Fits and Starts...

Imagine a suburban office park. Tree lined streets curve randomly through a collection of look-alike office buildings. The middle aged slim-fast set out are out for their morning walk in their socks, sneakers and universally unappealing peasant skirts, but with the morning sun shining through the trees, it’s a pleasant scene. As office parks go, it’s really quite nice. Inside the windows of the look-alike office buildings one finds people doing office work. Some of them have charts and graphs, and others lists and files. Inside some of the windows, people answer the phone. Constantly. Much is made over this simple process. Stress is incurred, numbers have to be collected and analyzed in order for improvement to be made. It’s an earnest attempt at counteracting the apparent daily surprise that people are calling. Right now.

One February day, behind the windows of one building in particular, this exact scene plays before brightly painted walls. The people answering the phone are talking, their heads bent, some with their eyes staring at an imaginary point on the horizon or their cubical wall for lack of anything better to look at. Some have toys, nerf guns, beach balls, the like. An email was sent recently asking the reps to please, keep it professional and therefore, stop throwing paper airplanes. Apparently, the tipping point on departmental professionalism was reached when the customer service representatives started throwing paper airplanes.
Some things you won’t see are pens or paper. It was decided that the phone reps would no longer be allowed to use pens, pencil and paper after one particular employee allegedly absconded with a customer’s personal information. This also included crayons for the sake of consistency and perception, even though just about anyone can attest to the profound uselessness of the crayon as a writing instrument. The reps used to color, some with a charming artistry, carefully layering Crayola colors over each other to create Fairy scenes, or neat homages to Sponge Bob. This decision was made because it was the “right thing to do.” ”And,” I was told, “they do it in India,” which is of course just about all of the reason you’d ever need to do anything. I pointed out that a person could just use the notepad feature on their computer, print the text and delete the notepad- which would actually be a more efficient way of doing such a thing. This suggestion was not appreciated. Anyway, They were reasonably sure he used his phone to record the information, but just in case pens and paper were banned.

When other employees of the company heard about this, they would question it almost exclusively in eyebrow gesture. “So you guys,” they’d say, head leaning in, one eyebrow raised, “don’t have pens and paper anymore?” By the end of ‘anymore’ both eyebrows would be raised before furrowing down into the “is that right?” look of questioning. I in turn, would raise my eyebrows, tilt my head to the right and nod. “I know.” I’d leave it at that. Their eyebrows would knit up and their faces would scrunch, lips pulled to one side. It’s the face for “what the fuck?” one of the few expressions successfully interpreted across cultures and languages, in my personal experience. “I know,” I'd say. “That’s like an American right!” Sometimes it looked like they just traveled back in time for 3 seconds to remember reading “1984” in high school. “I know.”

Not to be underestimated in their zeal for relief from the idle, repetitive torture that call center life provides, the reps ensured that the beach balls arrived not long after the crayons departed. Small wood puzzles sprung up, too.  I admired the phone reps ability to assemble the puzzles by decoding the tedious, slightly insulting instructions involving 132 little pieces, alphabetized and diagramed by an under-stimulated Chinese engineer who was undoubtedly practicing for the day he would work for Ikea.

Some of the reps stand, while others sit, leaning in to their computer as though it were the person themselves. If you walk by a rep actively engaged a conversation, you’ll likely feel looked through. They are connected to their phone by a long swirly cord, and sometime the pacing of the especially high strung members of the population will twist the cord up into a figure 8 of frustration, in both the making and unraveling. I’ve always considered this to be an unfortunate sign, akin to the tigers pacing listlessly at the zoo.

The pacing is understandable. Customers have the reps by the ears and more or less, the brain. They have something the customer wants, generally whatever was lost or “stolen” from the customer and they will use whatever tactics necessary to shake it out of “You People”, an entity for which the customer service representative happens to serve as a voice. The methods of conversational terrorism adults will utilize can be both dazzling and disappointing. Should you ever find yourself with an over-abundance of faith in humanity, working in a call center is an easy way to shake it. Despite this, most of the people look happy to be there, although that could be happiness to have a job regardless of its nature.

Beyond the reps and around the corners, in the little room off the lunchroom with an unreliable automatic light and the only privacy window in the building, you’ll find me, having just walked into an office.
"Your hair has gotten so long!" she said. She calls herself the department director, whatever this means. Her title is customer service manager. Among the things I believe to be true: if a conversation starts with a compliment or comment on one’s hair, it is unlikely to end well for both parties. I learned this in food service, of all places.

"Yes, it does that over... Time, it grows," I managed to reply. In retrospect, I don't know how good I am at hiding contempt, even within non-accusatory phrasing. Hair comments are reserved in social context for those one hasn’t seen for a while. She hadn't seen me in a while because she hadn't been to work in a while. She was glib like that, flaunting whatever exception or liberty was either being extended in her favor or flat out taken.   In her case, it seemed a general exception for the practice of coming to work or serving any real function whatsoever.

