The New Job
this entry brought to you by radiohead, "i might be wrong"
In January-- in fact, the first week of January-- I quit my job at Target. I miss the people that I worked with but my supervisor that I got along with great had just left a few weeks before me, and even though I liked the new guy, there was talk of changes, and this time, with Christmas time finally over, they were in a place to impliment those changes. My coworkers, by now, are all mostly gone, so I left at a good time.
I work at MCI now. It's slightly frustrating, because when I mention to people that I work there, they assume I mean telemarketting. It seems that everyone I know has either worked there or know someone who has worked there, and their faces will with dread and pity when I tell them. "I used to work there", they tell me. "I lasted two weeks. I hated it there." It's an understandable response, because MCI is one of the largest employers of out-of-high-schoolers in Chandler, and out of every 150 people hired at MCI, 10 of them are for my department, and the others are for telemarketting. I explain to them that we don't like telemarketers either, that we don't really speak to them, wish they would go away. Then I tell them that I work for telerelay, and they give me a blank face, probably like the one you have as you're reading this.
Let me explain. Relay service is a free, FCC mandated, public service for the deaf. A deaf person has a special phone, as you may be aware where they type to one another instead of talk. Well, if they want to call a hearing person, they dial me and tell me the number they'd like to call. I call that number and say everything the person types, and I type everything the hearing person says. All of the relay operators here in Arizona are required to type 60 words per minute, which is way more than it actually sounds. You might think, 60 wpm? I can do that with my eyes closed. The problem is 60 words off the top of your head is nothing, but actually typing dicated words tested at 60 wpm is a much different story.
Because of the fact that there are people's personal phone calls, I can't discuss the content of any calls for any reason. We're supposed to be a human phone line, and I can't become personally involved in conversation, I can't talk about them when off calls, it's supposed to be like they never happened, like I was never there. I can interject to control the pace of calls, ie, I can tell them to slow down or repeat words that were unclear, but if someone asks me a direct question or tries to talk to me, I can't do it.
It's a really interesting job. At Target, my life felt so futile. My job was the backbone of the store, but, as is true of any job like that, we were treated with the attitude that we were completely disposable. In ten minutes time we could go through and make it show that nothing was in the warehouse and make it so that you couldn't fix it in months' time, and all of us had knowledge of how to do it. It wasn't a secret-- and we could make so that no one would know, yet we were treated with total disdain. As a job, everything we did would be undone the next day. It was a vicious cycle that never seemed to have an end in sight. Everything we did seemed completely futile, yet doing nothing or working in any way at a slower or sloppier pace would just make things worse.
So I've not got a job where I help deaf people all day. And it feels good helping people. It's certainly not the most important job in the world, but know that I'm helping deaf people live their lives comfortably with a mode of communication that you and I take for granted, it definitely has its rewards. I'm making 10 dollars an hour, which isn't bad-- if I'd've been promoted to supervisor level at Target back in 2001 and stayed there I'd just now be making more than 10 dollars. Plus, I get an attendance bonus if I'm not late, so so far I've made a consistent 11 dollars an hour, which is nice. But what's more is I'm not just doing it for the paycheck like I would have been at Target. When I call up a doctor's office and make an appointment to see the doctor for something potentially life threatening (and when you take how many deaf people are previously hearing elderly people, this happens a lot), you feel good about yourself. But you feel even better when you make a call for someone who just misses mom and wants to check in with her for an hour, or when two young lovers just sit and chat about how much they love one another, that's when you just get all warm inside and you say to yourself, god, sometimes I just love this job.
Of course, since you're dealing with people and their personal lives, this job has its own unique set of frustrations. When you're in training, they tell you the job is stress free, in that it's a stress you don't go home with. And that's true. I don't worry about how many calls I make, how many sales I get. I don't have to worry about calls being too long or too short. In fact, I've been on a call where the text typer obviously wasn't there but wasn't disconnected, and the hearing person worked at a business where they couldn't hang up on anyone, so we both just sat there for 45 minutes before the hearing person was told by their supervisor to hang up. When I was briefly working telemarketting at another company, if someone put us on hold, it was awesome, because our talk time would go up-- the whole thing was talk time, Chris, your talk time is too low, Chris, you need to get your talk time up-- but if we were on a call too long, they'd get mad at us, because they knew we were avoiding calls. At this job I've been put on hold for forty minutes. In our down time, we're not expected to keep busy. We're not given busy work. We talk, read, write, play gameboy, whatever we want. On particularly slow days we even whip out the chess boards. The over night crew plays Risk.
