In which I bitch about the job market.
I work for a distributed call center. (Yes, I’m white trash like that. Ye gods.)
A year ago, I moved off phones into a chat pilot, which was great. They made us take three chats at a time for awhile, which was fucking insane, but chats are chats and not calls.
Well, it’s been cancelled.
No more chat pilot. Finis. (Actually, it’s been turned into a proper department, so that’s why the pilot is over, but the contract to work it was given to another call center in Mumbai.) So, tonight, I was moved back, by my call center employer, to inbound phones.
It fucking SUCKED.
Taking calls for Giant Cable Company’s home security product is rough:
– One guy was a dick to me because he failed to pay his bill and got disconnected. This was somehow my fault.
– Another only responded to 40% of the things I said, and was unintelligible when he did respond (because the mic on his phone was garbage). He grunted and panted a lot. I was not able to solve his issue and he refused a tech visit.
– Another claimed slow internet (that diagnostics did not support; I think the real issue was a virus-infested laptop). Did the troubleshooting, issue not resolved, offered to send a tech. Caller was enraged that there weren’t any tech appointment times she liked, took it out on me.
– Another person was pissed because an install appointment had been moved for no apparent reason, which I completely understand. My department doesn’t handle installation appointments. Customer demanded a call back from the appropriate department the next day. Well, I can’t schedule callbacks from any department, not even my own. Sorry for the frustration. (You’d think they’d build a tool for that, but no: customers can schedule callbacks on the website, but it’s automated and just throws them into the goddamned queue with everyone else. It’s a raging insult, but hey, that’s corporate American customer service for you.)
I’m nice to people. I listen and empathize. I mirror. I try. I have very little ego left about any of it and don’t really take it personally when people are mad, but there’s so little I can actually do to help. I get paid (very little) to be ineffectual, replaceable, and to get yelled at. That’s how my job is designed. And it’s disappointing and frustrating for me. I used to be a fucking sysadmin. I had root on boxen, FFS!
I don’t have any authority. I don’t know the why or how. The company is too big, too broken, and too greedy. I am a cog; I am replaceable. Anybody who can sit in a chair can do my job. Turnover is fantastically high and the job is designed to take any warm body. I am expected to have no expertise.
The job itself is hostile: by the time my extension rings, the customer is already pissed off about navigating the IVR, authenticating, and long hold time. Tools don’t really work, I can only support some things and not others.
I have to say “I don’t know” a lot (but I’m not supposed to because the Quality Assurance document says “take ownership” right on it). Volume is always really high, because that’s how call centers work: they have historical call volume for this half hour on this day for the past decade, and never over-schedule employees. The majority of items tracked by metrics are hostile to customers and employees both (the shorter the calls, the better? really?) but are measured anyway and treated as real data.
You can’t say “deliver world-class service” and “keep your calls as short as possible” and mean both.
There’s almost nothing that isn’t terribly, terribly broken.
I do get to work from home, braless and shoeless, with no commute. But I also get shit on by both sides: tools that don’t work, problems I cannot solve, angry callers rightly frustrated by standard corporate American bullshit.
Obviously they told me chat was going away, so I’ve been job hunting. (Turned out it went away in 4-6 weeks rather than 4-6 months, but they did tell me, damn them to hell.) One place turned me down, twice, no idea why. Three others didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my application. A few national work-from-home places that say they hire in Minnesota have no Minnesota positions available, likely due to a minimum wage hike (expected in four years, if I understand it correctly).
I live in Uptown, so there’s work in the neighborhood but it’s mostly food service. I applied at a deli and a coffee shop; neither replied. I’d never get a front-of-house job because I’m no longer young and hot, don’t even want to bake pizzas, I haven’t waitressed in decades, and the office jobs want young, enthusiastic, hard-working college kids to work shit hours for ten bucks an hour, or people with obscure licenses.
I’m feeling like shit about it. I hate my job and want a better one, but work, as I’ve been saying for years and years, is awful. Low pay, awful hours, and this horrific expectation of total devotion to the job on the employee’s part, with nothing whatsoever in return from the employer! Random scheduling, uncomfortable environments, no bennies, no holidays, no hope of promotion. You’re just supposed to bust your ass and say thank you for the abuse. It’s a shitshow.
I don’t want to get abused by angry callers five nights a week. I don’t want to apologize for shit that shouldn’t be broken in the first place. I don’t want to pretend my audits aren’t ridiculous, nor do I want to pretend enthusiasm for a shitty, hostile position that has never given me a raise or a holiday off.
