Resignation letter

Life is complicated, so I’m going to talk about something silly: my job. To be entirely fair, my employers probably wouldn’t be too impressed with that summation, but then I’m not planning on them finding this blog because I’m definitely not planning on impressing them with anything else I say from here on out.

I work in a call centre. This admission tends to have the “Oh god WHY?” response in people. (My 11 year old sister said: “Does this mean you’re one of the bad guys now?”) I can totally understand that, although my job involves ringing up existing customers of a company so on a scale of 1 - ‘evil’, it’s low to mid. I do enjoy my job, actually. (Now that’s  a confession!) The company are really lovely and give me far more flexibility than I feel I deserve - I work 17 hours a week where everyone else works 24 and I’ve had quite a few holidays/sick days in the short time I’ve been there due to other commitments.

The only problem is (and I fear this is a problem with most other areas of life) people. I hear a lot of stupid stuff on the phone. Don’t get me wrong, if someone says something silly and it’s just them, I don’t tend to mock them. But when the entire population repeats the same stupid stuff, this is when I get scathing.

My first problem comes before I even speak to people: Answer phones. I hear quite a lot of answer phones on a daily basis, which doesn’t bother me - speaking to people interrupts my essay planning for Uni coursework -, it’s just one answer phone that I have a real problem with. The system that we uses beeps when a phone call connects. Most answer phones kick-start pretty quickly so I know to hang up the call and continue my essay plan. There is just one particular type of answer phone which takes just that bit longer than the rest. It goes something like this:

*Beep*
Me: Hello, can I speak to Mr/Mrs Jones/Smith, please?
Bastard phone: Hello! Sorry we’re not available curr-
Me: [Explicit word that results in me being fired because they actually do record calls]

You may think I’m being completely ridiculous, but I can get a whole sentence in before this answer phone removes the superman glasses and cries, “GOTCHA!” This process involves me sitting up from the comfortable position where I’ve slipped down in boredom waiting to speak to a real person and translating the name from letters into recognisable sense. The name appears only as the phone connects (which is incredibly difficult when speaking to people with funny names), so if I’ve just struggled through difficult Polish consonants, the last thing I want to hear is “Hello! Sorr-” ARGH. Throw this in several times an hour, and it can get pretty tiring.

Answer phones aside, let’s talk about people. Oh god. My job has something to do with electrical appliances, mostly kitchen ones. I have to search around the house for things to sell to them, so I often say things like:

Me: Do you perhaps have a dishwasher at home?

Most normal people reply, as the convention is with closed questions, a “Yes,” or a “No.” Occasionally, though, I get:

“No, I am the dishwasher!” (hahahahahahahahahahahaha.)

The first time I heard that, it took me by surprise and I laughed, genuinely. I have heard it approximately a million-gazillion times now and, each time, I wish I worked with physical customers because I would get so fist-happy in their direction. One woman got original, once, and said:

“Yeah, my dishwasher’s called Brian!”

I thought she was totally loony, naming her kitchen appliances but I thought, hey, people do it for musical instruments. She might just be house-proud… I was in the middle of going, “Great! So how old is Br-”, when she suddenly affixed the words, “my husband.” on the end of this statement. Points for originality, but please stay off the stage. (Names changed for because I genuinely don’t want to breach these people’s privacy, no matter how much they irritate me.)

I feel this list will be an ever-growing one. Most of the other things that irritate me are specific to my job. I will tell you one thing though:

If you buy an appliance and you decline a five-year warranty at stupidly-cheap price and decide to wait for when you can only get a year’s cover at a time at ridiculous-price, then you deserve broken appliances.

Job rage.