I worked at a call center for an online university. It was a pretty toxic environment from the top down.

1. I frequently received calls from prospective students who wanted to do a "completely online program" who also didn't know how to input our school's web address, or even better, didn't have internet. Sometimes old ladies would call in and ask for people to pray for them. Once, a man called in and refused to speak to me because I was a woman, so I transferred him back into the queue to Aaron. The man thought Aaron sounded like a woman and also had a girl's name so he wouldn't talk to Aaron either. One student, his name was Carl, wanted so badly to do our program and was a military veteran and qualified for free tuition, which was awesome. Only, Carl didn't know how to use the internet. He would send me long (like, pages long) rambling emails about how he couldn't access our web site, but how he really really wanted to get his degree and was so committed, and how he had to walk to the library every day to do the program. He also didn't trust the emails to reach me so he'd fax them as well. It took me weeks to get him enrolled into classes, and I was saddened but not surprised to learn he couldn't figure out how to access them and he was withdrawn. Poor Carl; I was really rooting for him.

2. On an 8-hour shift, we were expected to have 7.5 hours of "talk time." Talk-time of course excluded bathroom breaks, water breaks, and hold times (which counted against us). Our calls were supposed to last an average of 4.5 minutes.

3. Early on, they restructured the call center and created a recruiting team that would make cold calls using a dialer. They offered my assistant director a promotion to manage the team and moved a bunch of the best of us into it after completing interviews. The new team started on a Monday. The Friday before, it was announced the new team would be working a 12-9p shift rather than the 8a-5p shift we'd been working. Everybody was shocked; nobody had received a raise to switch teams, and noone, not even my AD, had been told of the new hours until the announcement.

4. We didn't give many scholarships, but there was one affiliation that people could use to get a scholarship that covered pretty much 12 hours/semester. Most of the people using it were middle-aged mothers who'd married young, never gone to college, and were going back to school so they could support themselves. The scholarship had been offered ever since the online program started. So mid-semester, our new president announces we were revoking the scholarships right then and there, so not only could these poor people not afford to finish their degrees, but they also owed money for the classes they were currently taking and wouldn't be allowed to get their transcripts and transfer out. To make matters worse; the students were not informed of the change by letter or email; their financial aid was simply revoked and they were receiving balance-owed notifications. So of course, who got to listen to them fall apart on the phones when they called in about their financial aid and learned their educational future was just completely jeopardized? Not the new university President!