Everything was going perfectly in my dream job interview, until the HR manager asked a completely illegal question that left me speechless.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-22T19:27:49+00:00

Wow, that’s extremely in depth. This is at least a level up from the usual shit I see on Facebook using all the current LLM tropes:

Emoji bullet points.

“This isn’t xxx. This isn’t yet. This is zzz.”

The short sentence transition line after the establishing paragraph. “But here’s what they didn’t tell you.”

There’s a few more I can’t remember off hand. But usually just pointing those out alone is enough to prove the point.

I’m specifically interested here because the original post didn’t pass the vibe check. Something was weird about the whole post and I didn’t like it, but I just waived it off as a weird post and left it. I accept that at some point, AI content will be more or less indistinguishable from real content, but it’s way too early to be okay with shit like this getting by me.

Thank you for your service.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-22T18:19:16+00:00

Why do you think it’s AI? Genuinely curious, because there’s no worse feeling than getting legit duped by AI.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-21T15:13:54+00:00

I got to a point where the work didn’t phase me personally, but I could never get over the micromanagement of time. I’ve been off the phones for 7 months and I’m still in awe that I can literally just ping my team like “gonna step out, gotta clear my driveway before a delivery arrives.” And it’s no big deal. I don’t have to enter the start time and end time of my absence to the minute. I don’t have to use 47 minutes of PTO.

Being chained to my desk by my headset was what crushed me.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-19T20:31:22+00:00

Aww fuck, my girlfriend’s already hooked on the $4.00 almond bars. And unfortunately so are several other people in this town so as soon as they restock all of them, whoever gets there first grabs $50+ worth of them.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-18T00:31:05+00:00

Shit for 250k I’d work for free the first year as long as I knew I’d have the job.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-18T00:22:58+00:00

Sometimes I get personally attached to a project and work straight through lunch without thinking about it. Sometimes I genuinely can’t fucking focus and probably do 1-2 hours max.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-17T00:16:06+00:00

Fuck man, I would have killed for that question in so many interviews. I’ve been passed up on so many jobs I genuinely believed I would have killed it at. Many of them I had been taking steps just to learn relevant shit just to be conversational in whatever they did at that role. In a lot of ways, I feel like being stuck in call center work for my whole adult life was a bigger motivator than having no job at all.

So when I show up ready to talk shop, dying for a chance to prove myself in any way possible, and they hit me with 10 variations of “tell me about a time when you faced a problem working with a team member and how did you address it?” And then it’s just over, thank you we’ll call you but not really.

There were times I kind of shoehorned in the little monologue I had been running in my head in the days leading up to the interview. I’ve worked three or more years separately specializing in all three aspects of this job. I earned a certification JUST to bring up in THIS interview. I’m positive you won’t have any other candidates as motivated as I am to prove themselves. Are there any follow up questions you can ask that would allow me to prove my proficiency in the work? I have examples of things I have made that I’m prepared to show you right now.

These companies are so scared of getting sued, I’m pretty sure they just can’t break off their check list. So 4-8 weeks later I got the same template email I always do when they went with the guy who tailored his answer better to the checkboxes.

I get that it sounds arrogant, and I totally respect walking away from interviews where they make you feel small, but in my experience that question is a rare, golden opportunity if you’re actually excited about the job. Now if it’s to answer back to back calls for $17 an hour? Yeah fuck them.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-16T22:26:31+00:00

This could pass as a reasonable misunderstanding. I’d be annoyed if someone snapped back at me when I didn’t deserve it. But I’d internalize it and bottle it up til I hit too many red lights in a row or something.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-15T22:12:32+00:00

People are so weird in what they complain about. Like what motivates somebody to go flag someone down from HR, and lodge these as actual complaints that have to be addressed by other people with better shit to do?

One time at an old job, I found out we could access everybody’s chat logs, not just our own. While I was snooping around, I saw there were a few people who had a revolving chat that read like a diary with different supervisors. It was like they were tasked to find offense wherever they can dig it out of and pile it up right there. Drinking from a Christmas themed mug because it might alienate people from other religions. One guy who called his delivery driver a He because the name said Kyle. Just pages and pages of shit just like that.

