September 2008

In the early fall of 2008, I needed money really badly. So badly that I decided to take whatever Craigslist happened to throw my way. Bad idea. The economy in the US in 2008 was so bad that the best thing Craigslist offered up was a job as a customer service rep for a stock market service company in the financial district of New York City. OK, if you read my stories at all, or have ever had the pleasure of meeting me, you should know a few things. Do I talk and interact well on phone with people? NO. Do I function well around people I define as "corporate" or "financial"? Absolutely NOT. Can my clumsy demeanor be trusted for important button-pushing work? Excuse me sir, but precisely what planet are you on?

So, I got this job at a moment's notice, through a placement agency. But here's where things got interesting. I already had a job when I got this one. It was an internship. Unpaid. How would I resolve this? It's not like in college, where I could just drop a class I didn't like. This company had already invested tasks and things to do for me, which I could not just walk away from. Or could I?

I ended up having to call the office of my internship at 7:30 AM to tell them that I had found a better opportunity starting today, and really had to pay my bills and stuff, so they should cancel all tasks planned for me. They were totally cool and understanding about it, and told me to "be good". Problem solved. However, the word "cool" did not exist in the universe of the position I was about to enter.

So one morning in mid-September, I boarded a packed-like-sardines subway car for a very uncomfortable ride down to the financial district. Once there, I endured a slow-as-balls elevator ride full of suits and ties up to the 30-something floor the company was located on. Another uncomfortable moment. Finally, when I had endured all that, I was placed in a room with 15 of the most square tools I had ever seen, each one with a suit, tie, and briefcase. This was my "training class". I felt more out of place than a crocodile at an alligator rally. We were all promptly given about 300 pages of material to study and read through. Out of these pages, there were only about 5 which actually contained any relevance to our job whatsoever.

Disgusted, I turned to the guy next to me and said, full volume, "Can you believe this shit? I was expecting to get paid, not learn my ABCs." He did not respond. In fact, he did not even look up from the training manual. I looked around the room. Everyone was staring at me, giving me mean looks and telling me to "sshhh" or "shut up". Looks like I landed with a bunch of winners here! Soon afterward, our training instructor entered the room and promptly began barking instructions at us like a drill sargeant. He was a large black man with a gravelly voice. He kind of reminded me of "Junkyard Willie" from the Touch-Tone Terrorists.

Basically the way our job would work is this. We were call-center phone agents, headsets and all, whose duty would be to call and harass random people and tell them exactly what they do not want to hear: that a stock they own is having a shareholder meeting that requires their vote. And what would they be voting for? We would have to read through a 300-page booklet each week to determine exactly that, and recite it to them like our lives depended on it. I've memorized entire characters of Shakespeare before and had more fun then reciting this financial bullcrap. (EX. "Mcdonalds is looking to streamline its best interests and allocate shares to prevent an opposing sector from taking control of their assets") Yada, yada, fucking yada.

The general mood and feeling of work in this place was equivalent to being stuck in a torture chamber on a Monday. There were many rules and regulations that must be followed, and every word of conversation was recorded and scrutinized. They were as follows:

• Cell phone use was strictly prohibited on the call center floor. If so much as a cell phone ring was heard during training or work time, you would face a punishment far greater than anything you could imagine.

• If one word was said over the phone that did not meet the strict standards of the call script, you would be given a harsh lecture and told you are an inefficient cog in their system.

• A large part of the work in this job was done on a computer, but any usage of the Internet for checking Email, facebook, Scottysstories.com, or any other personal/entertainment website was strictly prohibited, and every click of the mouse and stroke of the keyboard was closely monitored by security. The only usage of the Internet permitted was use of a stock market website to look up stock quotes of the stock you are working on ONLY. If you so much as dared to even look up a quote of any other stock, then Junkyard Willie would call you out in front of everyone in his booming baritone.

• Every second you were in the company's hands was recorded under a strict time logging system, which required a complicated login process. If you spent one second too long while gong to the bathroom or getting coffee or logging into Sector 3419 or whatever, your pay would be docked for that one second in the company's time.

• Talking, gossiping, making jokes, or complaining to the person sitting next to you was strictly prohibited, and could result in... something bad, at the hands of Junkyard Willie, the NFL lineman-sized beast who served as our trainer and supervisor.

And let's say, by some miracle, you did everything right at this job. Every call you made was perfect, you did not step out of line once, make a single slip of the tongue or complaint, all your statements were accurate, your cell did not ring, you resisted the overwhelming temptation to check your Email, and you logged all your hours correctly. What would be the huge reward, the light at the end of the tunnel? A nice, fat, 2 grand a week paycheck? Benefits and 401K, whatever the hell that is (Haven't had the pleasure of finding out)? A nice sports car? No, no, and NO! It was just a single paycheck every Tuesday of 300 bucks. That's IT? For all that, 300 bucks a week? I felt cheated just by showing up. So how did I deal with all this bullcrap? The best way I knew how. By acting like a complete dick.

From Day 1, everyone knew that I was the troublemaker, the bad seed out of my training class. My trainer knew it, and all the other guys knew it. I asked inappropriate questions, I made jokes when no one wanted to hear them, and I even freaked out a suit or two. Or three. or a whole floor full. Just because I felt like it.