But I also don’t want to get an equally shitty other job, with a commute. Working from home means you don’t have to spend a dozen hours every week getting ready, dressed (fully suited up in wintertime just to step outside), walking, bussing, and walking, just to get to and from work. Working from home means you have half as much laundry. My work-from-home job is awful, but it’s at home. I can forgo makeup. I can not wash my hair for a week. I can wear what I slept in.
I want a job where they appreciate me for being useful, intelligent, dependable, and friendly. I’d like to work efficiently, do well at it, and feel decent about it. I’d like to make more than ten bucks an hour. I’d like my schedule to be the same every week, or get a decent amount of warning when it changes; I’d like to get holidays off. I’d like to do this work in a reasonably comfortable environment, with, like, climate control. I’d like to be able to walk there, or take a single bus. I’d like to have tools that work, I’d like to be able to actually solve problems or produce measurable output. And then I’d like to go home and not think about work until it’s time to go back again the next day.
How the fuck is that unreasonable?
And yet, it is. If you’ve read job descriptions for non-specialist work in the past ten years, apparently it is.
(What I would give to have my old U-B job back! It was part-time, I had a desk, it was 5 blocks from home, decent pay, and I got most major holidays off!)
In which there’s a thought.
You know, if you’ve found some old post here in which I’ve said stupid shit, please feel free to ignore it.
Over the course of keeping this blog, I’ve thought a lot of stupid shit, and I can almost guarantee that whatever it was I eventually got over it.
I used to be anti-vax and pro-homeopathy. I used to think shit about feminism and transgenderism I no longer think. Various opinions and feelings and thoughts about a lot of things have evolved. I’m a work in progress.
In other words, I’m too lazy to dig through seventeen years of posts to update or correct things I was thinking through; most likely, if I’ve written something dumb, I’ve gotten better since then, because I’m always learning. And writing out long screeds helps me to do that.
Cheers.
In which a favorite author has died.
Several writers have said today that they think they’d have been afraid to meet Harlan Ellison.
Well, I’m not a writer, so I guess I don’t have a writer’s fear of having my work critiqued by Harlan goddamned Ellison, but I’ve been around smart, mouthy men, and if you feel you would have been afraid to meet Harlan, you haven’t learned how to tell people to shut the fuck up.
Which, if you’re a fan of his, you should have learned from him. Ellison was basically a walking master class in how to tell people to shut the fuck up.
The way you do it is this: when smart, mouthy men say or do stupid shit, you say, “Shut the fuck up. Jesus. Are you even listening to what’s coming out of your mouth?”
And if they’re smart, and you’re right, they will.
The only time it gets uncomfortable is if they’re dumb or you’re wrong.
I never met Harlan, of course, but I don’t think he was dumb. I mean, not that my opinion matters in the least, but it never once occurred to me that anybody’d be afraid to meet Ellison. He looks like he was an unmitigated hoot.
In which there’s travel! And I repeat myself!
Going to see Amma in D.C. this weekend! Jai Ma! It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
I think this is my twentieth year in a row going to see Her, which is astonishing and weird.
Staying in a Marriott. My man decided not to come this year, so I have a hotel room all to myself. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed in a hotel alone before, seems so absurdly decadent! (I posted repeatedly on the Travel Exchange for a roommate but although I got two inquiries, both devotees found other lodgings.) I can afford the room on my own without someone to share with, but it’s a lot of money.
I feel, I think, guilty about the expense, like it’s a needless waste or I don’t deserve it, but I so prefer staying in the program hotel rather than finding something cheaper elsewhere and walking or trying to arrange rides or cabs or shuttles back and forth. I also decided to stay an extra night so that I can stay up all night for Devi Bhava and then sleep all the next day, rather than going home flat exhausted and fuzzy like I always have before. So, a room alone, and an extra, not-technically-necessary night. Wow.
Expect I’ll feel somewhat lonely, as I don’t really know any D.C. devotees, or really many devotees at all any more, so unless I make a new friend I’ll likely just sit alone.
Oh, well, better for meditation, I guess.
I intend to spend every possible moment in the program hall; maybe do some kitchen seva. Have to remember to take closed shoes for that.
Have plans to see VUBOQ on that last, extra evening, for drinks or dinner! So excited!
Then a flight back the next morning, home, and back to work that evening.
I did something absurd and bought a white dress. It’s the same style as a dress I already have, so I know it’s comfortable and I’ll love it, but me in white is ridiculous because I’ll stain it immediately. But it’ll be fun to wear in the darshan hall, as I never wear any of my old white saris or skirts or punjabis anymore, and I got it for free with credit card points. I don’t have a white slip, but I do have a gray one I think will work even if it shows through some as I’ll wear it with a gray dupatta scarf. My flight is discount, so I have to check my bag, so I bought a set of clear zip pouches for toiletries, too.
