Phone Monkey by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Day Eleven

Despite not yet being fully trained, today I spent an entire day answering phone calls from actual customers. Please be aware that we have a script, or a call guide, to read from, but this ‘prepared’ document doesn’t even begin to prepare you for the kinds of questions you’re likely to be asked. I sell four different insurance products, and I’ll be honest, they’re so similar that I have no idea if I’m providing the correct information or not. But I don’t worry about it, I carry on, and I managed to get through the morning and most of the afternoon without any real panicky moments. The first two calls were somewhat nerve-racking for me and virtually everyone else in the group who’d never done this kind of work before, but after the first half hour, our nerves subsided and we got into the idea that since this was going to be our full-time job for the foreseeable future, we’d best just get on with it and quit whinging.

I spent my dinner hour contemplating all the things I’d forgotten to say on calls, and all the mistakes I was aware I’d made. I think I’ll spend this evening reflecting on how badly I’m going to screw this company up for The Man. Then, late this afternoon, the bombshell they hit us with was, “We’ve listened in to some of your calls, and graded you, the same way you’ll be graded once you start work up on the floor properly.” I failed my monitor-thingy. I felt awful. Then I looked around and saw all the sad faces. We’d all failed. I’ve never taken so much delight in other people’s misery until this day, but I decided this was okay, since I had suffered the same fate as them. We got a mini-roasting, and within ten minutes they’d put us back on the phones to deal with more unsuspecting customers, who mistakenly believed that we had the ability to renew their insurance policies without royally messing them up. Don’t phone up to make any changes to your motor insurance today, because I’m sat here, waiting for your call so I can invalidate your insurance and accidentally increase the price of your policy tenfold!

Back in 2005, after I’d returned from university, and after I’d decided that being a waiter was not for me, I went back to work in a library. I’d worked in libraries when I was younger (my first ever job was on every second Saturday in a local library, starting the weekend I turned sixteen). I’m a bit OCD so putting library books in order all day is something that interested me at first, but it got to the point where the work became monotonous, and serving urine-smelling old ladies was really not my idea of fun. I’d racked up two years of work in various libraries before I went off to university; the summer before I went to uni, I was working full time to save money up for my much-anticipated, alcohol-fuelled first year away from home.

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