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After a while, I decided to switch to the day shift. At the time, I told people that it was because I was tired of the boredom, the sometimes 15-minute chunks between calls, but in actuality, I switched because I had begun to do calls in my sleep. Because of the late hours, there wasn’t much of a gap between the time I got off work and the time I went to bed, so I would often find myself waking up and saying, “Thank you for calling, this is... huh?” So I decided to make the change.
In retrospect, this was probably the first (well, second) element of my downfall within the company.
For starters, there weren’t only more fraud calls, there were more calls in general. Even though it made the day go a lot faster, it also made things a lot more stressful.
It really cut into my ability to read on the job, too. While improving my literacy wasn’t the reason I had applied for the position, it did end up being the reason I halfway enjoyed coming to work. I finally had the opportunity to finish all those books I had either not made it past the first chapters of, or just plain lied and said that I had read. (I would like to take this opportunity to make a formal apology to the estates of Joseph Heller, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mikhail Bulgakov.) During the day, it was impossible to read even a paragraph most of the time because there was rarely a call-free gap of 15 seconds, much less 15 minutes.
There were a lot more business calls during the day, too. I didn’t realize it before (again: idiot!), but people rarely, if ever, do business after, well, business hours. Even mundane things, like setting up a doctor’s appointment, are impossible after 5 p.m. most of the time. Not that I minded too much, but these calls could be the most embarrassing – far worse than anything a half-wit fratboy could concoct. Luckily, almost everyone who works in doctors’ offices is familiar with TTY calls and understands it’s not you but the deaf person who’s calling. Even so, it was hard not to remind them to make that distinction. Unfortunately, you would be fired if you prefaced one of the comments with something like, “Remember, this isn’t me talking, so when I say I have an itchy anus from chronic diarrhea, I’m speaking for someone else, so direct your stifled laughter at them, and not me.”
I guess the biggest difference between the day and the night shift, apart from there being more than five employees in the center at a time, was how much more urgent the calls seemed to be. If you call someone at night and they don’t answer, you assume they’re either asleep or they’re out of town. If they don’t answer during the day, it becomes an insult to your honor, a black mark so great that you must have the operator leave no less than five messages on the answering machine, asking what have you done to deserve this, often ending with a statement like, “With friends like you, who needs friends?” This will usually be followed by three or four more messages, each more vitriolic than the last, telling your now-former friend that their children are ugly, stupid and ill-mannered. You will then move on to insulting their spouse or significant other, saying something like, “They’ve changed you. What happened? Why won’t you let me in?!” This may be followed by a quick, 10- to 15-word message asking to please ignore the previous messages, that you spoke hastily, and that you truly value the friendship, or you would if they would just call you back. This final message is not mandatory, however, and should rarely be used, lest you lose the upper hand in the relationship.
There was a difference between the day shift and night shift employees, as well. The night-shifters generally consisted of a gaggle of pale, scrawny, sad-faced worms, usually single men in their early 20s who were “between jobs” and lived with their parents. They rarely spoke, and tried to sit as far apart as humanly possible from each other within the call center. On the whole, it was nice. By comparison, the day-shifters seemed to enjoy each others’ presence, forever passing around photos of kids and grandkids in the break room, or using the slightest excuse to bring enough casserole to feed a small army, which everyone could then fight over like a pack of rabid dogs.
And there was no chance of you getting an isolated cubicle during the day. I usually considered myself lucky if I could find a place to sit that was only partially surrounded. In those close quarters, it was next to impossible to pretend you were by yourself, what with the talking, the coughing, the sneezing. The leaving of crumbs or other unknown sticky substances on the keyboards, ready for some unfortunate person to put their hands in – a person who, even on his better days, has trouble shaking even gloved hands. A person who was discovered crying and hysterically washing his hands in the break room sink after he squished a mosquito that was filled with somebody else’s blood. A person who would now have to wait possibly hours before he could get up from the sticky, germ-ridden keyboard to finally wash his hands again, only to be interrupted by a supervisor, who would admonish, “You forgot to log off your computer!”
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More tomorrow. Have a great weekend!
- TJG
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