Call centers are all over Albuquerque and are super easy jobs to get and you get acceptable benefits that kick in almost immediately. Bank of America, Gateway (before they started outsourcing), America Online, Sprint PCS, TMobile, Citibank, John Hancock, Clientlogic (who handles CS for Tivo, Sony, Buycom, Earthlink, Microsoft, among others), Verizon…Between Cody, me, and two other people we’ve worked at them all at one time or another.

Due to the nasty attitude towards employees that prevails in corporate America, call centers in particular, the turnover rate is really high. There’s a sad lack of the long view these days - they want you to come in sick but they don’t consider that if they could just eat the two days’ salary for you to stay home they’d cut down the wave of infection you spread through the office which, in the end, causes far more people to call in sick as time goes on. That’s just one example of the lack of forethought. Why companies treat their employees like kleptomanic, hypochondric, litigious babies then suddenly get hurt when you don’t show loyalty to the company is just one of those modern unsolved mysteries.

The good thing about Albuquerque is that if you get fed up (or in irretrievable trouble) with one company here you can do the call center hop with no problem - and no repeats.

In 2000 I had a really crappy job doing third party phone customer service for an equally crappy online store. Cody was finishing his degree and we needed the health insurance coverage. This was the year of the palm pilot. Everybody wanted their fucking palm pilot and this store was selling them cheap. But here’s the catch about that store - their stuff is almost like never in stock and they totally lie about shipping estimates. It’s not all in-house like Amazon - everything is outsourced to different companies - the warehouses, the moneyhandlers, the customer service, the website management. It’s a mess. So the palm pilots were backordered by about, oh, 10,000 units maybe more and it was getting ugly. People had ordered their palm pilots and the money on their cards had already been earmarked but we had no idea when they would be coming in. No clue. We were just the losers who answered the phones for eight bucks an hour to angry tightwad yankees who wanted their goddamn digital penis before their friends got theirs.

I understand the consumer frenzy and gadget desire as much as anyone but let’s get a sense of perspective here folks, there are much more important things about which to harass your fellow man. But, hey, I was polite. My southern charm and ingrained work-ethic was in high gear I was handling these calls with levels of efficiency and politeness that would make your greatest-generation grandpa jealous but these were the days that tested phone jockeys’ souls.

There’s one call I’ll never forget. He’s lucky I don’t remember his name or where he lives because I would have no qualms about citing it directly right here because this guy made such a moronic example of himself he deserves every second of ridicule he ever gets. And if this is you, sir, I’d like to extend a special ‘fuck you’.

He was just another whining guy wanting to know when his palm pilot was going to ship. I’d been told by my boss to give an estimate of seven days to six weeks so I did. And you know what the little yankee fuck said? “How would you feel if your brain surgeon said that’s how long you had to live?”

I guess I need to point out my personal feeling about the importance of brain surgeons. My husband, a brilliant fucking man who makes every day worth living - but for some reason tells me I’m the one doing it - was kicked in the head by a horse when he was two. If not for the genius of the surgeons at Lovelace I never would have met this man. The only hint that it ever happened is a two inch scar on the right side of his head underneath his scraggly Bob Dylan curly hair.

So did I say all that to this stupid, stupid caller? Of course not. I just said “Sir, I’m sorry but I think there’s a huge difference between the importance of brain surgery and you getting your palm pilot,” and got off the phone as quickly as I could. Asshole.

Working for a recently privatized insurance company during tax season was less stressful than that awful summer of the great palm pilot backorder.

Folks, I know those queue times are long and the person you get may not sound very helpful when you call but really consider exactly how responsible they are for your problems, what they can really do to help you, and for the gods’ sakes, at least think about what you’re going to say or you, too, will become an asshole caller story on a silly weblog named after a huffy poky little mammal.