLB, two of the trainees speak a language other than English primarily and if I didn't read along with them when it was their turn, I would have no idea what they were saying. It's not that their accents were too difficult to understand, because they were fairly well-spoken, but when reading a language other than your native one from fifteen feet away while simultaneously trying to comprehend the material, it's common for these two trainees (whose names Karen still can't pronounce) to say something like "translate" instead of "transaction"while reading.

Then there are a couple of the other trainees who, obviously having spoken English throughout their entire lives, read choppily and can't pronounce words more than 7 letters long, or misread a comma to be a period and screw up the entire paragraph and make it even more difficult to understand. It's reminiscent of high school and the lack of literacy that runs rampant in an inner-city public school system.

So, imagine my relief and utter joy when we finished the last page of the book this afternoon.

Now we're on to more hands-on learning on our computers, looking up and servicing "test accounts."

This would be fine, if it weren't for Karen having apparently touched a computer for the first time somewhere around late 2006, asking me if I was sure I double-clicked on a link when the system I was logging into was taking longer than usual to respond. I didn't bother telling her that you don't need to double-click on a link, and that you don't have to move your mouse to the scroll bar if you have a scroll button on your mouse.

Three more days left, then on to the phones, where we take calls with a few other trainers and supervisors/helpers assisting us.

I never thought this would come out of my mouth, but I cannot wait to get on the phones.

Call Center Slut

When I worked for a fairly popular photo lab/camera store in my teens and into my early twenties, I noticed that the majority of my coworkers in the lab portion of the store had either already worked for a different photo lab, or left to accept a job at a different one. We were Photo Lab Sluts. There seemed to be no other job we could do, or were brave enough to do. We were lazily content with our 8-hour days of printing 100 rolls of strange, useless, and sometimes pornographic customer film, boxing it up, and selling it back to them. We were accustomed to re-doing multiple prints because "the sky doesn't look blue enough, I swear it was way bluer when I was there," and politely not making eye contact with the "gentleman" who came in once a week with multiple rolls of film of his elderly girlfriend peeing on fire hydrants. We didn't know how to do anything else and were terrified of venturing into other lands, like places with offices, or, god forbid, freelancing with no promise of a weekly paycheck.

People in the lab that I worked in were sometimes there full-time and spent their free time drinking with employees from other labs in the district (like me), or they were also students at prestigious art schools, majoring in photography (also me, a few years later). The funny thing was, the people that graduated from these schools didn't bother looking for better employment afterward. Some people had masters degrees in photography or art or art history, and contentedly spent their days as a lab rat, making no more than $9.00/hr. No one wanted to join the real world and use their degrees, even though $9.00/hr wouldn't pay for half of their student loans after the grace period (do you know how expensive art schools are?!).

The same can be said for call centers.

In either of the two centers I've worked in, there were at least a couple fellow trainees that were call center veterans. They'd worked for a computer company in their help desk department, for a different bank, perhaps a check company, maybe even a short stint as a telemarketer.

In my current class, there are two of us. Whereas I worked for Big Bank, Jeanette worked for Other Big Bank, in their call center. Another of our fellow trainees (Near Retirement Laid-Off Stereotype) worked for another large financial institution in their call center, specializing in stocks and bonds.

It seems that Our Type just can't get enough.

We are the Call Center Sluts.

Jeanette and I often trade battle stories on smoke breaks and, for some reason, our trainer seems fascinated by the fact that two other trainees have experience with our two biggest competitors and constantly asks us questions.

"We will reverse fees relating to the new policy with the ATM deposit cut-off, because that's understandable. I bet you guys didn't reverse anything at Big Bank and Other Big Bank, though, huh?"

"I hear that Big Bank's training classes have, like, 25 people each, and the class is in a big, beautiful classroom. Is that true?"

(The answer to both questions is "no," but that's beside the point.)

Apparently, both Big Bank and Other Big Bank have reputations around SBLB.

Anyway. As hard as I try to understand why anyone would willingly subject themselves to Life in a Call Center for longer than absolutely necessary to work their way up in the company or perhaps earn "experience" in the industry the call center exists in, I think I may have figured it out.

While everyone who works in a call center and actually quits at some point declares with fervent certainty that they will "NEVER work in another call center EVER again," they realize that their experience in that call center (any call center, really) pretty much guarantees them a job in any call center ever created for the rest of their lives.

Not to mention, call centers are an incredibly structured workplace, which is favorable among some people, and since they don't expect you to enjoy your job in the slightest, they allow more absences than any other job you have ever held. Because of the high turnover in most call centers, they also pay more than $10/hr (usually more in most centers) as an incentive. For the average single 20-something, recent layoff victim, or previously under-employed single mother, this is reason enough to apply, and stay.