I’m still technically poor, but I feel terribly extravagant about my upcoming vacation!
Now I need to go throw in a load of laundry and find my suitcase.
Update: I got a roommate after all! Hope she’s not insane!
In which there’s, uh, random stuff.
Kitchen sink’s been filling up with water from the pipes, so I haven’t done dishes in days. Plumber’s coming tomorrow to fix it, but then I’ll have to do the dishes.
Already cleared out the cupboard under the sink, so the visit shouldn’t be too terrible.
Leaving for DC on the 30th, to see Amma July 1-2, so need to do laundry and organize my crap for travel. Probably need to buy lens solution, too. Have to check (and pay for) my bag because I bought a discounted ticket, so at least I can take full-sized products.
Have to wash a wrap or two, too, for flying. I’ve learned over the years that a wrap is the only way to handle the warmth of airports (throw it over one’s shoulder, out of the way) and the chill of flights (use it as a blanket). Jackets are useless: too bulky to carry, and too short to cover legs and feet.
Sleep cycle’s such that I’m generally awake all night, often reading, until dawn, then sleeping ’til 11 or 1 or 3. We have blackout curtains so with the fan and/or air conditioner on it’s easy sleeping even with the sun up.
Work schedule is still part-time, 5 to 10pm, but my employer lost the chat contract to a call center in India, so we’re all going back on phones in the next 4-6 months. I’m annoyed as hell and considering other work. They’ve never given me a raise, they never manage to give me the few days off I need each year, and policy is ever hostile and shitty. Of course, a job change would probably mean equally shitty policy and even shittier hours, so, well, we’ll see. Maybe something will come up in the neighborhood. Maybe I could check groceries, up the street at that co-op or something. Get me out of the damn building.
In which LOL HORMONES.
As you wade deeper into perimenopause, well, there are these looooong lists of exciting symptoms to experience!
I’m at least halfway through the list now, if not more, and it SUCKS and I want to complain:
Thinning hair. Skin elasticity loss. Irregular (in my case, shorter) cycles. Anxiety. Arrhythmia. Tingling extremities. Muscle aches. Fatigue. Sleep changes. Hot flashes. Weight gain.
Fuck it all! It’s unpleasant!
I’m fat and dieting no longer works for shit. Over the past decade half my hair’s fallen out and been replaced with fewer, finer strands. My skin’s saggy. I have wrinkles on the bottoms of my feet, AND the fat there has thinned, so they get sore for no reason! Sometimes they tingle like they’re in a sack of ants because of low estrogen! SOMETIMES I CAN’T SLEEP, which never, ever happened to me before, and weirds me the fuck out. Going to pee and producing only a thimbleful is incredibly annoying. Mood swings, aka walking into the kitchen to get some water and suddenly feeling suddenly and inexplicably sad. I spend lots of time just not really wanting to do much of anything, which is foreign to my extroverted personality so I always feel vaguely guilty and lazy. Fucking acne!
Hot flashes, if you’ve never had one, are fucking stupid.
Trying to be grateful I’ve lived long enough to experience all this is not working. I want to be 35 again! Shit, I’d settle for 43, even!
This sucks!
Can’t tell you how excited I am for NIGHT SWEATS.
Fuck.
In unrelated news, social media still sucks but I keep looking at it anyway.
In which there’s a blog post! ABOUT NOTHING.
It’s late May. The air conditioner’s been in for a week. There was a thunderstorm earlier and the power flickered but didn’t go out, so, sadly, I had to keep working ’til the end of my shift. It was fairly slow and I didn’t get skilled for fucking inbound calls. Win!
It’s 1:22 in the morning and I’m sitting at my desk watching a BBC police procedural and scrolling social media like an idiot.
Need to book my Amma retreat, but keep not doing it. Probably will decide on DC (couldn’t get registered for the Toronto retreat with rooms, tried Travel Exchange but no dice) and buy a plane ticket tomorrow.
Dad was here last week and took us to a Twins game. Mariners won, which is fine with me as a native Washingtonian. It rained for most of the game, but was warm enough it wasn’t a bother.
Bob’s Java Hut, a coffee shop a block away, has a fantastic thing called a Carburetor. It’s cold press with half and half and sweetened condensed milk and it’s brilliant. If I bring a jar, they fill it to the top. Magic.