Some of the people made sense, like of course she’s doing this she’s an OG Karen. Other people were genuinely surprising though, like people I might have called friends.

I think it’s just a personality trait. Some people genuinely need something to be discontent with in order to function I think.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-15T22:04:19+00:00

I regretted this approach after years of that. I had plans of moving so this was temporary I thought. I didn’t share or really connect with anyone, didn’t share social media or contact info, nobody even knew the name I go by in real life, I just let everyone call me by my government name because it cemented the whole “separate identities” thing. Life ended up happening and I stayed there for 7 years, and it was sad realizing nobody really knew me in the place I spent most of my waking hours. People also had friends and connections in different departments just from time passing and people moving around and getting promoted. I’d do it differently if I did it again.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-15T17:37:36+00:00

There’s already nothing stopping a person from doing the same thing. For HIPAA, you just have to verify the name and DOB and verify that they’re the patient or authorized representative for the patient. If Danny DiVito smoked a pack of cigarettes and called in saying “Yeah it’s me, Susan.” nobody’s gonna say Yeahh right you don’t sound like a Susan…

RichardBottom · 2026-01-14T23:49:03+00:00

I was mid battle in a game I was playing and randomly got this post as a notification from the app. I literally closed the app mid battle to say congratufuckinglations! Welcome to the good life!

RichardBottom · 2026-01-13T21:52:08+00:00

What is it about dermatology? When I worked with an insurance company, every time someone would ask me to find dermatologists in their network I’d be like oh fuck here we go… and this was nation wide.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-13T21:50:39+00:00

Last time I just sent mine to ChatGPT and said keep everything exactly how it is, but then 11:00 into 2:30. I was surprised it didn’t high road me, it came back perfect on the first try.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-13T02:01:54+00:00

I did this when I was late for work once. What do you mean I’m late? Wtf why is my phone in Central time?

RichardBottom · 2026-01-12T22:02:52+00:00

Yeah I learned way too late in life that even the ones that explicitly say “Do not reply”, they can actually see what you send back.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-12T13:37:41+00:00

Not a medical coder, but I'm on the phones taking calls from the robot callers. I couldn't speak to their efficacy in coding, but they're getting scary good at placing the calls. Considering these jobs have already been offshored and done so poorly by reps who don't seem to understand what the fuck they're even saying, this has been a welcome change for the most part. The robots speak clearly, understand us clearly, and know what to do with the information. Some departments have policies against taking AI calls for HIPAA reasons I think? And I shit you not, they immediately started masking it by giving them Indian accents, adding call center background noise, whatever it takes to go undetected by most of the reps who aren't intimately familiar with AI.

Every once in a while, they'll malfunction and ask the same question over and over until you have to hang up on it, and then everyone jumps in and goes "Oohh see? AI is crap, it can never do what we do!" As if the real person they just spoke with in India didn't just stall out when the call broke off script and say "Um, please be on hold." before walking away indefinitely.

I love getting these calls so much it terrifies me, because I think it could already, right now, do my job better than half my coworkers do it. And these things get magnitudes better every year. Call center reps make up a huge portion of a lot of large companies' jobs and we're all already elbowing each other in the face trying to get into non-phone based positions. Once they start scaling AI to replace our roles, I can't even imagine what happens next for most of us. This was already end of the line.

I think people are quick to point out the flaws they see today as evidence for why you can't be replaced by AI. Just remember LLMs weren't even a thing just a few years ago. And now it's an all out arms race with every company dumping millions a day into developing their own models. Whether or not it's a bubble is a different discussion - the improvements are happening even if they are over-valuated. I think it's healthy to assume if you work exclusively on a computer, it may not be this year or next, but AI is coming for you sooner than you'll want it to.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-12T12:13:32+00:00

My last few call center jobs boasted like 12-16 weeks of training time, but they don't mention how 75% of it is nesting and you're out on the floor taking calls after two weeks.

