have you ever worked at a call center?

Paypal outsources their customer service to India. I've had to deal with them a few times.

That actual customers weren't as bad as you might think, but then I wasn't working the "complaint" line.

"Can you tell me where my ambulance is?"
"No."
"Why the hell not?"

£7 an hour, though. Looking back, I should have taken them up on their offer to keep me on longer, cos I really could have done with the money.

There was also my time at V*d*f*n* in Cr*yd*n. I wasn't on the phones for that, though, just data entry. Everyone around me was on phones, dealing with credit administration. It was a frigging irritating environment, to be quite frank, and the work was depressing, but the money wasn't too bad.

OTM -- the complaints I did field (or transferred to another line) were from people saying things like, "This truck has 5,000 miles on it, and the transmission went out. What. The. Fuck."

me: "thanks for calling Pilgrim Telephone how can I help you?"

caller: "i want to fuck you in the ass"

me: "sir you've reached the billing department, not the party lines."

caller: "spread your ass"

me : "again sir, this is the billing department do you have a question about your phone bill."

caller: "do you wanna ride in the back seat of a caddy? chop it up with big daddy?"

me: "sir, if you continue to use this language i will have to disconnect the call"

caller: "im gonna put my fat cock in your ass!!!"

me: "would you like to discuss your $1000 phone bill or shall i hang up?"

caller: "oh, i didn't make any of those phone calls to no pilgrin telephone sex lines."

me: "sure you didn't, sir i have you on tape suggesting anal sex to me in the billing dept."

caller: *click*

-- Anna

I posted this on July 15th 2002. I still stand by every word.

We believe that consumers subscribing to Pilgrim's Connections™ class of services are making a lifestyle choice motivated by the need to have fun, make friends, hang out, flirt and socialize. Customers are enthusiastic about the fun of joining a global community where they can speak to people from new and exciting places and find the friends and the connections they seek.

(Jesus, this was over 4 years ago and i'm still really bitter.)

http://www.richmediatech.com/hardware/media/man-phone.jpg
thanks for calling Pilgrim Telephone how can I help you?

http://www.skycallcommunications.com/Images/forestry%20dude.jpg
i want to fuck you in the ass

http://www.richmediatech.com/hardware/media/man-phone.jpg
sir you've reached the billing department, not the party lines.

http://www.skycallcommunications.com/Images/forestry%20dude.jpg
spread your ass

http://www.richmediatech.com/hardware/media/man-phone.jpg
again sir, this is the billing department do you have a question about your phone bill.

http://www.skycallcommunications.com/Images/forestry%20dude.jpg
do you wanna ride in the back seat of a caddy? chop it up with big daddy?

http://www.richmediatech.com/hardware/media/man-phone.jpg
sir, if you continue to use this language i will have to disconnect the call

http://www.skycallcommunications.com/Images/forestry%20dude.jpg
im gonna put my fat cock in your ass!!!

I actually became quite a cold individual after three years of constant nightshift telling people to stop screaming so I could pass their telephone number to the relevant emergency service. Most of the time it was difficult even finding out which emergency service they want.

Contrary to popular belief phoning 999 and shouting 'get me someone here now' before hanging up will not get you the police, and if you call looking for an ambulance on a busy night in london you are highly likely to be stuck in a queue with the operator listening to a recorded message for up to 15 mins at a time.

I wonder if it's been improved in the few years since I left.

I work on a helpdesk now - still pretty much a call centre.

One of my colleagues got sacked for giving first aid advice while he and the caller were stuck in a q for an ambulance. Her son was choking and I think my colleague probably saved his life. Unfortunately giving advice was NOT ALLOWED, the tapes were reviewed and he was giving his books.

It was so difficult to remain blank and stony and say nothing except 'stay on the line caller' while they are begging you for help.

Never again.

I worked on an ISP tech hepldesk, and my situation was a lot better than yer general potplant level 1 call centre, because we supported other ISPs and large businesses, so actually had to know a lot of stuff about routing, Cisco commands, DNS and the like. Mind you we did still get calls from people calling it "netscrape" and saying they wanted to know who ran the internet so they could sue them.

