– Hi…
– Good morn­ing, bon­jour!
– Yeah, I’m call­ing about my French classes… I’m sup­posed to start soon and — can you believe it — no one called me back!
– Okay… let me see. What’s your name?
– Jenny Smiths, S-M-I-T-H-S.
– And who assessed you?
– A woman.
– Whose name was…?
– Don’t know.
– Who do you work for?
– Patty Jonhson.
– Er… I mean, which min­istry?
– Oh, well, you should have pre­cised! Ser­vice Canada.
– And was it for group classes or pri­vate classes?
– I’m not sure now…
– Okay, how about I put you on hold for a minute and I’ll find the right per­son you can talk to?
– Lis­ten: I’m tired of being patient! I want my classes NOW!
– Hold the line please…

I swear that’s the last time I fill in for the recep­tion­ist. I’m a bloody French teacher. NOT a recep­tion­ist. And it’s Fri­day morn­ing and I haven’t had a chance to eat my muf­fin yet (lemon — cran­ber­ries) and if the woman can’t even remem­ber if she’s sup­posed to be in a group or a pri­vate class I really don’t think she will do that great as a stu­dent. And.. and I hate the phone. Remem­ber Call Me (Not), or how I became a crazy Malaysian woman’s slave in Hong Kong? I had vowed to never touch again. So far, I have only man­aged not to buy a cell phone.

Granted, I don’t use the phone that much as a teacher, since I’m in a class­room six hours a day. Unless I fill up for the recep­tion­ist at the last minute because my class has just been can­celed. But this is the first time in my — very short — career that I’m stay­ing away from the dreaded machine.

Flash­back. Win­ter 2004-05. I have just got­ten my first Cana­dian work visa and my first offi­cial job here. The future looks bright and when I showed up the next day in a office suite across the city, spir­its were high — as high as they can be at 8:00 am. After a 5 min­utes intro­duc­tion on the job (at this point, I had no idea why I came for because the staffing agency didn’t give me much info), I under­stood I was to be chained to a phone + com­puter, answer­ing inquiries about a point card for 8 hours a day. Sounds triv­ial said like that — I agree. But that’s because you haven’t enter the won­der­ful world of inbound call cen­ters, and prob­a­bly because you don’t real­ize how much fuss can be made around a point card.

I soon learned the basics. Cus­tomers could be divided in three groups:

• 10% of gen­uine callers, want an info and then hap­pily hang up, say­ing “thank you” (the two words least heard in a cell center)
• 30% of lonely peo­ple liv­ing in the mid­dle of nowhere, invent­ing all kind of trou­bles with their pre­cious card just to hear the sound of a voice
• 60% of gen­uine ass­hole, cre­at­ing all kind of trou­ble are very likely to ask to speak to the super­vi­sor and threaten to fire you/ kick your ass/ kill you (we’re still talk­ing of a point card, remember)

Gen­uine inquiries were a bliss to answer to. The com­puter would give us all the infor­ma­tions we needed to know and prob­lems were most likely solved with a new card (“yes, after ten years it nor­mal that your card doesn’t swipe as well, sir”), com­mon­sense (“sir, using your card to scrape the ice from your wind­shield cer­tainly isn’t rec­om­mended but it didn’t make your 100 000 points van­ish in the air”), or some researches (“would you wife has been to the store on ear­lier this week? Because I see here 100 000 points have been used up just two days ago…”).

Lonely peo­ple were a bit harder to deal with. As much as we could under­stand them, we just weren’t allowed to make the con­ver­sa­tion last too long. Our stats were sent to a big com­puter in the mid­dle of the room and hav­ing too much calls in the queue could mean seri­ous trou­bles. Like being the last one picked up to go to lunch. Yes… because we couldn’t all leave our work­sta­tions at the same time to go for lunch break, from 11 am to 2 pm, our super­vi­sor would walk around and ran­domly select a few of us: “you, lunch break, 20 min.”. The worse thing was to be in the last batch, right before 2pm… since we usu­ally started the day between 8 and 9 am.

Gen­uine ass­holes were tough to deal with. We weren’t allowed to be rude and taught to never ever lose con­trol. Sounds easy like that, but how do you react after hav­ing being called a “stub­born bitch” for the third times in a day? You wouldn’t believe how much fuss can be made around a point card. Peo­ple break­ing up and split­ting the points, peo­ple cheat­ing and deny­ing it even though the evi­dence is right there on the com­puter, peo­ple beg­ging for favors…

I lasted a cou­ple months, till the con­tract expired. I was offered a con­tract exten­sion but I refused. I was tired of speak­ing over the phone, tired of been lit­er­ally chained to a phone, tired of the whole point­less job. I moved on…

…and found a job as a recep­tion­ist for a whole­saler, where I was work­ing under DOS (this was 2005 by the way) because the guy was too cheap to upgrade. If you’re nice, next time I’ll tell you how I sur­vived for that contract!

Related arti­cles:

1. It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night
2. Call Me (Not)
3. First Steps As A Per­ma­nent Res­i­dent (9÷10)
4. A Nation Under Debt
5. How to Avoid… Iden­tity Theft