My whole team, is seated around the big table in CONFERENCE ROOM 2. Kurt, Chloe, and I are seated at one end, he hunched over the table, me leaning back, arms folded across my chest and my boots up on the seat next to me. Sarah, our manager, is at the other end to the left, going through a stack of papers. We’ve been here about five minutes now. There has been some brief conversation among the rest of the team. I don’t know who any of them are. Unlike the other teams on the floor, ours does not have a weekly meeting, so aside from Kurt and Chloe, I’m clueless as to whom I work with. I know that none of these people has been here longer than I, aside from Kurt and Chloe, who started the month before.
At long last, Laura Rice waddles in, gives us a glance, and falls into a huge throne of human bones and skulls that none of us seemed to notice before. Two Royal Guard stand behind her holding torches in case anything should go awry. “How is everyone doing?” she asks, not meeting any eyes in her gaze. She shuffles through a stack of papers she brought with her and bangs them on the table to straighten them out in a Rush-Limbaugh manner. “Well, we have some new policy changes again, new policy changes.” Still, she won’t look any of us in the eye. How disrespectful to an employee can you be? We aren’t good enough for her to look at. “These are some big ones, so it will take some time to get used to, time to get used to.”
Collective grumbling around the room.
“I’m sure some of you may have noticed that you are now docked 50 points for opening accounts in System 1 unless it is necessary. We really are looking for everyone to quit using it, and no one was taking our suggestion, taking the hint.”
One middle-aged guy, whose name I think is Mike, clears his throat. “It would have been nice if they could have told us this before ruining our monthly averages.” Mike is one of those people who isn’t a manager, but still spends copious amounts of time worrying about such things as our monthly averages. I’ve never figured out the need to excel here. We don’t get a commission, just a little bonus if we show up every day. Still, if you walk across the floor, you hear people chatter on about call time, dollars collected, review scores, as if any of this will make or break anyone who isn’t a manager. Of course, the company has effectively brainwashed everyone into thinking that all of these things are vitally important. They are constantly drilling into us that the percentage of time we spend on calls while on the clock is the most important thing on the face of the Earth. If we spend any more than five percent of our day off the phone, the sky will literally come detached from its moorings and drop down on not only our heads, but the heads of every SpectraCom customer, not to mention the rather unimportant heads of people that neither work for, nor use, SpectraCom’s service. If any single person on the floor collects less than 400 dollars per hour on average, SpectraCom will instantly become not only morally bankrupt, but financially bankrupt as well. Should a single employee get less than 80 percent on a review, it means he has not only failed life for himself, but caused his entire family to become social pariahs.
My manager speaks up as well. “The managers weren’t even notified of this. I have three people who can’t avoid disciplinary action because of this.” And they aren’t eligible for that $50 quarterly bonus anymore, no matter how well they do. What a horrible way to cut corners. “More than half of my team will get action as well unless they score perfectly on the rest of the reviews they get this month.” She consults several of her own papers while I scan the rest of the room, trying to figure out who the three are. I know I’m not in either group, as my scores are nearly always perfect, not to mention that I will probably be fired before the end of the month. I’m assuming Chloe is part of the second group, if not actually one of those three. It’s not Kurt; his scores are even better than mine.
The lack of notification for anyone makes far more sense when we get Laura Rice’s consoling response: she shrugs. She just fucking shrugs. A good deal of the floor is in danger of termination because of an unanticipated and unannounced policy change, and her response is to shrug. Oh well! Hundreds of people are in danger of being fired from this place–one of the only places in this economically depressed city that is hiring–good workers who just want to pay their rent and put food on the table, and this arrogant bitch shrugs. A good number of lives could be smashed, but the official company response is to shrug.
“That’s the best you can offer us?” I find myself saying. “How many people on the floor, not just this team, are in danger of losing their jobs just because they used the wrong system?”
“Rubin, please,” Laura Rice says, waving her hands up and down at me. “Please.”
“We didn’t forget to ask for payments, we didn’t harass customers, we didn’t do anything wrong. We used the wrong system. You can justify people losing their livelihoods over this?”
“Rubin,” she sputters. “No one is going to lose their job over this. No one is losing their job.”
“Is this policy going to be retroactive like the professionalism? Are you going to go back and hit people for using System 1 two weeks ago like you hit me for not being professional two weeks ago?”
“Rubin, there are some important topics to cover. I don’t want to ask you to leave the meeting,” she says desperately.
“This had better be good,” I hiss, forcing myself to calm.
She sighs. “This is something new that we are starting next week, starts next week.” She rustles through her stack of papers again, reads over something, smiles and says, “Starting next Monday, we are going to need to ask customers to verify their addresses on outbound calls. We do this normally on inbound calls as it is, to protect security on outbound calls; it shouldn’t be hard to start doing this.”
“You want us to verify addresses... we read it to them?” Mike asks, confused.
“No, no, no!” Laura Rice chuckles. “They will need to read it to you.”
I chime in again. “So you want us to call them at the number we have given them?” I ask.
“Yes,” she replies, still giving me an evil eye.
“You want us to ask for the customer,” Mike continues for me.
“Yes, that’s correct, “ Laura Rice upholds.
“Then you want us to have them tell us their addresses?” Kurt asks, getting into the mix.
“Exactly!” she proclaims. “Exactly.”
I take my feet off the chair and lean on the table. “Do you realize just how stupid we are going to be sounding? We know who we are calling; we are calling them at their house. It’s not like they came to us; we searched them out. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get some of these people to talk to us as it is? Now you want us to make further unreasonable demands? When was the last time any of you in upper management spent a minute on the phone?”
“Rubin, please, no more outbursts, no more.”
“When you were coming up with this,” I continue unabated, “did anyone put any thought into it? Most people don’t trust us as it is. Now we have to come on the line sounding like we don’t know what we’re talking about. What are you doing to us?”
“You’re going to just need to get used to it,” she says as though it’s some kind of consolation worthy of one upping her shrug. “These are the new policies. We have to go with them.”
“No,” I correct. “We have to go with them. You just have to fire us when we don’t do it well enough.”
“Rubin, you’re really testing me today,” she hisses. “Testing today.” She looks around the room at everyone. “That’s about all I have right now. Does anyone else have any questions?”
I hold my tongue.
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