Insincerely, Yours
“Uh, hey
Shannon I just wanted to let you know that I’m not coming in today because… I quit.
So, yeah… anyway, bye.” I hung up the phone and looked out over the hood of the
car as the smoke continued to bellow from the radiator. It was cold that day,
violently cold. The kind of cold that takes your breath away in its entirety. I
was soaking up every ounce of the quickly fleeting heat left inside of that car. As I sat there analyzing all the prior decisions that had brought me
here, a strikingly vivid realization settled in my soul like the snow that was
swiftly covering the ground around me. My car was broken down and stranded in a
Wal-Mart parking lot, I had a dangerously small amount of money left to my
name, and I had just quit my fucking job. Never in all my life, have I been more
at peace. That feeling of vindication was bar none. I was reveling in the aura
of happiness that was encompassing me in that smoking piece of shit car. It was
then that I realized I would never have to clock in, don that atrocious headset,
and say, “Thank you for calling WOW! Cable, Internet, and Phone. My name is
Javan. How can I help you?” ever again.
**********
Inside the
confines of the WOW! Cable, Internet, and Phone call-center there were a
specific set of attributes that existed in order to create the perfect American
office setting. Imminent and persistent feelings of disassociation, sadness, countless
hours of empty rhetoric, irrational and belligerent customers, fucking HR, and
of course the incessant and insincere small talk. All of those wonderful
workplace accoutrements were plentiful in the sales department of the world’s
shittiest cable company. This horrid place was my first introduction to the
wonders of corporate life and the fundamentally fucked up idea that is
professional communication.
There are
two forms of professional communication that corporations like WOW! teach their
young employees. First, you’ll be instructed on how to speak to your co-workers
and superiors according to some guidelines that are set forth by some dollar-store
equivalent of a conflict negotiator they call, “A Human Resources Representative”.
Second, you will be instructed on how to speak to customers. This form of
communication is paramount to all others, as this is where you are shown that as
an employee you are fucking worthless.
“I AM
GOING TO SHOOT YOU IN THE GODDAMN FACE AND BURN YOUR FUCKING HOUSE DOWN!”,
screamed a valued customer of the WOW! Cable Company. “Sir, I can totally empathize with the fact that
you would literally want to commit murder and arson because your bill went up
by three dollars. That seems entirely logical and I apologize for any inconvenience.”
I responded, as a nineteen-year-old kid who had nothing to do with this
gentleman’s increase in monthly payments. It was however entirely this irate creeps’
fault that this he ordered a $2.99 soft core porno and his wife caught him. But
I sat there like the faithful and obedient punching bag that I was, so I could
continue to be dehumanized and berated over the phone in the name of a bi-weekly
pay check.
But this is what you are instructed to
do. You are encouraged, rewarded, and uplifted by your superiors for the way
you let people speak to you in a manner that is truly vile. And you are reprimanded
or even fired if you attempt to defend yourself from the likes of these deplorable
dick-bags that call in. After all they must care for the customer above the
employees. No matter what a call-center
tells you, they don’t give a flying fuck about their employees. Simply because
the turnover rate for 18-35-year-old Americans, with little to no sales
experience that need a job, is unsurprisingly high. Corporations like WOW! intentionally
mass-produce employees that are void of a spine. They encourage you to be a
doormat for your fellow man and then they call it “practicing and honing” your
professional communication skills.
However, there was nothing even
remotely professional about WOW! Cable, internet, and Phone. They were a bunch
of degenerate scum bags. They conveniently only offered their services in ridiculously
low-income areas. And we were selling their garbage ass products and services to
people that couldn’t afford anything else. The areas we serviced were Detroit,
Southside Chicago, very specific neighborhoods in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio,
and a little town called Evansville, Indiana, where every single person spoke
like Joe Dirt with a mouth full of rocks. Let’s just say that if you ever google
map searched our service areas, the majority of it looked like something
straight out of the TV show, The Wire. So, many of the customers we attracted
were equally as shady as the dog-shit products that we were pushing. Subsequently,
most sales calls were comprised of attempted fraud in the form of
identity theft and almost always accompanied by some very vivid death threats.