At one point when I first started our callback queue was backlogged, and we were calling people back about 3 days after they'd called in (which is shitful, and doesnt happen anymore). Anyway my friend N goes to call this guy back only to be told he'd died since. He hung up and wailed "he waited so long he died! I KILLED HIM!". We had a pretty laid back atmosphere at our work (we were all friends and went goth clubbing after night shifts and stuff). Internet was allowed but games and IM banned on pain of firing.

Sometimes I miss those days. Then I see a modem init string and I go into a cold sweat and run away screaming.

SO I WILL COME TO THE STORE TOMORROW AND PICK THESE UP FROM YOU.

I just started laughing, really hard, like hysterical shrieking laughter and just said to her, LISTEN TO ME. YOU HAVE TO PICK THEM UP AT THE MUSEUM. WE JUST WENT THROUGH THIS. She started screaming again. Then she put her HUSBAND on the line to yell at me!!! All this time I was cancelling their tickets.

So, when they went to the museum, they'd have no fucking tickets to see the MYSTERIES OF EGYPT.

All day I've been saying 'There's a problem with the server, your head office are currently looking into it'.

am increasingly convinced that my bank, as well as AT&T, has a very elaborate system in place designed to just get you to give up even the most pedestrian and easily-resolved complaints. multiple disconnects w/o callbacks, unannounced transfers to pay-per-minute troubleshooting third-party services, notes placed in your "customer account" that go missing, promised rebates that don't materialize, five or six transfers between different departments during a single service call. kafka would be impressed.

As someone who does customer support, I can assure you that this is entirely the result of people not giving a shit. No sinister upper-management conspiracy necessary.

To answer the initial question, people who fail out of school due to severe depression, wallow in self-loathing for years before running out of savings, realize that without an education they're otherwise unemployable, and decide not to jump off a bride, a decision they are regretting further with every weekday (and most Saturdays), that is who works phone support.

Yeah it is one of the best-paying non-food-service "I have a high school diploma & no employable skills" jobs out there.

I worked for a few weeks taking incoming calls for Capitol One when I was 19. I knew I was moving in 7 weeks & decided just to waive all the fees of anyone who called. If I took it seriously I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it so much.

When I was 20 I worked as an "appointment setter." There was a "win a car" thing at the mall & we used the phone numbers from the entry forms. We first called & did an "environmental survey" for "market research," wherein we asked 10 or so opinion questions about recycling, energy conservation, etc. The point of this thing was the "demographic questions" at the end, where we got the person's income & marital status. If they made over $40k a year, they started getting calls from "appointment setters." I told them they could get a vacation package if they watched a house-cleaning demonstration wherein we cleaned a room of their house for free. What that meant was someone came to their house, dumped a pile of dirt on their floor, and then tried to sell them a $3,000 Filter Queen vacuum. If they didn't buy the vacuum, they refused to clean up the dirt. If I set more than 20 appointments a day, they bought my lunch. I quit after six weeks when I finally pieced all this together at a creepy/insane sales conference in Park City, Utah.

We ran out of car entry forms for a while so we had phone numbers, for a while, from some list that had the Wells Fargo logo at the top for some reason? And way too much identity-theft-friendly info on it. And when we ran out of those we seriously started calling numbers from lists photocopied from *the phone book.* That was the worst because no one every picked up the phone.

during one year of college, i worked as a dispatcher for an "alphanumeric messaging service," which was a thing that existed before the advent of the text message (must've been around 2002, when this company and every other company like it went out of business).

basically, if people wanted to send a text message to someone's beeper, they called an 800-number and would be connected to me. then, depending on the number/service they were calling/using, a different prompt would appear on my screen, usually something like "hello, $$$ messaging service here, may i have the name or user ID of the caller you wish to message?" after identifying the recipient in the database, they'd proceed with dictating their message while i typed it out. i was already a pretty fast typer, but i got super fast doing this, it was pleasing. plus i memorized the vast majority of all american area codes, including splits and overlays mind you.