The only thing we have to worry about is typing everything the person says, and to that end we do have things on our side; we can tell them to slow down if needed to type everything word for word. Sometimes you'll be having a bad day and can't type for shit, but that's it. That's the only part of our job we need to worry about.
So, it's kind of stress that you don't take with you, but to say it's stress free is untrue. It's a unique kind of stress you really don't have to deal with at other jobs. Since I can't get into details on what exactly can go wrong, let me give you a hint: try doing a web search on IP RELAY fraud and see what you come up with. Also, keep in mind that you can access relay from the computer, so we get lots of bored, idiot teenagers and college students who think it's frigging hilarious to call themselves up at home and listen to mildly annoyed operators saying the words "nigger" and "fag" repeatedly. Or to call their friends and say swear words over and over until they hang up. Or any other thing you could imagine some idiot would do with a service like that, when he could be using the Internet for productive things, like porn.
However, the most infuriating part of my job has got to be ignorance. I know that most people don't know anything about deaf people, deaf culture, and especially not how they communicate with the hearing world. But if you work at a place of business that should never hang up on anyone-- think of a place that you'd try to call for something very important, urgent, possibly even life threatening, and imagine getting hung up on. Now imagine you call up again and barely get out the words "I'M HANDICAPPED DON'T HANG UP" only to get hung up on. Now imagine calling again and not even getting a "Hello?", just getting the receiver picked up and hung up before any words can be exchanged, and you'll start to see what's stressful about our job. I can't get into too many details, but I can say that we don't volunteer the information that the user is deaf, because if you were handicapped and trying to make a call, there are times when you don't want the person on the other line knowing you are. But once the user instructs me to tell you that they are deaf and you still act nasty and hang up... There's a very special place in hell waiting for you, asshole.
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with love from CRS @ 9:24 PM
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
In January-- in fact, the first week of January-- I quit my job at Target. I miss the people that I worked with but my supervisor that I got along with great had just left a few weeks before me, and even though I liked the new guy, there was talk of changes, and this time, with Christmas time finally over, they were in a place to impliment those changes. My coworkers, by now, are all mostly gone, so I left at a good time.
I work at MCI now. It's slightly frustrating, because when I mention to people that I work there, they assume I mean telemarketting. It seems that everyone I know has either worked there or know someone who has worked there, and their faces will with dread and pity when I tell them. "I used to work there", they tell me. "I lasted two weeks. I hated it there." It's an understandable response, because MCI is one of the largest employers of out-of-high-schoolers in Chandler, and out of every 150 people hired at MCI, 10 of them are for my department, and the others are for telemarketting. I explain to them that we don't like telemarketers either, that we don't really speak to them, wish they would go away. Then I tell them that I work for telerelay, and they give me a blank face, probably like the one you have as you're reading this.
Let me explain. Relay service is a free, FCC mandated, public service for the deaf. A deaf person has a special phone, as you may be aware where they type to one another instead of talk. Well, if they want to call a hearing person, they dial me and tell me the number they'd like to call. I call that number and say everything the person types, and I type everything the hearing person says. All of the relay operators here in Arizona are required to type 60 words per minute, which is way more than it actually sounds. You might think, 60 wpm? I can do that with my eyes closed. The problem is 60 words off the top of your head is nothing, but actually typing dicated words tested at 60 wpm is a much different story.
Because of the fact that there are people's personal phone calls, I can't discuss the content of any calls for any reason. We're supposed to be a human phone line, and I can't become personally involved in conversation, I can't talk about them when off calls, it's supposed to be like they never happened, like I was never there. I can interject to control the pace of calls, ie, I can tell them to slow down or repeat words that were unclear, but if someone asks me a direct question or tries to talk to me, I can't do it.
