We hates it, we hates it forever

This will primarily be about my very first day of training at Accent. However, before that, if anyone out there still wonders (for some insane reason) why a totally scrumptious he-hottie like me is not only still single, but will most likely remain enshrouded in solitude for the remainder of my existence, go here and read an enlightening email exchange between me and some chick who wrote to my Yahoo personal ad last week. (Just to explicate… the name of my Yahoo personal ad is wanderinginthewoods. Halfway through this series of notes, she starts writing to my normal email address from her normal email address, which is why the ‘to’ and ‘from’ parties seem to change, but actually, it’s still her and me.)

Looking at her own ad, I can see that this woman is quite physically attractive, and she says she’s a tax attorney, so she has to be bright. The rest… well, check out the link, or don’t. But honestly, if this doesn’t explain why I’m not hooked up and am clearly never going to be again, there’s nothing else I can do for you.

As to Accent… my god, what a pit of despair.

If asked to describe Accent in twenty words or less, I think ‘cesspool of heartlessly artificial cheerfulness masking a soul numbing, mind crushing caldron of compulsory corporate conformity’ would sum it up nicely. And if a Latin translation of “Everything not mandatory is forbidden” were inscribed over the lintel of the training center, someone high up in management would promptly order it chiseled out again, because (a) it would be too truthful to be allowed, and (b) Latin is a language that at least implies some vestigial affection for scholarship, learning and wisdom simply for their own sake, and such sentiments have no place in the Accent environment.

For six and a half hours today, while being immured in a brief history of the telephone industry over the past twenty five years and besieged by more idiotic acronyms than MODOK could shake a SHIELD heli-carrier at, we were told that it would our responsibility, nay, True Believer, our sacred duty, to sell, sell, sell. “We are not a service and sales organization,” our trainer, Vivian, told us with eye roling earnestness from the front of the room. “We are a SALES and service organization. I cannot stress this enough, this is a SALES position you have been hired to do.”

She wasn’t lyin’. She literally could not stress that enough. But she really, really tried.

The day had many highlights. Early on some fine fellow named Ivan bounded into the room like a great big well hair-gelled panther. Ivan was a good looking Hispanic man with a half assed Elvis-esque near-pompadour who was just so goddam glib and smooth and slick and suave that I thought at one point he was going to slide right between the subatomic particles of the very atmosphere itself and re-emerge in some parallel timeline… or perhaps ‘thought’ is not so much the word as ‘hoped’, or even ‘fervently, desperately prayed’, provided that at the very least that alternate dimension would not have any version of me in it anywhere near Ivan’s entry point, and if there were some velociraptors there instead, that would have been fine too.

Ivan is the Accent sales guru. He had his line of patter down. He had the timing. He had the schtick. He bopped and bipped, shimmied and shook, made constant eye contact, smile and smiled and smiled and smiled, chuckled engagingly at all his own non-witticisms, and had nearly the entire class in stitches the whole time he was there, which I suppose indicates that either I’m the only one in my training class who has no sense of humor whatsoever, or I’m the only one who saw through Ivan’s snappy, beautifully timed and delivered comedy routine well enough to realize that he never actually said anything even remotely funny.

Ivan’s philosophy? JBN, which did not, as I surmised from his insanely upbeat attitude, stand for Jesus Be Natural, or some such humbly huckstering horseshit, but instead meant Just Be Nice. JBN, according to Ivan, was the secret of success, not just at Accent, but in Life Itself.

Isn’t he great, folks? He’s here all week… Ivan, the real life Yoda.

Then at the end of the day, a very pleasant woman named Tara came in from Human Resources and we spent an hour and a half going over in detail and then signing some of the most utterly evil and toxic documents I’ve ever been forced by the threat of starvation and homelessness to affix my deliberately scrawled and all but illegible cognomen to. Do you believe in civil liberties, the dignity of the individual being, or the inalienable rights our forefathers held to be truths that were utterly self evident? Me, too, and so does Accent, which is why before you can work there, they make you sign away each and every human right enumerated in the Constitution, as well as two or three others they probably aren’t sure actually exist but they don’t want to take any chances about. I’m not kidding. At Accent you have no right to privacy, no right not to incriminate yourself, no right to freedom of speech or any other form of expression, no right to congregate, no right to publish… if there’s a right that people have which the exercise thereof might cost Accent some money, their employees sign that right away before they ever put a headset on.

