Dollars Per Hour Chapter 5

    Friday passes like Friday’s always pass. Payments. Turned-off phones. Screaming people. Beers at lunch. Arguing more heatedly with customers after lunch. Managers asking Chloe and me to please keep it down. Counting down minutes, spacing calls to the end of the night. Going straight from work to the bar. Drinking until last call. Cheap, greasy food that usually gets vomited up on the way home. Wake up hungover Saturday morning for another bright, sunshiny day.

    Every Saturday morning is a mad dash into the building. Without fail, SpectraCom management schedules more asses in chairs than there are chairs, and to ensure you have a seat, you have to show up at least 15 minutes early. To ensure you have a good seat, you have to show up anywhere from half an hour to an hour early and wait for one to open. If you don’t find somewhere to sit, say, if you were to simply show up on time, you have to wander around, waiting for someone to go to lunch, so you can force the unfortunate person out of his or her hard-fought chair, leaving that person to do the same upon returning 59 minutes later. As you wander, any number of managers will be on your heels, demanding to know why you aren’t working, until they are distracted by another wanderer, leaving you to be attacked by the next manager, a clever ploy by upper management to break your spirit even further, bring you even more under their thumbs. Luckily, I have Kurt on my side, leaving the house early enough to save seats for both of us.

    It’s a fairly uneventful Saturday, the only problem call right after our first break, when Graham Hancock calls to make complaints about representatives calling about his mother’s account and not telling him why.  With his name absent from the account, neither I nor the rep before me were able to talk to him without her permission. The mother presented a whole new problem, standing next to her son and loudly refusing to grant that permission. No matter how much I tried to explain that both I and the prior rep were correct and not talking to Graham, and that if he would let me speak to his mother for only a moment, I would be able to speak with him at length, neither Graham nor his mother would consent.

    Graham demanded a supervisor, because surely he would get answers from a supervisor. He waited about five minutes and hung up. We’re not allowed to release the call until a supervisor picks up, so I had to sit there and wait on the line. Boo hoo.

    While I endlessly rearranged the words in a poem about wandering drunk through downtown, Kurt grabs my arm, laughing as he drags me to his desk, pointing to my signature in the notes of his current customer, Graham Hancock. Mr. Hancock was demanding to speak with a supervisor to complain that I had kept him on hold for over half an hour and refusing to get help. My counter registered that I had been on the call for a total of nine minutes and ticking. Kurt told the customer he was sitting next to me, and that we had been back from break for only fifteen minutes, so what he was saying was not possible, and he could see that my clock showed I was only on for ten minutes. Graham demanded a supervisor for complaints against Kurt as well, hanging up this time after only two minutes.


Go to Chapter 6