Excuse me while I give my supervisor a meaningful look and reassure him that I'm not going to write anything too compromising about his true nature as a shape-shifter-hunting captain of the Enterprise billionaire playboy philanthropist.
See, Jim? Your secret is totally safe with me.
I knew Jim and I would become friends the first day of training. He'd been very professionally giving us all a lecture with a slideshow about call center rules, and after that we'd been permitted a break. I was making conversation with one of the trainees (my future friend Manda) and Jim and his co-supervisor, Chase, descended on the newbies to finish training.
"All right," he asked, quoting Iron Man, "Do you want to be in the Fun-Vee or the Hum-Drum-Vee?"
"That depends," I deadpanned back without batting an eyelash, "Do we get attacked and killed by terrorists on the way?"
I think I took him aback a little, because he blinked a few times before saying "Are you a coward?"
"I don't think so."
"Good, then you're with me."
It took me about three weeks to not feel a full-blown panic attack coming on when I answered the phone with the standard greeting, and three more weeks to have the entire first medicine-related script memorized. When I applied for the job, I wasn't at all sure if I'd end up making friends. By December, I had several: Jim, Manda, Amy, and Max. Doubtless you'll hear more about each of them in the future. And I started feeling like, anxiety or not, these friends made the job worth it.
Of course; December was when we started working on a political poll that was twenty minutes long, and I'm fairly sure that the vitriol that seeped out of the respondents of that survey prematurely aged me a little bit. Everyone I spoke with in this state (with the exception of one or two people) seemed to seriously hate Democrats and it was all I could do at the end of surveys not to be like, "well, I sure hope you enjoyed completing this survey with me, a more or less liberal-leaning feminist who is terrified of the effects of global climate change and who also has definitely voted for Democrats on several occasions. Because I feel pretty great and stuff, knowing that you just hate all Democrats forever."
Which isn't just me being resentful. Someone actually DID say that to me.
I never said any of that, obviously. I was tempted.
The high point of that survey was the respondent who answered one of the questions about congress with "You know what I wish we could do? I wish we could bring back Andrew Jackson and have him challenge all of the senators to duels on the White House Lawn."
Believe it or not, that was one of the least crazy things I heard on that survey. Mostly I was (and am) more concerned by the fact that Andrew Jackson is a terrible candidate to put your bets on in one of my favorite parlor games, "Which Dead President Should We Bring Back To Power?" Andrew Jackson was a homicidal, genocidal crazy person who would probably kill at least 8/10 people who looked at him askance. Sure, there's a decent musical about him--the title of which should also put up some red flags: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Bloody once is bad enough; bloody twice? Forget it--in which he is reimagined as a rockstar (and in the production I saw, he looked like Zach Baggins, one of the hosts--I refuse to say star of--Ghost Adventurers which was massively distracting and vaguely upsetting). Rockstar, sure. President, again? Nope.
Working at the Call Center, I also learned that Idaho is a very hostile place. I've been on several surveys that did outgoing calls to Idaho and all of the meanest and most disgusting things that have been said to me on calls were ALL comments from Idahoan respondents. If they could have done so over the phone, I am confident I would have been stoned to death with those pleasant Idaho potatoes they're so famous for. Among the winners were:
"I'm sorry, I have diarrhea and I'm on the toilet RIGHT NOW so I can't take this call."
"If you suck my d*ck first." (in response to the standard "would you help us by answering some questions?")
Seriously.
The Call Center also taught me how to be polite in a way that nothing else had before. I never realized the usefulness of the phrase "I understand" until I was caught in a face-to-face conversation with an acquaintance a few weeks before I started my social media classes. This person had said something wildly insensitive and I was scrambling for something to say that wasn't shouty or rude or what I was thinking, which would have only made the situation worse.
The words "I understand" fell from my lips in a graceful, carefully neutral way, and I felt myself smile like the Madonna (the religious figure, not the artist; although for some people I'm pretty sure singer Madonna is an actual religion). "I understand" is maybe the most glorious phrase in the English language. It automatically transforms the speaker into a backhanded-benevolent Atticus Finch, who understands but doesn't say exactly WHAT it is that they understand. I'm fairly sure that people who write and dictate the laws of neutrality in survey administration didn't have that in mind when they set up this system, otherwise they might have taken it away from us. To them, it's just a true neutral response to whatever anecdote. But in my book it's a civil way to be polite to people of whom you actually understand very little. Civility like that is something you don't really learn in any other job, except, of course, if you're working the food service industry; where the pressure to be polite is unrelenting and the people are short-tempered and rude for no good reason.
I honestly think the world would be a lot kinder and more understanding if we were all required to do a stint in a job that puts that kind of pressure on people. I learned quite a lot about what I was capable of, emotionally--arguably, working phones isn't actually all that hard; it's physically easy if emotionally taxing for someone like me who has social anxiety, but I wouldn't trade the lessons that I learned for anything.
I'll be honest: coming to the end of my tenure at the call center is a bit of a relief; but it's harder than I thought it would be, too. It was a good job. It was, funnily enough, exactly what I needed at the time, and I'm incredibly, incredibly grateful I had the chance to work there. I could never have accurately predicted all the good times I would have.
So, just for the record--coming clean and all that,
Well. Except when Idaho was involved. Seriously. Because of the way people from Idaho talked to me on this job, I'm never going to Idaho. Ever.
It's been very.
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