With an effort, I pull myself out of the stupor and nudge the guy next to me. “Honda 3.” I said, intimating my desire to take my break “on-the-dot” at 3am. I must have spoken a bit louder than necessary as he momentarily flinches. I realize my headset is still hinged to my head. Still, the message gets across as he consequently nods in agreement. He is still talking to a customer but just delivered the familiar “anything else I can help you with?” segue to the closing spiel. I have been “avail” for almost 17 minutes, which means I am available to take in a call. I am hoping I don’t get one in the next six minutes.
His customer appears to have raised an after-thought question about something I suspect to be likely irrelevant. But we at computer tech support always aim to deliver the best possible customer experience. We provide answers to even the most obtuse of customers’ queries like, should they or should they not place their computers near the microwave oven, or why the computer’s built-in mug holder isn’t stable enough--obviously referring to the optical drive tray. The dense ones who ask equally dense questions tend to forget what you tell them, anyway. So expect the same customer to be calling back next week for a similar, if not related, problem. We reach full circle, and the vicious business cycle is perpetuated. Not everyone is intended to win.
You get that nagging feeling that everything you do, no matter what and how, leads to nowhere. Back in college, I studied economics with such idealism I hoped to make a difference in the world. I had this fervent desire to address real-world problems like poverty, unemployment, mass hunger and even clinical depression. Impressionable as we were, students like me were taught how every profession should work towards its own dissolution. When we’ve eradicated all of the world’s problems, there would be nothing left for us to do. It wasn’t long before I realized it doesn’t exactly work this way in the real world. Current human society has this overbearing tendency to delve in a constant cycle of generating needs. Artificially induced needs. A principle the call center industry openly affirms.
Is there a solution to every problem? Under otherwise normal circumstances I would readily say yes. But a qualified yes. The solution may not be available now but it will be given time. There’s also the fact that although the solution is correct and makes sense to many, expect that it will inspire resistance from a privileged few who have everything to gain by keeping everything as it is.
Three years ago, I tucked my tail in, swallowed my pride and applied for this job. Former colleagues and close friends had frowned on the idea of me working at a call center and said it was an outright waste of my talent. Whether I have talent or not is not as relevant as one’s desired professional route. An older colleague, wisened in his years, put it most aptly: you’re in this job because you’ve failed in what you were supposed to do in the first place. Priceless, irrefutable knowledge.
The fact is, no sensible person ever dreamed of becoming a call center representative. But I deserve this job. It’s the only job that’s fit for the unfit. A solution readily available but not completely acceptable. It’s the most appealing and reasonably paying alternative for people who literally celebrate the half-ness of their humanity; the semi-skilled, semi-equipped professionals. When there’s a “semi” attached to your title, you can safely assume you’ve reached that undesirable state of mediocrity.
I realize now that I deserve it. I just don’t want it.
What I dread most about avail times is not the uncertainty that comes with the wait. It’s precisely the moment of not doing anything that opens up opportunities for self-reflection. Hard thoughts that you try as much as possible to avoid. It’s during these moments that I retreat into a state of regret, thinking about what I have accomplished so far in the past three years of working here.
Absolutely nothing.
A bubble popped up on my computer screen from the internal messaging system. Team, please adhere to your scheduled breaks. The guy next to me received the same message. No ACW, please. We have high avail. A random send-to-all. Impersonal but nonetheless thought-provoking.
The name on the message is familiar, someone from a wave of employees hired not so long ago, perhaps less than a year ago. He’s the new operations manager and everybody hates him. I don’t personally know the poor fellow. I usually suspend disbelief–give every person I am unfamiliar with due benefit of the doubt. He could be a kind person with commendable qualities for all I know. But unfortunately in his case, I am unable to commiserate. His untimely and dubious appointment overtakes any respect he may or may not deserve.
What I come to hate most in this company is that performance, loyalty and dedication account for nothing. What happened to innovation, initiative, creativity and excellence? Just bare concepts devoid of any real-world value, aside from being useful catchwords during occasional business reports, token organizational meetings and tired pep talks. Here comes a guy with no managerial background whatsoever who gets appointed (not promoted) to a sensitive position that may spell the success or doom of the company. Until eight months ago, he was a virtual unknown. His name has never appeared in the list of monthly reports that highlighted top performing agents (or even the bottom ones, for that matter). He spends more time outside the smoking area than inside the operations floor, mingling with the people who matter.
