There’s an interesting article in newsweek which has spawned an more interesting thread at slashdot (and now a post at boingboing) about how most people of the X-Y generation, 20-35 year olds, will spend a good portion of their thanksgiving visits with the ‘rents doing on demand tech support for the family. Wow.

You mean these kids aren’t called all the time by random cousins wanting to know if they can replace a power supply and fix a machine that survived a major surge or two during hurricane Ivan?

Cody’s family does not expect us to show up at most of their weekend get-togethers. No one ever asks us to bring a pie or Cody’s great green chile cheeseburger egg rolls. But we are called upon on a fairly regular basis to walk people through Norton installations, how to resize a photo, or installing Service Pack 2. We are on-demand tech-support every day. I just wish these folks would remember that Cody sleeps during the day and works at night.

We are also a repository of dead hardware: “hey, the guy at best buy said this had a virus so we had to buy a new one”, or my absolute favorite “this printer doesn’t work with our computer so we thought maybe you could use it”…”That’s because it’s a daisywheel printer for a very old mac”. Sometimes I feel like a weird computer age version of “Sanford and Son” (Not to be confused with Fox’s next big reality tv hit: Stepford Wives and Sons). Except we’re white and roughly the same age and married and live in a fairly good neighborhood and don’t own a very old truck. Never mind.

The good part is my Dad’s an old-school geek and buys and sets up his and mom’s systems himself. Hell, he used to to that for a multi-billion dollar telecommunications company he can handle a home network :p So we actually will get to relax at christmas.

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.

Cody called comcast because the cable connection wasn’t working. He got some woman in Canada.

Oddly enough I almost always get call centers in Canada. I’ve only gotten a center in India once when I was confirming a flight and it went very well. I heard about the practice of outsourcing to India from my dad in 2000 because a company owned by a friend of his was one of the first to do it. I believe that company stopped the practice within about a year of starting it too because it was not as cost effective or functional as it seemed it would be. People didn’t believe me when I told them about it then.

Back to the call

He asked what the gateway should be. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

He said, “Do you know what a gateway is?”

She said, “Yeah, it’s a computer.”

We don’t call comcast for tech support anymore.

I’m going to try getting to bed at a decent hour tonight because I have an appointment with an elliptical trainer at 7:30 in the morning. But I was thinking about this and thought it was kind of funny.

My parents drove over to Atlanta to visit my sister last week. Mom said something about not hearing from me that week, which is very likely I’m a big slacker with the phone calls. My sister said “just read her blog!”. So mom did and, of course, she sees the post about the car wreck and calls. Not a good way for a parent to find out about a car wreck. But seriously we’re fine.

I’m not sure if this was during the same conversation or later on but apparently my sister was talking with Dad about this site and she asked if he read it. “No,” he said in his deepest deadpan voice, “I don’t want to know.” And if he ever did get curious and check it out you know it would be the one time I ever post a gritty personal post about my shady past or something.

Last night I went out with Justin and got some amazing Mediterranean food and went to see The Princess Diaries 2. The cute English guy from Dead Like Me was in it what a fun surprise! He makes a much better dead alcoholic punk clown guy than a titled tweedy twit though.

Back to the food. The hummus was ok but I got this Fesenjoon stuff that was TOTALLY AMAZING! It had chicken stewed in walnuts sauteed in pomegranate sauce. It was served in a similar way as Indian food with basmati and some saffron rice so you kind of gloop the stew onto the rice. It was freakin bliss I’m tellin ya. I had leftovers for breakfast and damn they were just as good.

Oh this was weird. Coming back from the bathroom Justin ran into an old friend of his and I noticed that I knew the guy too. I’d worked at John Hancock with him and his bitch-trog wife. No, really this girl was a piece of work. She was the assistant corporate trainer and I watched her screw people over so she would look good several times in the month-long training period. One poor woman made the mistake (against my advice) of telling her that she just found out she was pregnant. They found a handy little way to let her go pretty soon after that. Charming.

So when Justin came back to the table I said that I knew that guy and that I’d absolutely hated his wife. J said “You have to tell him that!” and waved the guy over. Turns out she’d screwed around on him earlier this year and they were getting a divorce so it made him happy to hear that yet another person had fond memories of him and nothing but complaints about her. Weird thing is when the Hancock call center closed here they went over to Clientlogic - where I’d worked before I went to Hancock. Ah yes it’s the Albuquerque call center hop we know it well.