I still need to see a dentist. OMFG do I ever. My mouth is a fucking crime scene.
Still rockin’ out regularly to my ancient iPod, dug up out of a drawer recently and which still holds a moderately decent charge. Backed it up to my computer finally, but haven’t put anything new on it. It’s so old there’s a playlist called “Pop Rocks” that features nothing under ten years old.
There’s no produce in my fridge. We need to go shopping. All I have is onions and wilted celery, maybe some carrots. How did people used to survive without year-round tomatoes?
Bought some clothes online and they arrived today! A new hippie skirt (my old ones both died recently) with a massive 25-yard spin; expensive as skirts go, but worth it. New sports bras, since the elastic always goes. A three-pack of tank tops because it’s FUCKING HOT OUT, plus a tank dress with pockets, because feminist Twitter spent, like, a month bitching about how women’s clothing never has pockets because OMG TEH PATRIARCHY and I just wanted to prove it’s not that you can’t get pockets but more like you don’t fucking bother to buy shit with pockets, ladies.
There are very few people who need to wash their bed linens as much as I do. Maybe I’ll pull that off tomorrow, so we can sleep in on the weekend in fresh, cleeeeeean sheeeeeets.
Here’s a tiny dalek.
In which there’s a blog post! Because I still blog! Occasionally!
Fat:
On a diet now, again, again-again, started weekend before last. Basically a combo of calorie-counting and slow carb. Haven’t had any pasta or baguette, pizza or flour tortillas, but have had a couple of potatoes. Mashed last weekend, and roasted tonight. They do have vitamins and minerals, after all, your potatoes do.
Doing the tiniest little exercise routine, but doing it daily! Have a couple of old wine bottles filled with water for weights for curls and arm lifts. Weird thing is that squats are easier when fat; something about balance, I imagine? It’s the smallest exercise routine ever, but it’s 100% more than the nothing I was doing before!
Have already lost a full inch of my thigh and breast measurements, and a quarter inch off my ankle. Maybe more, but I’m only measuring on Sundays. Don’t happen to own a scale. Feeling distinctly better, even. My feet look less like dead fish! More energy, even!
Sol:
The light is getting better, of course, as our gorgeous planet tilts the way she does, but it’s still in the 20’s here with absolute piles of snow all over. The weather doesn’t matter much to me, as I go weeks on end without leaving the building, but I love that it’s still light out now when I sit down at my desk to login for work at five o’clock.
Employment:
Work is, well, stupid. I work for a call center who contracts with cable company, very large. Many employee-facing policies are, for the most part, absurd, and the produce of management who apparently have little to no idea what’s really happening on the ground, and their training videos are absolutely cringeworthy corporate bullshittery trapped in a past of long-term employment and employee-employer loyalty. Their flagship software suite is forever being updated to be less useful, constantly rearranged to make it harder and harder to deliver service to their customers.
Most of what I do is secretarial. In the main, my job is comprised of clicking Next and copying and pasting blurbs. Once in a great while I have to think, briefly, about a customer’s issue and actually solve a problem, but mostly? I just follow a flowchart. Any competently produced piece of software could do 90% what I do (they pay me for that extra 10%, I imagine). Fucking Alexa could do what I do, were it tied into the appropriate data.
My direct employer is, as far as I can tell, very broke and very struggling. Stock value is a downhill slalom since 2013. I’ve been there two years and have seen various functions removed or outsourced, and have never had a raise, plus, well, I sense that peculiar kind of urgency failing companies exude.
But they did, at least, move me off phones into a chat pilot! Chat is better, by a lot of markers, than getting screamed at by infuriated customers, but management has the chat platform software set to feed us as many as three chats at a time, so it makes it impossible to deliver excellent, or even good, service when it’s busy.
Not that it would be overtaxing to chat with three customers at once; could do that easily if the goal were just to fix things, solve problems, give the people what they want. No, it’s the required logging/documentation and abysmal tools we’re also using that make it a nightmare.
It’s been busy lately because a lot of the team are out for a variety of reasons: illness, internet outages/weather, time off. Oh, and because management can’t seem to figure out how to stagger breaks and lunches on the schedule. It’s a disaster, when five agents all go to lunch at once, and your team’s down to a dozen.
Received my tax refund so I currently have more in savings than half of America. I’ll use the bulk of it to see Amma this summer, of course, and am contemplating what else I might want. Set of sheets, maybe, or a new office chair, since this one is sprung.
Input:
Bought some old treeware vedanta and have been doing daily readings of the Yoga Vasistha and the Bhagavad Gita. Only takes a few minutes but I’m really enjoying it; does help to keep the head right.