One of the earliest examples was on the first day I was on the call center floor after training. It was non-stop auto-dial, one call after another after another. We had been trained to be as nice as possible, to thank the people we harassed for their time and exhibit courteous manners. After a full morning of this, it was getting to me. I'm not really like this. Then the signal for lunchtime was given and the entire floorful of people began squeezing their way to the elevator banks for a very uncomfortable ride down. Whilst in a packed elevator filled with suits, a thought just hit me, and out of nowhere I blurted out, as part of my thought process: "I'm not that nice in real life". Within a second, everyone in the elevator was staring at me. One older suit with graying hair and a moustache turned to me and said "That's a song lyric you're saying, right? You don't really mean that, do you?" Red-faced and guilty, I replied "Yeah, it's from a song". It turns out he was one of the chief officers of the company and reported directly to our supervisor. Beginning of the end? Maybe.

I hated those elevator rides, and soon became known for my asshole comments and jokes no one cared about. During one crowded ride, the only two females in the company were talking amongst themselves. One, "Latifah" was the only girl in my training class. The other was just some random woman who happened to be in the elevator.

Latifah: These things (elevators) scare me. I really hope we don't drop.

Woman 1: I used to work in another building in Queens where my co-worker dropped, like free-fell, like 20 feet. I don't trust these things.

SD (ME): Typical girl talk. Always gossiping, panicking, making everything worse. Why don't you just deal with it, like everyone else. You'll survive.

Latifah: Meanwhile, if this thing dropped you'd be the first one to freak out and cry like a little baby, like you did when we were stuck the other day for 2 seconds at lunch.

MY GOD was I owned there. A Harlem native, Latifah had quite the attitude, and the next day she would confirm to me what I had suspected, during a coffee break:

"You're definitely weird, but I am so fascinated by you, and I wish I could be a fly on the wall in your brain."

If this is not the oddest thing that has ever been said to me, I don't know what is. I don't know if she was flirting with me, mocking me, annoying me, or begging me to include her in a story on my site. With that random comment, she definitely earned the latter.

However, company brass did not take too kindly to me, especially the gray-haired man whom I had "sung" to in the elevator, and my gruff supervisor Junkyard Willie. I was called in by the phone screener three times on my first day for saying things I should not have said on the phone. A lot of times I got annoyed by the sheer number of calls I had to make. A lot of times I screwed up simple verbal tasks due to the sheer repetitive nature of the job and the fact that I was so damn tired of reciting the same shit. But one time, I dropped a huge bomb, and created a snippet that will be played at every training class in this company for years. It started rather routinely:

SD: Hi, I'm calling from (name of company) and I'm calling on behalf of your investment in (name of stock)

Annoyed Person: You guys have been calling and harassing me all week.

SD (sticking to script): Well I'm just calling now because at this juncture, we have not received your vote for the upcoming meeting.

Annoyed Person: You know what, I don't give a shit about you. The market right now is completely fucked, so you can take this vote and shove it up your ass!

SD (Shocked, Amazed, and barely holding in my laughter): OK sir, will do.

A week after this call, everything was still going fine. I thought if anything, that would be the one to send me out the door. No one ever said anything to me about it. The top brass of the company even called all of us in for a meeting to assure us that despite the turbulence which was going on on Wall Street nearby, and despite the economic cutbacks which were going on at almost all companies, that our jobs were fine and we had nothing to worry about.

The very next day after that, I was called in for a private meeting by the gray-haired fuckface I had encountered in the elevator. I was in the middle of a call when he told me about it: "Finish your call, then drop everything else and come into the conference room with me". I went in, and Junkyard Willie was in there as well. The two of them informed me that "mistakes are being made, bad information is being given out, and everyone else in the company is downright scared of you." They told me to "go home" and they could not have me on the phones.

I did not buy this, so I asked them why, precisely, they were choosing to fire me and no one else, exactly one day after they told all of us we had nothing to worry about and our jobs were safe. They said I had violated every rule in the book: I was caught talking on my cell phone, I was caught using the Internet to check the stock of... American Eagle (those fucking bastards), I forgot to punch the clock one morning, I was caught bullshitting to co-workers during company time, and a million other things. But one call in particular had pissed them off. It was a call when I was trying to record a man's vote, and he was not budging on his hesitance to vote, so I told him that I think his stock will do well and he should "just vote already so I can move on to the next call." OK, I lost my patience with the dude, what would anyone else do?

But it turns out all the call center screeners threw a shit fit on that one and demanded that I be cut off immediately, after less than 3 weeks of employment. We were not supposed to give out opinions over the phone, a rule that was contained on page 1375 or something of our training manual. Jesus, how the FUCK was I supposed to remember that? And those same screeners were perfectly fine with me agreeing that I should shove their vote up my ass. Go figure.

To add insult to injury, I called the agency that I had used to get this job, and told them I had just been fired, and asked them to assure me that I would be compensated for every single second I was there. They assured me that my last check would be mailed to my doorstep. It never was. What a bunch of fucking tools they all are. Everyone in the financial sector. I'm glad they're struggling.

I cannot put my hatred for this company and the morals and lifestyle they preach into words. I learned the important lesson that it's better to sit at home doing nothing at all than waste your time working for an utterly irrelevant bullshit job. And in the months since this awful experience, due to the economic climate I've been doing a lot of sitting at home. Fuck it.