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Training took two weeks, and in retrospect, was the most enjoyable aspect of the 16 months I spent with the company. There were only four people in the class, so we got through things pretty quickly. Of course, some aspects of it were obvious time-fillers, such as the half-hour video explaining how to adjust our chairs, but who was going to complain? We were getting paid to learn how to swivel, for God’s sake.
But there were other exercises that were surprisingly useful, such as performing test calls with each other. For this, one person would get on a computer that was connected both to a telephone and a TTY machine, which is what most deaf people use to make calls. One person would use the phone, which was located in another room, and another would use the TTY machine, and the operator would relay the conversation between the two of them.
Two of my classmates didn’t go for creativity when making these test calls. They would stick to mundane conversations like, “When will you be home?” “In ten minutes.” “Okay, bye.” “Bye.” Weak stuff.
My friend Isaac and I would at least try to make it enjoyable for whoever had to type and read. My favorite exchange came when he pretended to be a doctor and asked if we could move my appointment to a later time.
My response: “Okay, but I don’t know how much longer I can take the itching.”
Of course, the calls we performed in class didn’t always end well. In the middle of the first week, we began to call our loved ones using the TTY machine so we could see what it was like to be on a call from a deaf person’s perspective. I was performing the operating duties for a girl classmate and her boyfriend, who appeared to be on his lunch break. We had been told repeatedly to type everything that was heard, whether the speaker intended it for broadcast or not. So when the boyfriend, frustrated at the girl’s insistence that he take part in this conversation, muttered a phrase one isn’t supposed to use in mixed company, I had no choice but to type it. The class reacted with a mixture of horror and mirth.
The relationship ended shortly thereafter.
At the end of the first week, we began to sit in on calls with the real operators, who worked upstairs. The calls I heard my first time up there were dull - just as ordinary and boring as the ones that had been made up in class. They were all parent/child or husband/wife conversations, and they never dealt with anything interesting, like ritual cannibalism or abnormal growth of body hair.
When we came back downstairs, I soon realized I was the only one who hadn’t learned what the business was really all about.
“Did anybody get one of those scam calls?” someone asked.
“Yeah,” the others said.
“What do you mean, scam calls?” I asked.
Our instructor sighed, and then patiently explained that if people didn’t have a TTY machine, they could use the Internet to make calls. Some of these people, it seems, had access to stolen credit cards. Mountains of them. So many cards that if the person on the other line told them that their card had been denied, they would be able to substitute an unlimited number of others in its place. And with these cards, they would attempt to purchase any number of products.
Most of the people doing the scamming seemed to hail from Nigeria, which meant that their grasp of the English language was not as strong as it could have been. For example, while a native speaker might say, “I would like to buy 50 T-shirts,” the scammer might say something like, “I will like for purchases 50 pieces of T-shirt.”
If the request were read out as typed, it would elicit a response such as, “Huh?” This would send the scammers (in my mind, anyway) scrambling for a dictionary, because it would often take about four minutes for a response to be sent. Usually it would be the same flawed statement as before, but it would have about ten GA’s behind it. (GA stood for “Go ahead,” and was supposed to conclude each comment from both parties, so everyone would know when to speak without interrupting.)
At first, these calls were hilarious.
This did not last.
I asked the trainer, “Is there any way we can get rid of these calls? Can we hang up on them at all?”
She was vehement. “No. It could be a deaf person on the line. It usually isn’t, but you never know.”
As I later learned, the real reason for the lack of hang-ups stemmed from a contract the company had. They couldn’t hang up on anybody if they wanted to stay in business, illegal activity or not. Which is ironic, considering that the constant deluge of fraud calls invariably made most of the employees annoyed with any call, even the legitimate ones. I could have tried to explain to my trainer that if we really wanted to help our customers, we should come up with a procedure that would allow us to hang up on the frauds and still keep the contract, but it was too early in my career for me to have such insight. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. A hang-up procedure was instituted in my final weeks at the company, but there were so many things that had to happen before the hang-up could take place it was barely worth it. And then, of course, a new fraud call would come in five seconds later, so it just ended up being a vicious cycle. That’s business for you.
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Thanks for stopping by! More tomorrow.
- TJG
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