To backtrack a second here: Strangely, while the Powers That Be declare previous call center experience to be a plus, they fail to tell you that it really doesn't matter at all. If you are reasonably competent at speaking out loud and can form something vaguely resembling a sentence while attempting to maintain a positive voice tone, they will hire you. Nothing else matters. Call centers are so notorious for their high turnover that they can't afford to be picky. Typically, the more intelligent and ambitious the call center employee, the sooner they will go AWOL in search of greener pastures.

...Of course, there are exceptions. I like to consider myself to be one, but perhaps time will prove otherwise.

Back Into the Trenches

After 6 months away from the Land of Call Center Madness, I have decided to go back.

Before I delve into the reasons for my re-entrance into what many declare to be the worst type of job imaginable, allow me to divulge some background information:

When I was in my late teens, working in various stores in various suburban malls around my metro area for little more than minimum wage, I often thought, upon dialing an 800 number to bitch about something gone awry in my checking account or cell phone bill, that the person on the other end of the line must have the easiest job imaginable. I mean, all this bitter- and jaded-sounding person speaking condescendingly to me has to do is answer a phone all day. And I hear they get paid a lot! How do I find one of these jobs?

To my immediate horror and eventual delight my little sister got a job at a Big Bank in our area, in their call center. She, at age 18, would answer phone calls from the Bank's small business customers and service their requests pertaining to their checking and savings accounts, and also loans, lines of credit, and credit cards. She was also required to participate in what the Bank called "suggestive selling," also known as attempting to convince existing customers to saddle themselves with hundreds of thousands of dollars more debt, but she wasn't too concerned with that, seeing as how they would be starting her at what seemed like a huge wage for a kid barely out of high school: $12.27 an hour.

Needless to say, I was insanely jealous, as I was, at the time, working part time at a Big Box retailer for a measly $8.75 an hour.

Luckily for both of us, Big Bank had an employee referral program that gave her money if she referred someone to the company who stayed for 6 months. I interviewed and was hired soon after.

After 6 blissful weeks of the fun and games that made up classroom training, they sent us on our way, to our little cubicles in a cheerful, well-lit 2nd-floor call center, where we would become yet another cog in the system of suggestive selling and cold-transferring our customers into oblivion.

After a year and a half of such nonsense, I simply stopped showing up, determining unemployment and lack of any income to be far preferable to my increasing lack of sustainable mental health and quickly escalating blood pressure, not to mention increasing body mass acquired from hours of sitting on my ass, eating junk food that the call center Powers That Be practically force-fed us in order to placate us into submission.

I wasn't unemployed for long. Two weeks later, I forayed into the cutthroat world of serving at a large seafood chain and found the majority of its customer base to be extremely poor tippers and the management staff to be extremely less-than-forthright about the hours they wanted to schedule me and my fellow employees, and set off to find more stable employment in the industry I knew best, and even liked a little: Banking.

Now, I thought, "I will NEVER set foot in another call center, ever, ever again." I thought, perhaps, that I could use that year and a half of banking experience at the Big Bank to secure a job at another financial institution, where I could make sure I never had to talk on the phone, and could possibly steer clear of any customer interaction, period.

The only place that I sent my resume to that asked me for an interview was Semi-Big Local Bank (SBLB), for the Customer Service position in their call center.

I (obviously) took the job.

Today was my first day.

Like Big Bank (I will notice that many, many things here are just like Big Bank), SBLB has a training class that lasts a few weeks. Upon walking into your training class for the first time, there are many feelings that might go through your brain: Who will I be stuck sitting next to for the next month? Will this be just like school? Will I make friends? Will I be the nerdy one? Will I ask all the stupid questions? Will there be any other smokers there, or will I have to quit because I'll be lonely outside alone?

Well, I walked in this morning about 10 minutes early, and was the second person to arrive. The other trainees/new hires fit the stereotypical bunch of people that generally work in call centers:

The Recent Immigrant or two, excited about what seems to a good job opportunity that can help them with their journey to the American Dream by way of promised "internal promotion" and "advancement opportunity";

The Fucking Weirdo;

The Lower-Income Minority or three who may have a couple of children to support and are ecstatic to have gotten a job without any prior relevant experience or required college degree that pays them more than minimum wage;

The token Near Retirement Age person who, by unfortunate circumstances beyond his or her control, lost their long-term and high-paying career or business and is now forced to find employment elsewhere, and this is their last hope. You can tell them by their collective defeated look;

Three or four College-Age Kids who, upon graduating college bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, realize that their 6-month grace period on their multi-thousand dollar student loans is a week away from ending, and they still can't find job that pays more than minimum wage, so they decide to sell their souls to this financial institution, figuring they only have to do it for a couple months before their superiors determine their degrees to be sufficient reason for advancing them quickly and painlessly into a higher-paying and less soul-sucking position within the growing company.

I most closely identify with the last Stereotypical Call Center Employee, although I never actually finished that degree. I thought I could bypass that little detail by “working my way up.”

We'll see if SBLB proves to be any different.