Many a good time!
Contrary to the many anticipated posts, I actually enjoyed my time in a call centre.

There was the time when Nobby Stiles phoned, there was the time that Ted Heath phoned to complain on behalf of one of his constituents. All good fun.

The only down points were the teenage girls that were put in charge of a team of around 140 call centre staff.

Utterly useless (but I'm guessing not that useless in other 'departments' which resulted in their getting the job in the first place - I'll get to that!) and drunk on power, they seemed to see the first line in their newly aquired job description as:

"Make everyone's life as hellish as possible by implementing incredibly unfair working practices..."

...and so they did.

The call centre was setup in a bit of a hurry to be honest, I was working elsewhere in the firm (the postroom), and the firm decided to branch out into the new and exciting world of....insurance. They needed staff, and as such provided a better salary than most call centres and a monthly bonus, literally just for turning up. With that in mind, I applied, and duly got the job.

To start with everything was pretty good - there was a strange looking man in charge who was desperate to make friends - a bit like David Brent mixed with the hobbit. To start with there were around 20 employees, but the firm soon found that they were experiencing serious success in this field that they knew very little about and set about employing loads of very young (and quite often nubile) girls to fill the void. David Brent knew which qualifications girls needed for this job, and chose appropriately.

Now, the wages were not bad, but hardly brilliant either; however, each year the company would fly all 2000 employees off to a foreign country somewhere for around 3-4 days as a Christmas gift. On this pissup, sorry educational trip, they also saw fit to dish out some extremely good gifts in the form of a raffle for every employee that went on the jolly. The gifts ranged from 2 weeks in Sri Lanka to a weekend in the Isle of Wight. Sometimes there were camcorders, video recorders...in short, the sort of things that you would actually WANT to win. Because of this, the staff were generally loyal and the turnover was, in contrast to most call centres, very low.

Due to the low age of the majority of the staff on these 'educational' Christmas trips (they had to make them tax deductable somehow ;-) ) you could witness the most debauched and disgusting behaviour you have most likely ever seen. Free beer was literally thrown in, just to add to the mix.

Fan-bloody-tastic times were had by all.

Now, back at the call centre, the staffing level was as such that the poor chap in charge couldn't really cope any longer, and so he needed to find someone to help him run the place.

Most of the dolly-bird 17-21 year old nymphomanic, nubiles knew it as well.

Now, I'm not sure who took advantage of whom, but when we returned from one particularly messy trip, a fair few of these, ahem, girls were suddenly 'promoted' above their intellect and went about proving between themselves who could be the nastiest, most harriden like creature to ever grace the call centre floor.

Some of them really thought that they'd hit the big time with their new found 10k a year jobs and I had to chuckle to myself when walking past a few of them at the train station in the morning reading The Times, when in reality I seriously doubt they could understand the title, let alone anything that was printed within.
They set about timing every person that went to the toilet, and then pulling them up on disciplinary procedures if they took longer than 30 seconds - I kid you not. They had a particular hatred for men.

One poor sod was dragged from his bed when he called in sick with flu - real flu. He could barely stand and was vomiting inbetween calls. He went home early. I never saw him again as he was sacked by phone call that night.

Thankfully, most of us just took some of their crap on the chin and just got on with it - the social side far outweighed the crap that these over-inflated egos could dish out.
Good times were had by all for the most part - it was more like a teenage youth club than a workplace, and much more fun and with a hell of a lot more sex.

Of course, the girls in charge would invariably fall pregnant and the whole sequence would start again.
Occassionally a chap would get promoted and then having something a bit more impressing than 'phone monkey' on his CV would quickly leave - after all, he wasn't about to do the horizontal bop with the hobbit boss.

To my knowledge this still goes on now - fair play to 'em I say.

Indeed, this business practice seems to work, much to the chagrin of the remaining staff - there's well in excess of 5000 employees now and the logistics of getting that many staff abroad for Christmas has put paid to it.

That's why I left; shallow bastard that I am.
(dchurch bah, Thu 3 Sep 2009, 13:24, 3 replies)

I clicked
just for "a cross between David Brent and a hobbit".

Still giggling now!
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Thu 3 Sep 2009, 13:46, closed)

you in no way seem bitter

( Mockingbird Practitioner of SCIENCE, Thu 3 Sep 2009, 14:25, closed)

Nah
probably was at the time, but I wouldn't have minded if they'd been any good at their job.
(dchurch bah, Thu 3 Sep 2009, 14:31, closed)