The door closes, and I sit obediently as I have a habit of being. Hands folded, I wait. It is one of those split moments in time that are so shocking that one tastes pennies for a moment before flight or fight  hormones kick in. Then the little voice inside says "Oh! Of course," as one realizes that this moment is simulatenously unsurprising and rather predictable.  This combination renders one a bizarre calm on the outside, but like a tea kettle on the inside, quickly approaching it's boiling point. I felt like a little kid, about to get the belt.

"So Melissa,” she starts, “L and I talked this morning. And I understand that you two met yesterday," she paused, waiting for my agreement that this occurred. I’m tempted to deny it for fun, while I envision the “meeting” they must have had about 15 minutes ago.  It likely happened in the parking lot over several cigarettes and a recanting of each other’s personal details as they each roll in to work. "It's so hard for a sociopath to find love these days," I imagine them lamenting to each other.

But yes, L and I had met yesterday and I had been honest regarding my feelings on recent events.  Something else I believe to be true: honesty is not a universally respected currency.  In fact, it's mostly seen as a form of weakness to be exploited.

"Yes."

"Well you know Melissa," she had this cutting way of saying one's name as an insult, as though their parents first spoke it after wincing. "We've had our differences in the past."

It’s hard to know how to tell this part of the story. Because for the number of times I’ve told this story, I’ve found no satisfaction in the telling. The vindication never comes. I wouldn’t expect this telling to be different.

I could relate the long list of reasons why I felt I was wronged. I could probably write at least 6 pages on the vague and shifty concept of perception. I could tell you all about the profound level of mismanagement and compromised ethics I witnessed and participated in. It could be fun to tell it with my internal dialogue in place of the stupid silence I had to offer as I was told that day, but even that doesn’t change the outcome. I could render embarrassing and scathing descriptions of those with whom I worked, about the meetings that were wrapped up with "Ok, I've got to go take a shit." But none of that would undo the simple feeling of insult that the preceding two years had left me with. In the end though, I think it might be best said via quote, overheard in a poker room. “I’ve been insulted by better.”

Long story short, I quit and I didn’t have another job. I offered 30 days notice, and my employer elected to let me go after 7, with pay in lieu of notice. Simple as that, apparently.

A few weeks later I ended up on the phone with a state employee, explaining why I was filing for unemployment after having quit my job. The tone in which questions were asked lead to an almost desperate retelling of how awful I felt about working there.  I knew when I hung up that I had been marvelously successful at making myself look like a nervous wreck. In those few weeks, I also had a few phone interviews and managed to stumble through those as well, each time asking myself how I must sound to the person interviewing me, because I knew how I sounded to myself.

“So why did you leave?”

“Well…” and from here would progress some awkwardly spun description of the situation, something that from beginning to end could be fictionalized as a bad romance, if the names and places were changed. Each time, I withheld the true story so I didn’t look negative, or like a problem employee, or viral or any of the things one must counteract when dealing exclusively in perception. I did this a few times and then one day I realized: I was beat. I couldn’t effectively disguise or lie about the reason for leaving my job, and I certainly couldn’t tell the truth. I felt shell shocked.


Staring out the windows in the Man’s room, watching the winter clouds slide in across the bay, I wondered how it was possible to be right and wrong at the same time.

I tried to talk myself into a better attitude, but the questions remained. I wondered, in what world it would be seen as a negative to explain that I didn’t appreciate the ethics of the environment I was in. Or, to say that I don’t believe in rankism, and am therefore not interested in maintaining a sense of superiority over coworkers. Or, to say that I have certain expectations for leadership- specifically that you should be good at your job and you should, at the very least, understand what mine is. Or perhaps that I felt a lack of respect, and yes, that is something I’m looking for in a professional environment.

In the end it was fairly simple: in a corporate world these ideas are negative. Because they don’t show compliance, or an endless devotion to someone else’s goals. Health insurance, vacation pay and a 401k in exchange for your soul- and that’s a good job. Mind your credit and your savings, buy a boat and attend PTA meetings. Suck it up, play the game, blah de fucking blah, Nordstrom and Starbucks and a bucket list of the things to make you feel alive before you die. Not. My. Scene.

What I had on my hands was not merely a job hunt, it was an existential crisis. How it was possibly reasonable that I would ever compromise the basic things I believe in and wish to stand for in the name of money? I worked those figures and came up short every time.

I stared at the clouds for hours. I waited for answers, for email and phone calls.

I realized one day that I was trying out for a team I didn’t want to be in the hope that I’d get to play a sport I hated because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Because that’s what everyone else does, or wants to do. But not me.

At some point, as the clouds slid in for maybe the 40th day in a row, I decided that even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else, I believed that I had quit for the right reasons. I believed that my sanity, my perception and my happiness were good enough reason to walk away from my job, and that something would happen and that’d we’d be ok. Despite this, however the stress was growing surrounding my unemployment. More certain than ever that I didn’t want to return to corporate life, I was going to have to figure out a way to bring money in to the family.

So I did what anyone who needed money and didn’t want a job would do. I decided to go back to school.