Three more minutes. I humor myself and pursue the thought. Perhaps objectively, to get ahead, knowing the right people and getting close to them is a necessary and distinctive skill. After a few months, you think you get used to the standard. People are recognized not for what they know but who they know. Ultimately, it’s the management that stands to lose if they narrow their choices within their own immediate circle. It’s similar to creating needs. You can invent a superficial sense of loyalty by forming a small cabal of friends but not actually have it. Besides, you surround yourself with stupidity long enough you forget to notice it’s abnormal. What is more frustrating is how they try not to make a big deal out of it, like trying to justify chronic infidelity to your adolescent kids.
The clock finally turns to 3:00 and I casually key in Auxiliary Work Mode 1. My colleague does the same and we leave our workstations to proceed to the smoking area outside in front of the building.
As we saunter towards the exit I realize that what motivates me to remain here is the normal excuse made by the most jaded of individuals – cutthroat economics dictates that you can’t live without money. In my more than three years of working here, I have obsessed in making the best out of the situation. And yet, there are certain conditions that prevent one from performing to the fullest, much less reaping the rewards of one’s conscientious efforts. I have observed one major factor that characterizes this business – it is fueled by self-interest, which isn’t the noblest of professional attributes.
While self-interest may be a strong motivational factor at first, it is hardly a lasting one. Tenuous at best, self-interest can immediately foster competition. But your principles are always held in suspect. You ask the question: why do you do your job? Surely it’s not born out of a genuine desire to help customers, to serve clients and assist co-workers. The hard fact is, you look after others ultimately because you are looking after your own. But if you don’t really believe in what you are doing, if there is no passion, can you really last in this type of environment? You need to steel yourself and stifle your humanity if you intend to just work from one paycheck to the next.
Everything becomes a black box. Without any hard-set fundamentals, everything becomes a variable. You don’t know what you want except what the bosses want. They, in turn, want only what the clients want--foreign business people who make occasional visits to ensure that we make good with our deliverables. For three years, working in a call center environment has become a dehumanizing experience for me – the ride a veritable journey to regression and ultimately the death of one’s sensibility.
Each 15-minute break is a lesson in reality. We arrive at the designated smoking area and I get a chance to observe the people around me outside of their usual, impersonal wok-mode shells. It’s amazing how strangers can be so eager to share their personal thoughts, their immediate circumstances and real-life struggles. Some of course can’t wait to relate their most recent experience with a customer, and how the call went and such. But these least interest me. While the boisterous ones are dull and transparent, the quiet ones--those who are deep in thought smoking silently alone--are the more revealing.
I survey the surroundings and see a group of young people in the middle of the smoking area, laughing and bantering, having the time of their lives. But on one corner, smoking alone and scarcely hidden underneath the blanket of early morning darkness, I find what I’m looking for. A middle-aged man, frail and disfigured, his hair thinned by age, his shoulders collapsed under the invisible burdens he carries. He looks down absently on his decrepit, old-fashioned shoes. “Shoe-gazer,” I said to myself barely containing a dry laugh. For what seemed like an eternity of ten minutes he does not move, except to draw and exhale smoke from his cigarette. Each breath he lets loose is an obvious sigh of frustration.
Despite the obscurity granted by the darkness and the collective fog of second-hand smoke, I sense an uncanny clarity in the nicotine-filled substance of his ways. His time appears to be up and he flicks the cigarette butt casually into the trash bin. As he steps into the light at the building entrance, I notice the backside of the shirt he wore. It was an old shirt frayed by sweat and years of patience. A veritable window to his past that amounts to absolutely nothing within this workplace. On it, written in bold print, was the word, FACULTY.
My 15 minutes is also up but somehow at the back of my mind the thought of returning to work seemed bearable, at least for the moment. I follow his footsteps with renewed assurance, knowing that I still have youth for an excuse.▼
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*Although this is a piece of fiction, the author did work as a technical support representative in a reputable call center for almost three years. He was supposed to be up for promotion but curiously the account closed shop a few months after he received such a notice. He now develops, implements and manages development programs for an NGO catering to the needs of street children.
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