I've been in Customer Service for almost 10 years, and I think I have been called every foul and disgusting name in the English language and several other languages as well. I don't know what it is about a telephone, but for some reason people seem to think that if you are on the other end of a phone call you are somehow not human. Telephone sales and customer service is possibly the worst and most thankless job in the world.
My father died and my mother lost her marbles when I was 17, forcing me to skip college and take care of my 4 younger sisters. Telephone work lets me make more than minimum wage so that I can feed my family. I am a decent, honest, hard-working person, but to listen to the people that I talk to every day you would think I was the worst kind of criminal. I have partial deafness in my left ear from people blowing air horns and whistles (or sometimes just screaming) when they answer the phone, or when they call our call center. I don't like my job. I don't enjoy calling people, or answering calls in a call center. This is not what I had hoped to spend my life doing. I still have one more sister and my own son to put through college, so it looks like I may be doing this for quite a while longer.
If I was your daughter or wife you would think that people were awful, and rant and rave about the jerks that abound in our world, but since I am a faceless entity people treat me like I deserve abuse.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Indian call centers, because my job has been outsourced several times, causing me to have to start back at the bottom of the food chain and with decreased wages, but they are people and it isn't their fault. Just like me, those people are just taking whatever work is available and tying to feed their families. When you get a call, how hard is it to just hang up the phone, instead of taking your self-righteous anger out on some poor slob who has learned to cringe every time he or she hears a phone ring? If you get an annoying voicemail... press the #7 to delete and move on with your life.
On behalf of all the under-educated or under-employed people in the world, I sincerely apologize that our misfortune has caused us to interrupt your days. I apologize that sometimes when you answer the phone it is not a friend or loved one, but a bill collector, or a sales pitch. I know that it is easy to see us as horrible little caricatures of greedy villains, but we aren't. We are your mothers, sisters, brothers,fathers, husbands, wives, and friends. So the next time you decide to take out your daily frustration on some hapless slob on the other end of a telephone, please remember what I told the last person who screamed at me to get a "real job";
"I spend 10 hours of my day, 5 days a week, doing something I hate, so that I can stay in a perpetual state of cyclical debt... sounds like a real job to me."
My father died and my mother lost her marbles when I was 17, forcing me to skip college and take care of my 4 younger sisters. Telephone work lets me make more than minimum wage so that I can feed my family. I am a decent, honest, hard-working person, but to listen to the people that I talk to every day you would think I was the worst kind of criminal. I have partial deafness in my left ear from people blowing air horns and whistles (or sometimes just screaming) when they answer the phone, or when they call our call center. I don't like my job. I don't enjoy calling people, or answering calls in a call center. This is not what I had hoped to spend my life doing. I still have one more sister and my own son to put through college, so it looks like I may be doing this for quite a while longer.
If I was your daughter or wife you would think that people were awful, and rant and rave about the jerks that abound in our world, but since I am a faceless entity people treat me like I deserve abuse.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Indian call centers, because my job has been outsourced several times, causing me to have to start back at the bottom of the food chain and with decreased wages, but they are people and it isn't their fault. Just like me, those people are just taking whatever work is available and tying to feed their families. When you get a call, how hard is it to just hang up the phone, instead of taking your self-righteous anger out on some poor slob who has learned to cringe every time he or she hears a phone ring? If you get an annoying voicemail... press the #7 to delete and move on with your life.
On behalf of all the under-educated or under-employed people in the world, I sincerely apologize that our misfortune has caused us to interrupt your days. I apologize that sometimes when you answer the phone it is not a friend or loved one, but a bill collector, or a sales pitch. I know that it is easy to see us as horrible little caricatures of greedy villains, but we aren't. We are your mothers, sisters, brothers,fathers, husbands, wives, and friends. So the next time you decide to take out your daily frustration on some hapless slob on the other end of a telephone, please remember what I told the last person who screamed at me to get a "real job";
"I spend 10 hours of my day, 5 days a week, doing something I hate, so that I can stay in a perpetual state of cyclical debt... sounds like a real job to me."