Phone Monkey #1
Phone Monkey #1
(Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Insanity in Everyone)
I spent part of last summer working in a call center, providing technical assistance and sage advice to people from all walks of life. If there’s one thing I can safely say I learned from my time as a phone monkey, it is this: people are fascinating, terrifying creatures.
A job in any call center starts with training. My training consisted of two weeks in a room with 20 other people, and a heater that nobody could figure out how to shut off. To compensate, they cranked up the air conditioning as high as it would go. Al Gore, eat your heart out.
My training partner was a man I affectionately dubbed Buffalo Bill, because I was pretty sure he wore the skin of the innocent as a bathrobe at home. He talked to himself, and only himself, for the duration of the training period. This in itself is not so remarkable, but the conversations he had with himself made my skin crawl. He only spoke up, twice. Once was on the third day, when the instructor made reference to the fact that call centers have a high rate of employee turnover, and that only the thick skinned lasted. Bill jumped to his feet, looked the Indian girl sitting across from him straight in the eye, and yelled “WELCOME TO THUNDERDOME, BITCH!” He sat down immediately and was silent for the next two weeks.
On the very last day of training, the day that was dedicated to rehashing anything anyone might be unclear on, Bill decided he was done. Someone made a comment, the instructor corrected it, and Bill lost his mind. He started shouting “NO! NO! You’re WRONG, GODDAMNIT!”, flipped off the entire class and both instructors, and ran out. That was the last of Buffalo Bill, but it was only the beginning of my encounter with the unfiltered side of my fellow man.
Something strange happens when a customer picks up the phone. At some point, while they’re punching in the phone number, an inflated sense of self-entitlement balloons into existence. Whatever filters they posses in their day to day lives are set aside. They will say and do whatever they please, because they’re paying and it’s your job to bend over and take whatever they dished out. My very first call went something like this:
“Hi, thanks for calling —–, this is Kenneth. How can I help you?”
“YEAH, I GOTS A PROBLEM WITH MY BILL!”
“You’ve actually reached technical support. You want billing.”
“WHAT?! WHAT KIND OF MADHOUSE ARE YOU RUNNING OVER THERE? ARE YOU AN IDIOT? I WANTED TO SPEAK TO SOMEONE ABOUT MY BILL!”
“What button did you press?”
“JESUS, I DUNNO! I MASHED THE KEYPAD TILL SOMETHING HAPPENED!”
Unbelievable. Not every caller was a lunatic, and most people were just glad I could help them. Sometimes I couldn’t be of help, for one reason or another, such as this call for my third day:
“Hi, thanks for calling —–, this is Kenneth. How can I help you?”
“Yeah, hi, I um… need your help.”
“That’s what I’m here for. What can I do for you?”
“Well see, I’m playing internet poker, and I’m having some trouble…”
“Ah, I see. Is your internet cutting out?”
“No, I’m cheating and they keep catching me. Can you help me cheat without getting caught?”
As much as I’d have like to have helped him, it wasn’t worth my job at the time.
During the day I took many calls from elderly people who just wanted someone to talk to. The duty managers had specifically warned against “letting old people ramble”, but that didn’t sit right with me. I wasn’t going to sit there for an hour chatting, but if the queues weren’t busy, I usually spared a few minutes to chat. It was either that or rush on to some jackass who’s internet wasn’t working because his computer was turned off (I got a few of those).
The truth is that there was no point in rushing, because there was always going to be another call after I got finished with the current one. At the very least, the elderly are hilarious. One caller shouted “MY WIFE AIN’T RIGHT!”, before I could greet him, and then went on to tell me the problem he was having with his TV. An easy fix, so I spent 10 minutes afterward listening to him tell me about all the places he had lived. Turns out he had lived in some really interesting places, like Morocco and Egypt. He was a fascinating character, but someone I could have easily passed by if I was in a rush.
That was the call that convinced me I wasn’t cut out for call center work. Call center conversations are by their very nature the antithesis of a strong connection. Too fast, too rushed, too scripted. People are endlessly entertaining, and they’re fascinating if you let them speak, and I just couldn’t do that while I was on the job, as much as I tried. Working in a call center is great if you’re uninterested in the lives of others. Seriously, if you can cut people off and read from a script over the chatter coming from the other end of the phone, you’d be fine answering phones. I’d like a little more out of life, so I handed in my headset and left.
My time answering phones was brief, but I took away a couple of good stories and a newfound respect for the lunacy that lurks behind the eyes of the people I meet. Careful who you snap at, because they just might snap back.
