You're fired!
When I was 25, I took a job at an Ameritech call center as a customer service representative. I had completed my undergrad two years prior, started my master's program in forensic anthropology in London, took a break from the program, moved back to Indiana, moved out to Colorado, moved back to Indiana, went back to IU to complete a second undergrad major, left that program, and found myself back in my hometown bartending at the local lawyer hang-out across from the courthouse, thinking about being a homicide detective or a lawyer. I clearly had no academic or professional direction, and so, at the request of my father, I found myself accepting a respectable job with decent hours, decent pay, and great benefits. And it pretty much sucked.
First of all, I worked in a large call center - a vast room on the 2nd floor of a warehouse-type building with over a hundred cubicles. Approximately 110 women and 10 men staffed the call center, and we took incoming calls from customers requesting service and repair to their telephone lines. Imagine - working with over 100 women in the same room. It was the most catty, gossiping, all-up-in-yo'-business group of people I have ever worked with in my life. Most of the ladies were nice, down to earth types who were happy to be providing for their families by working outside the automotive factory environment, which is the main employer of people in my hometown. I respected these ladies and generally tended to gravitate to their groups during breaks and whatnot. However, just like high school, there were cliques of women, particularly the young 20-somethings with bad attitudes, who always seemed to stir up trouble.
For the majority of my time there (about a year and a half), my cubicle group consisted of a pill-popping 40-something druggie named Becky, a 30-something red-headed nymphomaniac I dubbed Psycho Cindy, and Angel, a young devout Christian woman who married her church's youth pastor at the age of 18. And then there was me, a mixed bag of tricks who got along well with all three. We spent 7.5 hours every day tethered to our desks by our headsets, receiving calls from angry, crappy customers who blamed us for the many problems with the company. We got yelled at, cursed at, and hit on by dirty old men. Taking call after call after call on the busy days was difficult, but it wasn't the worst part of the job. The worst part of the job was Compliance.
Compliance was part of our "job goal" and in a nutshell, compliance was how well you adhered to the Ameritech cult-like job program. Compliance included things such as logging in and out of your computer at the exact minute for each morning, afternoon, and lunch break. Our breaks were staggered, so we constantly had to remember to log out at precisely 10:13, or 12:26, or 2:48. You had 15 minutes for breaks, 30 for lunch. So you had to be back at your desk, ready to log back in at precisely 10:28, 12:56, and 3:03. And the powers that be were keeping track and deducting some kind of points when you were one minute early or one minute late.
Compliance also included staying at your desk, keeping your headset on, not talking across cubicles, not being disruptive, and playing well with others. Basically, compliance was the conduct/citizenship of the elementary report card. I didn't score the highest marks in third grade, and I didn't do so well 18 years later, either.
Management advised me that I consistently scored among the highest employees on customer service. No surprise there - the people I talked with loved me because I actually tried to cut through the corporate bullshit and help them, which got me in trouble with management more than once. But I also consistently had trouble staying in compliance. In fact, the entire 20 months I worked there, I never had one month where I was actually "in compliance." I talked to my cube-mates too much, I was disruptive, I stood up most of the afternoon talking on the phone, I surfed the computer system for something interesting to read, I got caught reading People magazine at my desk while simultaneously talking to a customer (more than once), I egged on Psycho Cindy to tell us more stories about her 18-year-old hispanic lover, I spent weeks trying to convince Angel to go out for margaritas with us on Wednesdays, I kept a running tally of how many Zanax tablets Becky took. I stuck up for the girls who got picked on by the bullies in the office, and I didn't take management serious at all. None of these behaviors helped my compliance. I think my managers liked me because I did a great job at my job, and my high numbers made them look good, but they didn't know what to do with me and my rotten compliance. They finally gave me some special projects to work on that got me away from the phones and my co-workers, and that seemed to help a bit.
Toward the end of my term at Ameritech, management finally threatened to fire me after I told one of the managers that I thought the Ameritech employee program sucked and caused people to hate their jobs and defy their ridiculous compliance standards. I quit soon thereafter for a great job that would make better use of my talents and not tie me to a desk and expect me to stay there. Angel eventually had kids and is now a stay-at-home mother. I'm sure she probably teaches Sunday School, too. Psycho Cindy is still crazy and still "dates" younger men. Becky died a couple of years ago from an accidental drug overdose. She died in her sleep, and her husband woke up next to her dead body.