in a 8-hour day i'd take an average of 500 of these calls, always back-to-back (they scheduled our shifts so that the number of dispatchers working was always proportional to the volume of incoming calls - standard call center stuff i guess). on a good day you'd get at least a couple "erotic" messages and those were always fun, especially since we had to repeat the message to confirm it before sending. our service also contracted with a number of media/entertainment companies, so i'd get the occasional celebrity recipient (although never any celebrity senders, though i guess i might not have known). i sent messages to dan rather, the drummer from aerosmith, and treach from naughty by nature, among others.

yes. hotel reservations. horrible.

yes (IT support) and it sucked

IT as well. Medical software, sucked

among other things, sex toys

One time a medical doctor was leaving to another practice and had a dispute with the previous clinic on obtaining the records. Lawyer on behalf of the doctor calls and I answered it on my lunch break to help out a buddy. Lawyer convo

“So is this recorded?”
“Yeah”
“What’s your name?”
“Ross”
“So, we’ve got Ross here today and Ross - do you confirm everything you’re about to say can be used in the court of law?”

-clicks-

Ten years ago almost exactly. Opening savings accounts. Hated it so much that I consider the 6 months the worst time in my life.

hmm interesting thread idea

working in a call centre doing customer service for a mobile phone company left me uncomfortably aware of how much information random people in other call centres have about me, my comings and goings etc. also that when you have an argument with a customer support person they will look up your facebook page immediately after finishing the call and everyone will laugh at your photos

I'm surprised I never answered this. Outgoing fundraising and survey calls were a large part of how I supported myself from 20-23 (and something I've done a few times since).

I was a telemarketer for a year or so, selling charitable pledges. It was a scam, of course - they promised the charity a certain amount at the end of the campaign, and then put shift after shift of callers on the case until they'd raised about 10x what they'd promised to deliver. I was OK at it but the money was shit so I quit.

I did a few shifts at a survey call centre before getting another job. It wasn't bad; all outgoing calls, an easy pace to the surveys.

Opinion Search?

It was at Ek0s.

Outbound customer service. Did not enjoy it at all, needed the money post Uni. Luckily it led to other things after 8 months or so that led to the job I am in now, so I am thankful for that.

tech support for local ISP, around '99 as the internet was becoming mainstream. Loved it. Wasn't fun when the service went down, we got bricks through the window and angry masturbators turning up in dressing gowns

I've done years of tech support, quite like it

there aer so many stock images of happy ladies' in call centers with long brown hair

https://www.google.com/search?q=happy+ladies%27+in+call+centers+with+long+brown+hair&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS1014US1014&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

no wonder we are training our ai image generators with this trope

I had a whole year working in a call centre and nobody was smiling in that fucking place

My first full time job was in a cable tv/ISP call center in my early 20s. I did it on a whim despite not being good on the phone and hating customer service, but it was mostly telling technical steps rather than soft skills like reassuring customers. We serviced New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and as you can imagine, it was rough. (We were located in the Midwest as we just an independent call center that the company contracted).

It got better after I was promoted to the resolutions desk. In that position, I only ever talked to customers if they requested a supervisor, and that combined with working the shift ending at 1 a.m. meant I didn't much interact with the public. Consequently, I mostly sat in a cubicle with a PlayStation Portable or a book, so it felt like I was getting paid to do what I would have been doing at home anyway. I think I plowed through something like 40 books in 2007 as a result.

Unfortunately, it set me on a bad path. Without a college diploma, I relied on those five years of experience to get me another customer service job, rinse and repeat, so the end result was working in the customer service field for the next... well, I still am, nearly 20 years later. Despite still not liking to interact with customers at all. I think there have been only about a few years in my working life where I've had holidays off without having to actively request it.

I think in theory it coul dbe a good job - I did it as a temp once and could barely get myself to show up

I do not like talking

Carribean cruiselines seems fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VouUppmrx1E

I made a spoken memoir / radio drama / sound collage thing about my year in a call centre, think it's quite good and certainly put a lot of time and care into making it, but it has had absolutely zero interest from anyone, so with no expectation that this will change now, here it is.

https://centuriesofsound.com/2023/03/13/1-3-port-out/