However horrible all of that is, well, I’ve worked at call centers before and I more or less expected it. So let’s leave aside the utterly vile and vicious manner in which Accent treats all its employees as no more than chattel and take a look at some of my other experiences there today, with my fellow classmates:

I walk in. Despite the fact that I left early and showed up fifteen minutes before our scheduled start time, the class was still more than half full when I showed up… a lot of people didn’t want to be late. That’s fine. I look around, find a cubie with space on either side of it, sit down.

A minute or so later, some amiable looking fellow wanders by me, plunks down next to me, and starts talking reasonably loudly to the guy on the other side of him, whom I hope he knows and is somewhat friendly with, because what he’s saying is “I’m not going to be in a good mood today, I just found out my wife has been unfaithful to me”.

Now this guy looks a great deal like a 35 year old Jerry Mathis if said 35 year old Jerry Mathis had just finished an 18 month pasta binge while not getting much sleep. At that particular point, I’m thinking that, just based on his appearance, if I was his wife I’d be unfaithful to him, too, but he isn’t even warmed up yet in the whine whine whine in a loud voice in front of a classroom full of strangers department. No, he goes on to describe how his wife had said she’d only kissed her new beau, but he’d gone in and read her email behind her back so he knows they’ve done a lot more. But he’ll get through it, because he knows he’s a strong person, and he just reaffirmed his commitment to the Lord Jesus yesterday. And his wife has said she wants to go to their pastor and get counseling as well, so has absolute faith this is just a test that God is putting in their path and they’ll emerge from it with a stronger marriage than ever, unless of course the cheating bitch doesn’t show up for their first session that night, in which case he’s calling a lawyer.

At which point, I got up and moved, simply so I wouldn’t take this guy by his short cropped right wing John Bircher Jesus fellating hair and bang his head against his desktop until his obviously pea sized brain turned into a greyish pink liquid and ran out his ears in a tiny, nearly unnoticeable trickle of goo.

Then, after Ivan the Just Be Nice Guru came and went, we did this exercise where we had to pair off and each of us had to interview our partner, so we could introduce them to the class. I’d moved over to an empty cubicle next to two girls, one of whom was okay looking, the other of whom is the only honestly hot chick in the entire class. Naturally, they got paired up together, and I got teamed with a 22 year old girl from the next row back named Christina. Christina is a vacuously pleasant girl who giggles incessantly, weighs about as much as I do, has a tongue stud she seems inordinately proud of, and who spent fifteen minutes this morning regaling me with tales about how her favorite word in the whole world is ‘pimpin’, and it is her three year old son’s favorite word, too, and any time she buys him new clothes, he would proudly declare they were his ‘pimpin clothes’. She had many other interesting and riveting anecdotes, as well, like the one where one of her girlfriends came over dressed as a cheerleader and her precious tot said “You’re fuckin goofy” to her, which Christina allowed was somewhat embarrassing but still, you had to kind of be proud of the little nipper, didn’t you? Then there was the story about the facial piercing she’d used to have but allowed to close up because she knew Accent wouldn’t find it appropriate, and another about how her boyfriend was currently out driving her car around and I’ll bet you can’t guess what she figured he was probably doing instead of looking for a job like he’d promised?

I’ll spare you the suspense. Christian was pretty sure he was ‘pimpin’.

Honest to god, I have very little idea what ‘pimpin’ actually means, but having spoken to Christina at some length regarding the word this morning, I am at least reassured that neither does anyone else who uses it in the contemporary vernacular sense, either.

Now, there was some good stuff that happened in amidst all this bleakness, although none of it was enough to overcome my near constant sensation of steadily increasing horror, encroaching, pervasive futility and bewildered alienation from that horrifying environment. Still, Jesus Boy… he of the loud whiney voice and the understandably unfaithful spouse… didn’t last three hours; muttering something about contacting Tara to see about attending another class, he heaved himself up and, eyes down, chins aquiver, slunk out around 10:30.

And even nicer, the one hot girl in the class, Robin, found that the computer on her desk wouldn’t work when we finally got around to some basic computer training, so she had to switch to the empty cubicle next to me, and we had the opportunity to chat casually on and off the rest of the day. Ain’t nothin’ happening there, sports fans (she’s 18, dating someone, and has a kid) but she is without a doubt the only even remotely interesting human being in there (despite being barely literate, she has a sense of humor and a pretty good brain she’s clearly never really had the slightest instruction in how to use properly) and she was nice to me all day, no doubt just to be polite because I happened to be sitting next to her, but, well, that doesn’t happen every day in my life.