Threats directed towards me, when all I was just trying to do was inform a
customer that it was in fact very illegal to attempt to purchase anything, let
alone cable, using his dead grandmothers social security number. But I sat
there and took my unnecessary ass-chewing from a legitimate criminal that I
just caught, red-handed, in criminal activity because I needed the job.
The first time that a stranger
tells you that they are going to drive to your call-center in Colorado and castrate
you in the parking lot, it’s shocking. By the 1,368th time that
someone tells you they are going to kill you, you are desensitized by the
regularity of it occurring. Hell, you almost want them to just go through with
it so you don’t have to do talk to these people anymore.
So now that you’ve been trained and
seasoned on this new-found (and very fucking skewed) idea of what
professionalism really means, it begins to reflect in the way you interact with
your supervisors and managers. As they expect you to be just as subservient to
them as you are to the customers, no matter what they ask of you.
When you are interacting with your
supervisor in a call center, it’s usually for something called a “QA Session.”
This is a truly bizarre ritual that occurs weekly, where the two of you sit
down and listen to a recorded call of you and a customer. Your supervisor will
take notes and grade your performance based on how well you adhered to your, “sales
script”. All the while, they are simultaneously oblivious to the fact that the customer
just informed me of just how deep he wants to put his dick down my throat
because we can’t match prices with Comcast or Time Warner. At the end of the
call your supervisor will turn to you and begin to critique how you handled the
situation.
“I’d be more than happy to get
those services disconnected for you, Ma’am.” I said to a woman who had just
explained to me that her husband had recently passed away, and she no longer needed
cable because he was the only one in the house that watched TV. I canceled
everything and scheduled for a technician to come to her house, disconnect the
cable, and take the equipment away. As far as any decent human being should be
concerned, I did the right thing. Trouble was that my supervisor was anything
but decent.
“Are you fucking serious? How long
have you worked here? How could you just let that opportunity for customer
retention slip away?” My supervisor, Shannon sternly asked me these questions
during one of our final QA sessions. These questions were in response to the way
that I handled the aforementioned call. I was in disbelief. There was no way I
was being chastised for showing compassion and understanding. “This can not be
fucking real.” I thought as I tried to comprehend what the hell was going on. As
Shannon continued to yell at me for letting a sale go, I realized this woman
was just as ingenuine as her blatantly fake tits. I realized that this entire
corporation was nothing more than fake tits.
Imagine, the ideal call that they were
looking to hear from me.
A woman is grieving the loss of her
goddamn soul mate, and you want me to pester her into subscribing to HBO?! That’s
your definition of professional communication? Professionally, kiss my ass.
A true and well-versed communicator
realizes that even when turning a profit is the goal, empathy and sincerity are
the cornerstone to any effective form of discourse. Not this robotic and repetitious
bullshit that is absent of any level of transferable emotion. Those that are
truly successful in the business world are not drones that suckle on the teat
of commission. They are tactful, ambitious, driven, and intelligent. And maybe
if WOW! had reinforced those ideals instead of pushing an agenda so crooked
that it would make a slumlord in Harlem find Jesus, they might still be in
business.
**********
It took several hours to limp that
broken truck home. I was cold, I was wet, and I was filthy from trying to fix
the damn thing in the parking lot. But I was sincerely happy for the first time
since I started that job, because I was no longer inhibited insincerity.
We have very little in this life
that is actually in our control. The manner in which we communicate and where
we go to make our money are a couple of things that we do have a grasp on. So,
choose them both wisely. Your words are impactful. Your thoughts can resonate
within others so much deeper than you ever thought possible. Know your worth. You are so much more than just the combination of numbers on your check.