These days, I think about compliance occasionally when I am sitting at my desk on a Saturday morning trying to maintain a self-imposed goal of billable hours. I hate the billables, but it could be worse. No one here at my firm has ever once mentioned the word "compliance."
First of all, I worked in a large call center - a vast room on the 2nd floor of a warehouse-type building with over a hundred cubicles. Approximately 110 women and 10 men staffed the call center, and we took incoming calls from customers requesting service and repair to their telephone lines. Imagine - working with over 100 women in the same room. It was the most catty, gossiping, all-up-in-yo'-business group of people I have ever worked with in my life. Most of the ladies were nice, down to earth types who were happy to be providing for their families by working outside the automotive factory environment, which is the main employer of people in my hometown. I respected these ladies and generally tended to gravitate to their groups during breaks and whatnot. However, just like high school, there were cliques of women, particularly the young 20-somethings with bad attitudes, who always seemed to stir up trouble.
For the majority of my time there (about a year and a half), my cubicle group consisted of a pill-popping 40-something druggie named Becky, a 30-something red-headed nymphomaniac I dubbed Psycho Cindy, and Angel, a young devout Christian woman who married her church's youth pastor at the age of 18. And then there was me, a mixed bag of tricks who got along well with all three. We spent 7.5 hours every day tethered to our desks by our headsets, receiving calls from angry, crappy customers who blamed us for the many problems with the company. We got yelled at, cursed at, and hit on by dirty old men. Taking call after call after call on the busy days was difficult, but it wasn't the worst part of the job. The worst part of the job was Compliance.
Compliance was part of our "job goal" and in a nutshell, compliance was how well you adhered to the Ameritech cult-like job program. Compliance included things such as logging in and out of your computer at the exact minute for each morning, afternoon, and lunch break. Our breaks were staggered, so we constantly had to remember to log out at precisely 10:13, or 12:26, or 2:48. You had 15 minutes for breaks, 30 for lunch. So you had to be back at your desk, ready to log back in at precisely 10:28, 12:56, and 3:03. And the powers that be were keeping track and deducting some kind of points when you were one minute early or one minute late.
Compliance also included staying at your desk, keeping your headset on, not talking across cubicles, not being disruptive, and playing well with others. Basically, compliance was the conduct/citizenship of the elementary report card. I didn't score the highest marks in third grade, and I didn't do so well 18 years later, either.
Management advised me that I consistently scored among the highest employees on customer service. No surprise there - the people I talked with loved me because I actually tried to cut through the corporate bullshit and help them, which got me in trouble with management more than once. But I also consistently had trouble staying in compliance. In fact, the entire 20 months I worked there, I never had one month where I was actually "in compliance." I talked to my cube-mates too much, I was disruptive, I stood up most of the afternoon talking on the phone, I surfed the computer system for something interesting to read, I got caught reading People magazine at my desk while simultaneously talking to a customer (more than once), I egged on Psycho Cindy to tell us more stories about her 18-year-old hispanic lover, I spent weeks trying to convince Angel to go out for margaritas with us on Wednesdays, I kept a running tally of how many Zanax tablets Becky took. I stuck up for the girls who got picked on by the bullies in the office, and I didn't take management serious at all. None of these behaviors helped my compliance. I think my managers liked me because I did a great job at my job, and my high numbers made them look good, but they didn't know what to do with me and my rotten compliance. They finally gave me some special projects to work on that got me away from the phones and my co-workers, and that seemed to help a bit.
Toward the end of my term at Ameritech, management finally threatened to fire me after I told one of the managers that I thought the Ameritech employee program sucked and caused people to hate their jobs and defy their ridiculous compliance standards. I quit soon thereafter for a great job that would make better use of my talents and not tie me to a desk and expect me to stay there. Angel eventually had kids and is now a stay-at-home mother. I'm sure she probably teaches Sunday School, too. Psycho Cindy is still crazy and still "dates" younger men. Becky died a couple of years ago from an accidental drug overdose. She died in her sleep, and her husband woke up next to her dead body.
These days, I think about compliance occasionally when I am sitting at my desk on a Saturday morning trying to maintain a self-imposed goal of billable hours. I hate the billables, but it could be worse. No one here at my firm has ever once mentioned the word "compliance."
posted by Amanda at 10:29 AM
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