Still, the outlook there is grim. I admit that there is an Earthly environment even more inimical and alien to someone of my sensibilities than this one, and I once spent 13 weeks immersed in it at Fort Benning, Georgia. But the Accent experience is not going to be a fun one at all for me, I can already tell.

However, it’s a job, and as I figured when I was washing dishes at Village Inn, yes, I’ll hate it, but at least I’ll hate different things than I hated about my last job. For one thing, I get to sit down; for another, there aren’t any dirty dishes.

If any of you use Sprint, though, for God’s sake, change carriers as soon as you can. Even one day of training is enough for me to see that Sprint’s customer service profoundly sucks, and if you do have to call them with a problem, the poor schmuck who takes the call will be required to try to sell you something, too.

Worse, three weeks from now he might be ME.

And I know that’s what I want from someone I’m calling with a telecommunications issue I need to have straightened out: a sales pitch. OH yeah.

What is perhaps the most bothersome factor about Accent to me is that they clearly think they’re fooling me, and everyone else in my training class. I mean, all our trainers act as if working at Accent is the greatest gig in the world, when they all know that for floor reps (such as we are training to be) it’s a demeaning and dehumanizing experience, in which every second of every minute of every hour of every work day is subject to absolute oversight and control and degrading, humiliating little ‘critiques’ and ‘assessments’ and ‘appraisals’, where all initiative and individuality and eccentricity is relentlessly thrashed out of every employee and everybody has to show a good attitude and be a team player and never, never, never stop smiling for an instant lest somebody else steal their balloon.

And it’s just that which troubles me the most… that these people all know exactly what that call center is like and exactly why they have this absurd and unbelievable turnover rate, and yet, they come in and grin and spin and shuck and jive day after day, knowing full well that two days out of training every single one of us will be wishing we were dead.

Or that, you know, our trainers were, at any rate.

For those of you out there who think I exaggerate at least a little, let me explicate something I probably have only touched on vaguely heretofore: Accent started out, a few years back, as a customer service incoming call center working for, well, anyone who wanted to hire them to service their customers. Now, customer service is an annoying, frustrating field, mostly because the customer service reps at any company rarely or never have the authority, or even the training and the equipment, to actually help anyone who calls in with a significant problem. Most customer service jobs, especially in call centers, are cosmetic; the reps are there to answer the phone, listen to people bitch, note the complaints in the account, and apologize, because a surprising amount of the time, that’s all it takes to keep a disgruntled customer from going to the time and trouble of switching to another service provider.

Call centers are even more aggravating on top of this, because by their nature, calls can be monitored, and the reps log on and off their phones using individual sign on codes so their time can be tracked second by second, allowing a level of micromanagement most office supervisory gruppenfuhrer wannabes can only yearn after… and if you think I was kidding about everything not mandatory being forbidden, you obviously haven’t worked in one of these places.

So customer service is bad and call centers are awful, but now add in to that mix the brilliantly insane idea of requiring your powerless entirely cosmetic customer non-service agents to pitch products to the already irritated customers who are calling them up with problems that need to be resolved… I mean, honestly, it’s one of those things that renews my faith in objective reality, because I’m just not nuts enough to dream up a solipsistic fantasy that completely whacked out.

But, hey… it’s a job.

Oh, one other wonderful thing… apparently, nobody ever gets Monday off at Accent. You don’t see why that’s a problem, but, see, the call center is closed on Sunday.

Now, I’d been assuming that there were basically two shifts, as far as the work week went… the standard Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday off, and then a Tuesday through Saturday shift, with Sunday and Monday off.

However, if the call center is closed Sunday, and no one ever gets Monday off, that means that those unfortunate enough to be scheduled on Saturdays (which will be, you know, the people at the bottom of the barrel, like, new hires) will have, like, Sunday off, and then, some other day, somewhere in the middle of the week.

I fucking HATE that.

And while they do make a huge thing out of telling all us trainees up front that we WILL, definitely, no doubt about it, get a night shift, no one has so much as breathed a word of this ‘no two consecutive days off for new hires’ horseshit to us.

If this is true, I will hate it vehemently. I NEED two days off in a row from any job, much less one I’m going to loathe as much as I’m clearly going to loathe this job.

Well… nothing I can do about it now, I guess. Except bitch here.

Which I guess I have, pretty thoroughly, so I’ll let you all be about your business now.

G’wan, move along. Nothing to see here.