The Thing That Pays The Bills

My friend The Anomaly and I decided yesterday that we are going to start aggressively seeking other jobs. The job we have has become unbearable lately. Let me lay it all out for you:

For those of you who don’t know I work in Business Card Collections. It’s not nearly as awful as it sounds. I call businesses, not people sitting at home scratching their ass and watching Jerry Springer. I work off lists of accounts and am responsible for collecting a certain percentage of those accounts. Basically, I cold-call businesses all day and very rarely get the actual person I am supposed to talk to. When I do, I can usually talk people into paying unless they give me the obligatory sob-story and I have heard just about everything, believe me. I’m not a jerk. Unlike some of my fellow collectors, I don’t see being a little late on a few bills as the most horrendous moral crime one can commit. I am not condescending, and this gets me far. However, bear in mind that is when I actually GET someone on the phone. When I don’t (which is most of the time) I do nothing but leave messages that I know will not be returned. It is the most futile, pathetic feeling leaving the same message for the same passive-aggressive asshole who won’t give me the courtesy of a call back to tell me that he/she is broke. The job is mind-numbingly boring.

Let me describe the environment. I work on the 24th floor of a building downtown and the place is the worst kind of cube farm imaginable. When I am seated, the walls around me barely come up to my elbows. I am face-to-face with Cynicism Unbound who is, unfortunately, very interesting to talk to. On my left is Catnip, an ex-hippie who once fed an entire houseful of her hippie friends catnip-laced brownies who promptly passed out and, upon awaking, told her it was the best high they ever had. She's got some great stories too. Diagonally from me is my good friend Choirgirl who I could talk to for hours non-stop. Needless to say, the environment is DISTRACTING at best and downright insanely Big Brother-ish at worst. As much as I adore the people around me, I DON’T want to be in their eyesight every second I am there. I want to feel at least a little bit of privacy, and there absolutely is NONE. Even the break room and conference rooms have glass walls. The only place I ever feel like I am totally unseen during my day is when I am in a bathroom stall with the door closed taking a shit, and even THEN I’m not quite so sure.

As far as the money goes, we don’t make nearly enough in base wages (I got a damn TEN CENT raise at my year anniversary. Actually, I looked on my paycheck and it was a .09875642 raise!!) so we have to rely on our incentive plan. If we collect the aforementioned percentage, we get more money on the paycheck we get on the 15th. The problem is, we are responsible for whatever accounts are dealt to us. It is absolutely mathematically impossible to ALWAYS make your numbers unless you cheat somehow. The worst part is, at the beginning of this year, they raved about uncapping our incentive and promptly raised our objectives by 11 or 12 percent. We basically have to work twice as hard for about the same amount of money. Not to mention, the tension in the place lately is enough to make me want to run for the hills. Managers have been dropping like flies lately because their new boss Stinky Fat-Ass is treating them like shit. We already lost my supervisor who was seriously the best supervisor I have had during my long, dark corporate career. Two others have announced they are leaving and there are rumors that at least three more are going to follow in their footsteps. The place has lost any kind of stability and nobody smiles or enjoys coming to work anymore. I stare off blankly into space a lot of the time because I just CAN’T. CALL. ONE. MORE. PERSON!!

So what am I looking for? A job that pays about $15/hour where I sit and answer phones all day and don’t have to rely on people to DO SOMETHING so that I can have a decent paycheck. I don’t want their problems to be too complex, either and I don’t want it to involve any kind of follow-up from me. I want to work in an environment that has walls where I can read a book between calls and not get in trouble for it. I want to work from 8-4:30 Monday through Friday with a half-hour lunch. I want to walk out of the place at the end of the day and not give it another thought because it isn’t the most important thing I will do that day. It is the thing that pays the bills that I will do until I get into some kind of career.

Unfortunately, this is post 9/11 Busherica, not the America I remember during the Clinton years. I was told recently that one of the worst, most unscrupulous places I have ever worked (QWEST!) is now trying to get rid of long-timers in the position I used to be in so that they can hire people to do the same job for $8/hr!! The job I had at AMERICAN Express was outsourced to India. Didja get the irony there? AMERICAN Express!! I wouldn’t put it past US Bank to do the same thing. It would just be bitterly ironic. The worst part is, thanks to Bush corporations get a pat on the back and all kinds of TAX BONUSES for eliminating US jobs. My mother and other people like those crazy Minutemen in Arizona are so worried about “Foreigners” taking our jobs and they SHOULD BE! But they need to aim their hostility at the assholes in AMERICA that are sending our jobs overseas, not the poor unfortunates crossing the border to make a decent living. People who LIVE HERE are having a hard enough time.

Whoa! Tangent there. None of this is new. Corporate America sucks. We all know that. I really just want to win the damn lottery so I don’t have to worry about this shit anymore. In the meantime, I’m watching the damn want ads for a miracle.