It's a really interesting job. At Target, my life felt so futile. My job was the backbone of the store, but, as is true of any job like that, we were treated with the attitude that we were completely disposable. In ten minutes time we could go through and make it show that nothing was in the warehouse and make it so that you couldn't fix it in months' time, and all of us had knowledge of how to do it. It wasn't a secret-- and we could make so that no one would know, yet we were treated with total disdain. As a job, everything we did would be undone the next day. It was a vicious cycle that never seemed to have an end in sight. Everything we did seemed completely futile, yet doing nothing or working in any way at a slower or sloppier pace would just make things worse.
So I've not got a job where I help deaf people all day. And it feels good helping people. It's certainly not the most important job in the world, but know that I'm helping deaf people live their lives comfortably with a mode of communication that you and I take for granted, it definitely has its rewards. I'm making 10 dollars an hour, which isn't bad-- if I'd've been promoted to supervisor level at Target back in 2001 and stayed there I'd just now be making more than 10 dollars. Plus, I get an attendance bonus if I'm not late, so so far I've made a consistent 11 dollars an hour, which is nice. But what's more is I'm not just doing it for the paycheck like I would have been at Target. When I call up a doctor's office and make an appointment to see the doctor for something potentially life threatening (and when you take how many deaf people are previously hearing elderly people, this happens a lot), you feel good about yourself. But you feel even better when you make a call for someone who just misses mom and wants to check in with her for an hour, or when two young lovers just sit and chat about how much they love one another, that's when you just get all warm inside and you say to yourself, god, sometimes I just love this job.
Of course, since you're dealing with people and their personal lives, this job has its own unique set of frustrations. When you're in training, they tell you the job is stress free, in that it's a stress you don't go home with. And that's true. I don't worry about how many calls I make, how many sales I get. I don't have to worry about calls being too long or too short. In fact, I've been on a call where the text typer obviously wasn't there but wasn't disconnected, and the hearing person worked at a business where they couldn't hang up on anyone, so we both just sat there for 45 minutes before the hearing person was told by their supervisor to hang up. When I was briefly working telemarketting at another company, if someone put us on hold, it was awesome, because our talk time would go up-- the whole thing was talk time, Chris, your talk time is too low, Chris, you need to get your talk time up-- but if we were on a call too long, they'd get mad at us, because they knew we were avoiding calls. At this job I've been put on hold for forty minutes. In our down time, we're not expected to keep busy. We're not given busy work. We talk, read, write, play gameboy, whatever we want. On particularly slow days we even whip out the chess boards. The over night crew plays Risk.
The only thing we have to worry about is typing everything the person says, and to that end we do have things on our side; we can tell them to slow down if needed to type everything word for word. Sometimes you'll be having a bad day and can't type for shit, but that's it. That's the only part of our job we need to worry about.
So, it's kind of stress that you don't take with you, but to say it's stress free is untrue. It's a unique kind of stress you really don't have to deal with at other jobs. Since I can't get into details on what exactly can go wrong, let me give you a hint: try doing a web search on IP RELAY fraud and see what you come up with. Also, keep in mind that you can access relay from the computer, so we get lots of bored, idiot teenagers and college students who think it's frigging hilarious to call themselves up at home and listen to mildly annoyed operators saying the words "nigger" and "fag" repeatedly. Or to call their friends and say swear words over and over until they hang up. Or any other thing you could imagine some idiot would do with a service like that, when he could be using the Internet for productive things, like porn.
However, the most infuriating part of my job has got to be ignorance. I know that most people don't know anything about deaf people, deaf culture, and especially not how they communicate with the hearing world. But if you work at a place of business that should never hang up on anyone-- think of a place that you'd try to call for something very important, urgent, possibly even life threatening, and imagine getting hung up on. Now imagine you call up again and barely get out the words "I'M HANDICAPPED DON'T HANG UP" only to get hung up on. Now imagine calling again and not even getting a "Hello?", just getting the receiver picked up and hung up before any words can be exchanged, and you'll start to see what's stressful about our job. I can't get into too many details, but I can say that we don't volunteer the information that the user is deaf, because if you were handicapped and trying to make a call, there are times when you don't want the person on the other line knowing you are. But once the user instructs me to tell you that they are deaf and you still act nasty and hang up... There's a very special place in hell waiting for you, asshole.
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