Lit­tle Secrets

Post high school, it’s always fun to see close friends pur­su­ing a car­rier. The peo­ple you’ve seen heart­bro­ken, the friends you got high and drunk with, those who were anx­ious before exams, those who once stole stuffs in a super­mar­ket, might now be doc­tors, lawyers, police­men, sales­per­sons or… yeah, or teachers.

When I was a teen, hav­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties (other than attend­ing classes and smok­ing our first cig­a­rettes) was a dis­tant prospect. Few teens get a part-time job in France: in McDonald’s, you’re likely to deal with twenty some­thing rather than with high school kids – unlike in North America.

As a result, pro­fes­sional life was like a “for­bid­den fruit”. By the time I grad­u­ated from high school, I took it really seri­ously and was almost will­ing to sell my soul to prospec­tive employ­ers. I was ready to enter the grown up world, where peo­ple where seri­ous, hard-working and ded­i­cated to their boss, much like a Chi­nese pro­pa­ganda poster.

How­ever, I soon dis­cov­ered that work­places bore some resem­blance with the world I was used to. Con­trary to my naive opin­ion, peo­ple don’t auto­mat­i­cally become smarter and well-behaved nor that they turn into hard-working knowl­edge­able pro­fes­sion­als once they get a job. Quite the oppo­site actu­ally. I also dis­cov­ered that every job had its dirty lit­tle secrets that only insid­ers know. And some­times, I was one of them.

So let me share some of my dirty lit­tle secrets…

The credit com­pany

I worked as a temp for a credit com­pany. Yep, I was the – 18 years old – God­dess who would lend you money… or not. I had basi­cally no train­ing but the job wasn’t dif­fi­cult. My “office” was located in a shop­ping mall and sales­per­sons where bring­ing me cus­tomers eager to spend their pay check on a flat screen TV. I had to copy a few ID and ask the cus­tomer a few ques­tions (monthly wage, rent, other ongo­ing loans etc.). Since few peo­ple carry their pay stub with them, I couldn’t check the info. After enter­ing the data in the com­puter, I had three choices : accepted – refused – call the national office for backup check. If I had to call the head­quar­ter (fairly hard to reach on week-end, my busiest time), it always went like that :
–First name, last name… yep, this one hasn’t paid back his bal­ance. Alright, copy his ID’s, get a cur­rent phone num­ber. We’ve been look­ing for him for a while, we will now be able to track him down. Have a good day !

The host­ess

I work as an host­ess dur­ing the audi­tion for a well-known TV show. The most painful wasn’t the audi­tion part itself, where con­tes­tants were singing. Alright, it was painful, but noth­ing that can’t be han­dle with good earplugs. But the core of my job was to keep par­ents, fam­ily, friends of the con­tes­tants out­side the audi­tion room. You have no idea what I’ve been through…

If we would let a par­ent go with a really young kid, like 6 or 7 years old (yeah, I know… Some par­ents are just weird…), we would have the mob yelling at us :
– How come they go in ? You told my I couldn’t go with my baby !
The “baby” being a twenty some­thing, of course…

The call cen­ter agent

Have you ever dialed a 1–800 num­ber ? Well, for a cou­ple months, I was on the other end of line 12 hours a day. Just a cou­ple of tips for when you talk to a call cen­ter agent :

• We all have a “mute” but­ton by the phone. If you sound funny, if you’re abu­sive or just plain stu­pid, the call is going to be shared with our co-workers. Yes, we will laugh at you. You can’t hear us, thanks to the “mute” button…
• From expe­ri­ence, I can tell you that every­thing shows up in files. The num­ber of time you called, your com­plaints, and even the bad words that might came out of your mouths dur­ing the call. It’s called a log file, and we love to update it.

The teacher

Remem­ber the teacher you loved cause he would always show video ? Tip : he wasn’t try­ing to be pop­u­lar among stu­dents. He was just too lazy to pre­pare a class. The teacher who would give the class a test on Mon­day morn­ing ? Not sadis­tic. Hang­over. The three teach­ers who loved orga­niz­ing cul­tural even for their classes ? Huh huh, once again, didn’t feel like teach­ing. Yeah, I’m using these tricks on bad days…

So, what are the insider’s secrets of your job ?

Related posts:

1. My Dirty Lit­tle Crush
2. My Per­sonal Stalker
3. Call Me (Not), Part II
4. How to Avoid… Phone Scams
5. The Phone Booth