The phones don't stop

Trapped in a dead-end job at a customer-service call center, a man in his mid-30s hears the ringing and just doesn't care.

By Gilbert Neal

Jan 8, 2004 | It's 1:20 on a Monday. I've just finished my lunch, a piece of dry fried chicken from the randomly maintained food carousel in the cafeteria. I top that off with a packet of M&M's with peanuts. I slide onto an unoccupied spot on a bench in the well-kept, gaudily landscaped common area. I'm sitting next to Greg, who trained with me when I first got here two years ago. I like Greg's down-to-earth contentedness. He's in data entry, and doesn't see a reason to ascend to the dizzying white-collar heights of the order-taker or customer service departments. "Too much stress" he says, and I agree, though I've willingly ascended as much as I will in a quick series of quiet promotions. Greg is one of the few people here that I actually confide in on any level, partly because he is so unpretentious and genuine, despite his penchant for being a great gossip. He knows everything about everyone, it seems. But I trust him.

We share a smoke, and are joined by Mary and Patty. Mary trained with Greg and me, but has had a decidedly different career path chosen for her. She volunteered to fill a suddenly vacated, thankless secretarial position, and has been unable to leave it. Simply put, no one else would take it for the meager wages, and she's told she's too good to promote.

This doesn't make sense to me, but Mary insists it's because she's black. Black women fill the majority of low-wage secretarial and data-entry positions here. The next step, in pay and cachet, is the order department, which employs about 50 percent black women and 50 percent white. The office's upper echelon, customer service, employs two black women, three white men, and seven white women. Mary tells her story, with Patty nodding with knowing approval.

The promotion process here is inconsistent lately. It used to be that you needed to stay at your current level for six months before even getting the chance to apply for a promotion. But the need for qualified help, along with what seems like a mass exodus from each department, has obliterated whatever discipline management has tried to maintain. So people like Mary are entrenched, left to calcify on the lower rungs of a corporate ladder she is more than qualified to sit atop. Mary complains a lot, but she's bright and driven. She used to manage a phone bank, but the company went out of business. So she landed here.

I was eager to excel when I first got the job. I was actually hired through a temp agency, though the ad I answered appeared to come from the company itself. The starting pay was $7.50 an hour, $8 (the advertised wage) if you showed yourself capable of answering 100 calls a day for a week. This, of course, I did with ease. The next challenge was to stay with the temp agency for six months, and only then could you apply for a bona fide position with the company proper, which meant insurance and vacation. Until that time, you were to wear a laminated badge with the company logo, and VISITOR emblazoned in blue letters, so people in other departments could tell the real employees from the fake ones, I suppose. I never wore the badge, as I deemed it demeaning and needlessly class-based. As I was to learn in quick order, it was a Pyrrhic rebellion, as intermingling with other departments was rare anyhow. It was frowned upon in sort of a tacit interdepartmental understanding.

In fact, my first few forays into the "cheerful to strangers" strategy that comes so naturally to me were often met with steely glares of bewildered caution. I was naive enough at that time to believe I could form friendships like I had every other place I had ever worked. Even within my department, conversations were forced and awkward, as if I was from another planet. No one here had HBO, or listened to Brahms, or NPR. I didn't feel I was better than they were. In fact, it was like everyone but me was in on the joke. We simply had nothing to talk about. This curtailed the primordial satisfaction inherent with a group of people in a confined space united against that vaguest of white-collar foes: The customer.

This was the job I was doing: Taking orders. Over the phone. Books. This was the corner I painted myself into from the time I took my first job while attending college, soliciting funds for the local philharmonic. Going from this phone pool to that, slacking off in school, living for the now, and swimming in the tepid victories of the past, never giving a moment's consideration to the fact that I might outlive my lethargic happiness. It was a sobering thought: I may never escape this life. I knew nothing else. And this was all made even clearer when new hires would show up with little more than a high school diploma, and poor spelling and speaking skills. These were now my peers, and I had to endure the indignity of training them.

Here, there were always calls waiting, always telephones buzzing with urgent anger. Customers barely holding in their contempt, scarcely masking their disappointment in the poor quality of necessary human interaction they have just inherited, toll-free.

I thought, at first, that getting my foot in the door at a world-renowned publishing house would be the ideal opportunity. Maybe I could become an editor, or a copywriter, or proofreader, or do publicity. Work my way up, learn the ropes. But I was chagrined to discover that the brains of the company were in New York, and that the office here in North Carolina was for the more menial publishing tasks. Taking orders. Servicing customers. Loading books onto trucks. Shuffling paper. Pruning landscaping. There was no chance of being "discovered," since communications between the two cities were confined to upper management. Who would find me here? How?

The phone does not stop. Problems, catalogs, orders, ringing, ringing, ringing. The phone does not stop. It's easy enough if you're young and this is your first job. It's a way to pay the rent and get some experience, a stepping stone. But if you've got a college degree and talent and the curse of self-awareness, the job scrapes at your soul, call by call, day by day.

Once I was hired by the company proper after three months of "probation" as a temp, I decided I would make it my duty to put forth a weekly "new idea" to improve our department, and perhaps be seen as a potential manager. We should have departmental meetings. We should have a liaison between our department and our office in New York. We should have meetings with other departments to instill a more mutually beneficial channel of communication. All the departments more or less affected every other department, and shouldn't we all at least meet each other?

I carefully noted all of my ideas, revised and edited them, and presented them to my manager, Terry. She was receptive. Almost thankful. She nodded, expressed understanding and, I thought, acquiescence. But none of my ideas were forwarded to any "higher-ups," much less initiated. I asked why this was. "Because every one of your suggestions has been tried before, and none of them worked." I asked how more communication could possibly not work. "Because departmental meetings always turn into bitch sessions, and nothing ever gets done." The first few, I'll admit, will be exercises in people having a voice for quite possibly the first time here, but we could evolve them into ...

"It just won't work."

This was the awakening, the realization that I had officially and for all time put my head in a noose and the hangman was taking his sweet time. And that's the day I officially stopped caring. Never stay late. Never work overtime. Never offer opinions. Do not go the extra mile. At one time, I offered to train new employees, without a raise in my salary, just so that I could take the time to train them more thoroughly (training was fast becoming an afterthought, as people were needed immediately to answer phones. It didn't matter what they knew how to do). The problem was that the people who were training me told me as much, and I refused to believe them. But the equation was simple: Management is entrenched. They're not going anywhere. The department is too unwieldy from turnover to create another position. So why would management struggle to improve the call-taker's lot?

The phones don't stop.

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