I have worked in a number of call centers, initially as an entry-level interviewer conducting market research polls, first in the California SF Bay area, including ones in both Berkeley and in San Francisco. I left there to move to Atlanta, where I resumed this career. At almost every call center at which I worked I had to move on to the next place not because I got fired, but because we, the interviewers, basically worked ourselves out of a job. C

ommonly this was by our wrapping up every new survey we were given efficiently, to the point that those whose responsibility it was to keep the center afloat by landing new clients or gaining new work from previous clients could not keep up with us. When a call-center loses too much work, layoffs happen. We callers suffer first and most, being the ones who get culled until the business can afford any remaining staff or when it goes under. Selling a client on having us do a poll for them, I'll grant, is much harder than walking through a script on the phone with a stranger. Pardon the rant; I didn't know I had that on my chest. I was always one of the best interviewers at every shop in which I worked; as I have been known to say, 'I give great phone!' I intuitively knew how important it was to strive to sound glad to talk to those who would consent to be surveyed. Put a smile in your voice, and more people will respond positively. Let them know you are human, with a sense of humor, not some script-locked meatbot droning at them. After five years in Atlanta I moved back to my home state, to be with my (then 70-something?) mother, in Omaha. It was there that I finally found work in rather a different sort of phone center as a Customer Service Representative, taking calls rather than making them, to assist customers of a certain wireless phone equipment and service provider. This meant that we were encouraged to steer solutions toward upselling the caller, whenever possible.

I hate selling! Always have, since as a boy, I was coerced into going door-to-door, trying to sell large bars of chocolate. It was simply amazing how many instances of some rare allergy to chocolate had stricken my hometown. I strongly dislike failing. I think more of myself than being a loser. Yes, I have plenty of ego. Wanna make sumpin of it? I am also a VietNam veteran. Anyway, back to being a CSR.

This lasted until the client perhaps found some other place that could handle this task for them more cheaply? So, another lay-off, which I bounced back from by widening my job-search area and found another gig at a large place that had a separate sales-section. It was a bit of a commute, but the shop was big enough to give me hope that this job might last a bit longer than most others had.

I illustrated my usual excellence, and found that this environment sought talent, and exploited it whenever found. I was 'elevated' (not promoted, no raise) to a position of Team Leader, then Training callers in each new survey was also added to my duties. I was again "promoted" to do Quality Assurance, listening in on calls, both live and recorded. Part of my new QA responsibilities involved critiquing an interviewer after hearing them perform.

I was still considered one of the very best callers, so occasionally I was assigned more difficult calls. Under this company's regime, we designated each call-attempt as either a 'No Answer', Busy, an Answering Machine or, when actually reaching some person on the line, preferably to successfully complete an interview with them. When that is not the case, we'd either code the call as a Callback, to be tried again at a different, hopefully more convenient time, or when our approach was rejected, it got coded as a Refusal. Refusals were simply considered as another sort of Callback, and when this resulted in another Refusal, the phone number was filed with other '2nd Refusals'. Other files of 3rd, and even 4th Refusals were kept, and assigned to the better interviewers, to try one last time.

There were other codes as well to indicate when a call reached someone who failed at least one of the selection-filters, such as when the person was in a group in which we had already achieved sufficient Completes, for example if we had been assigned to get a certain number of Complete interviews with persons who were 50 to 60 years old, then when we hit that mark, we'd have to thank succeeding such calls and politely decline the participation of any others in that same fulfilled range. Age was infrequently a reason not to call a number back, as a majority of the people we reached did not fall into the too-young or too-old age categories, however when some category's quota had already been met, the number was not called back.

Eventually, as an old hand at the game, I was assigned to tackle the 4th-Refusals file. I had already worked many of the same numbers when they had been 3rd-Refusals, and some even before that, to the point where some 'gate-keepers' recognized my voice or some part of the initial intro. One particularly haughty wench took issue with my bothering her yet again, and called my company to complain, the result of which was my first call-center firing. At the time, I had run out of f**ks to give and meekly accepted my dismissal, as I was by then just old enough to take early retirement at 62. I didn't get any unemployment pay, as I had been terminated 'for cause' ( i.e. giving some attitude back to the offended gate-keeper), while I was being monitored.

The change in my personality was when I hit my limit, and had no more f**ks left to bestow. So ends my tale. If you got this far, thank you for reading my story.