Have also sucked down a few fiction novels this year, after hardly reading at all last year. Spend a shitload of time watching streaming TV at my desk in the evenings after work, which is fine, but after all my years being pro-reading and anti-telly I feel rather full of it.
The Dread:
Still suffering from anxiety, but (knock on wood) haven’t had a full-blown panic attack since Walla Walla last September. Although, hmm, my anxiety is so bad, and has been for so long, that maybe I now consider what I once would have called a full-blown panic attack just “anxiety.” I’d probably be on meds if I had to work outside the home, but I’m just so resistant to the idea of going to get some, for some crazy fucking idiot reason.
Actually, I know the reason: the idea of going to the doctor for anything but the flu gives me anxiety. I’ve been meaning to go in for a checkup since I got insurance, but I keep blowing it off because WHAT IF I’M DYING. It’s batshit, I know, but hey. I’m batshit. I often sit and twitch for hours while I’m at work. Cool with it.
The Boy:
The relationship is solid and wonderful and the best I’ve ever had. I don’t deserve it, but hey, there you are. God is good.
The dead fish:
I made a delicious dinner tonight: parmesan encrusted salmon, oven roasted potatoes, cabbage gratin, cucumber salad, and homemade tartar sauce. I used a lot of parmesan! Here’s an unflattering photo:
In which I’ve rated the day.
Slept a lot. A LOT a lot. There were cuddles. Lovely.
I got a book I wanted very much in the mail. It was volume 1 of two-volume The Yoga Vasistha, a 70’s publication broken into daily readings. (It was supposed to be both volumes, but shit happens when you buy old books off of eBay.)
I also received a nifty plastic cover for my cloth Hobonichi Weeks day planner, along with a stencil and some stickers and booklets. It was a replacement order for the one the USPS lost and never delivered after it cleared customs, so I couldn’t bug the company for a refund and had to re-order it. I like it all very much.
I had a cup of tomato soup and a few Saltines for breakfast.
I made a couple of tacos on my work break, for lunch:
He bought me a nice pizza for supper. I ate some nice pizza. It was thin crust, with white sauce and veggies. Delicious.
Did not do any chores (beyond making the bed, which I nearly always do).
Monday score: 10/10
In which, well, why don’t we just stop having it?
Another angry hot-take about how bad sex is always the man’s fault:
On the Ansari/#metoo front, nobody seems to be willing to say that maybe, just maybe, women don’t typically enjoy meaningless sexual encounters.
It’s the elephant in the room. Because clearly, we don’t. We have millions of testimonials that prove that we just… don’t.
If #metoo tells us anything, it’s not that men are pigs. It’s that sexual encounters are distressing to women more often than not. Because the vast majority of these stories are not about legal harassment or assault or abuse, they’re stories about unfulfilling hookups, catcalls, and bad sex.
There’s an implication that (most straight) women want and enjoy sex on the same terms (most straight) men do, which is to say: sex that is contextless and meaningless. But clearly, we don’t.
I suspect this is what we really need to be talking about.
And yet, all we get are hot-takes about how men are creeps for taking the sex we’re deliberately giving them, because we’re victims of the patriarchy and have no agency.
It’s somehow not our fault when the sex we enter into willingly is bad and we don’t stop it. (And, per the article, this mysteriously has something to do with uncomfortable fashion, which we literally create and perpetuate ourselves, and endometriosis, which, as far as I know, men don’t actually cause.)
Nobody’s saying, ‘Oh, hey, look, women apparently aren’t liking random sexual encounters, maybe let’s talk about how to enable ourselves to stop having them, rather than blaming men.’
And I think someone should.
Maybe we should say, ‘You’re not frigid if you don’t want to have sex under conditions unfavorable to your needs.’ Maybe we should say, ‘Many men are capable of liking mediocre sex with no real emotional context and it’s okay if you don’t.’ Maybe we should say, ‘You can be a fully authentic woman without having context-free sexual encounters you don’t enjoy.’ Maybe we could say, ‘Fucking around isn’t feminism.’
Maybe we could say, ‘While gender may be a spectrum, there are actual verifiable differences between the sexes that inform motivation and behavior and even sexual enjoyment parameters, and acknowledging these facts can be done intelligently and in a celebratory fashion without resorting to blaming men for taking what you’re giving to them.’
(I can’t speak to the pain topic; I don’t find sex painful, beyond a few random experiences that I immediately halted. I do realize it’s a real issue for many, though.)
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4 random books from my Library!
