{"id":11086,"date":"2017-06-10T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-10T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=11086"},"modified":"2017-06-04T13:29:12","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T18:29:12","slug":"things-i-learned-from-working-in-a-call-center-blast-from-the-past-september-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/things-i-learned-from-working-in-a-call-center-blast-from-the-past-september-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I Learned from Working in a Call Center (Blast from the Past: September 2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

While poking around in the archives, I came across this interesting post from my first year out of college.\u00a0At the time, I was just getting started in the labor force and wanted to learn as much from my jobs as I could\u2014even the mundane ones. The result was this.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Over the summer I worked part time at a local call center.\u00a0 At the time, it was just what I needed: a flexible job that helped me pay the bills while figuring out where I wanted to go next.\u00a0 That said, I learned very quickly that call center work is not the sort of thing I want to do for large portions of my life.<\/p>\n

I’m glad to say I quit my job on good terms with the management, and was one of their more productive interviewers.\u00a0 I don’t harbor any hard feelings against the company I worked for or any of the particular employees.<\/p>\n

However, I do want to reflect a bit on the nature of the work itself, which was less than awesome, as well as some of the things I learned about myself in the process.\u00a0 Since this has nothing to do with the company I worked for, I’m not going to mention it by name.\u00a0 Also keep in mind that the things I have to say are heavily influenced by my own opinions, so they may not apply to you.<\/p>\n

That said, here are some of the things I learned from working in a call center:<\/p>\n

1) In the long run, jerks only punish themselves.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I spoke with a lot<\/em> of incredibly rude people in this job.\u00a0 I also spoke with a lot of people who were courteous and well-meaning.\u00a0 Without exception, the jerks seemed overstressed and miserable, while only the courteous people ever seemed genuinely happy and content with their lives.<\/p>\n

I think the way we treat others says more about ourselves than anything else.\u00a0 People who are mean and nasty to each other are never truly happy.<\/p>\n

2) A small amount of patience makes most things go faster and smoother.
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I hated it when people told me “just put ten for everything.” As an interviewer, I couldn’t do that\u2014I was required to ask every question verbatim.\u00a0 Those who were patient enough to let me do that got through the survey quickly and painlessly, while the impatient people who tried to rush things almost always got upset.<\/p>\n

I think it’s safe to say that this has a general application as well.\u00a0 When we’re patient enough to let things happen the way they’re supposed to, things happen faster and more smoothly.\u00a0 When we try to rush things that shouldn’t be rushed, we screw up.<\/p>\n

3) The ability to genuinely listen is a rare skill.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I can’t tell you how many times I asked a simple question on a survey, only to find the person on the other line answering something completely different.\u00a0 I didn’t expect anyone to drop everything and devote their full attention to me, but how much effort does it take to answer a simple question?<\/p>\n

I’ve known for a long time that listening is a skill that requires work to cultivate, but apparently, it’s also one that few people have truly mastered.\u00a0 If you can’t understand a straightforward question well enough to give a yes or no answer, how can you understand something as complex as another person’s feelings?<\/p>\n

4) Political campaigns are evil.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This is a little tongue in cheek, but I stand by it one hundred percent.\u00a0 Every survey we conducted for a political campaign asked questions that were clearly geared toward developing negative campaign ads and manipulating public perception.\u00a0 None of them asked how the government could best serve the people.<\/p>\n

5) Having a flexible work schedule makes writing both easier and harder.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

It makes it easier because you can plan your time around other things that are going on; it makes it harder because your days generally have less structure.<\/p>\n

I think I hit a pretty good balance by working in the morning and writing in the afternoon, then going in to work again in the evenings if I needed the hours.\u00a0 Call centers are always looking for people to work in the evenings.<\/p>\n

6) Reducing everything to numbers makes human interactions meaningless.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This was, by far, the thing I found most frustrating about my work.\u00a0 I talked with hundreds of people from all over the country and didn’t connect with hardly any of them on a personally significant level.\u00a0 It was all about checking off boxes, where each completed survey was just another number in the system.<\/p>\n

This tended to be more true of the short surveys, less true of the longer ones.\u00a0 For that reason, I loved it when I got a survey that took twenty or thirty minutes to complete.\u00a0 It’s very hard to talk with someone for thirty minutes without making some kind of a connection with them, however fleeting.<\/p>\n

7) If you have a love of learning, find a job that lets you use your mind.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

To be perfectly honest, I never felt completely satisfied at my work.\u00a0 A robot with sufficiently advanced voice recognition software could probably have done my job as well as I could (at least for the ninety second surveys).\u00a0 Over time, I felt like my work was turning me into a robot.<\/p>\n

That’s ultimately why I felt I had to get out.\u00a0 Maybe I have a problem with authority, but I can’t stand being just another cog in the corporate machine.\u00a0 There’s got to be a way to pay the bills and still live life meaningfully.<\/p>\n

Image courtesy W. Lowe<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While poking around in the archives, I came across this interesting post from my first year out of college.\u00a0At the time, I was just getting started in the labor force and wanted to learn as much from my jobs as I could\u2014even the mundane ones. The result was this. Over the summer I worked part… Continue reading Things I Learned from Working in a Call Center (Blast from the Past: September 2010)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[1094,418,599],"class_list":["post-11086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blast-from-the-past","tag-day-job","tag-thoughts-reflections","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2SO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11086"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11117,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11086\/revisions\/11117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}