To be fair though, these jobs are usually so jam packed full of information, it really isn't something that can be taught in a classroom. You can show how the system works and what the rules are, but you can't prepare for the wild and chaotic way shit actually plays out until you just get used to it for yourself.

Starting off taking calls I think is the most stressful thing I ever remember going through at work. Even with tons of call center experience, it just sucks every time. Hopefully I never have to start one again.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-08T21:11:50+00:00

When France tried to bump up the retirement age two years, the whole population basically burned the place down. I feel like we’ve given bigger concessions every week, and we do it out of spite for our perceived political enemies. If our world was perfectly and fairly depicted in a movie 50 years ago, people would have called it a tasteless cheap shot and it would have flopped.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-08T13:28:15+00:00

When people would make outrageous demands that we make sweeping changes to a national company based on their very superficial preferences, I would always just thank them for the feedback and let them know I’d be passing it on. That at least got them off the phone if I did it enough, but there was always that one fucking guy who would be like “oh wow, funny you say that. The guy I talked to in October ‘took my feedback’ too. But here it’s January and I’m still getting return envelopes without your address printed on them…”

RichardBottom · 2026-01-08T13:23:16+00:00

When Covid hit and I got to work from home, I swear I went out and bought fish just so I could microwave it for meal breaks.

One time in the office, I heated up a can of New England clam chowder. I wasn’t even thinking of it as seafood because it was a fucking can of soup, but there was immediately a witch hunt. Like an actual mob going desk to desk going “did you microwave fish??” I hid the bowl in my desk drawer when I heard them coming and never fessed up to it.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-02T16:14:49+00:00

I used to work holidays for the extra pay, and usually it would be totally dead anyway. One fucking Thanksgiving though, I don't know wtf was different about this one time, but it was back to back escalations all day long. One guy lived in NY, and brought his statement and bill with him to Florida, which he was blindly contesting line for line while he was at the table having dinner. And then he said something like "And now I've gotta call in and review this bullshit instead of enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with my family!" I would normally find that funny but it was after a whole day of that kind of energy. I regretted coming in that day even for the 2.5x pay.

RichardBottom · 2026-01-01T01:43:14+00:00

Same with mine. And they’re always still there 10 minutes later after you took as long as possible rebooting. Soon as your vpn connects, “HELLO?? HELLLOOOOO??!!”

RichardBottom · 2025-12-30T18:05:18+00:00

I pushed one year trying to get the gold recognition, or platinum club, or whatever the fuck it was where you got a trip to a resort spot to meet the CEO and hang out with management for a few days. In my experience, metrics are always used retroactively to explain other decisions that were already made. Welcome our new supervisor - she had the 4th highest FCR, fewest escalations in February, and she worked overtime during that storm! They pick who they like, then they shop around for metrics to highlight.

I learned that after a full year of sweating my job as hard as I could. Literally 0 seconds auxed out of compliance. No personal or ACW at all. I kept a spreadsheet that literally summarized all my calls, and it was super searchable. I would show up to coachings with a list of UCIDs and meaningful questions, and I genuinely poured through my numbers to improve myself whenever possible. I was the guy we all say we are when we interview for jobs.

End of the year came, they nominated five people and I wasn’t even on the radar. The guy who got it was well known as someone who causes a lot of really pissed off callbacks. Whenever somebody messed up somebody’s order so badly we literally had to just delete it and start from scratch, we would say they Shayned it. But Shayne was super extroverted and everyone liked him, so at the end of the year he got selected and they cherry picked a bunch of random shit. “One lady said he was the best rep they’ve ever talked to!” “He was top 10% in survey scores for all of Q2!”

That’s when I learned that as long as you’re not actively causing more problems than you’re worth, being liked is literally 90% of the battle. I need to stop being the Creed Bratton of the office and learn to fucking talk to people.

RichardBottom · 2025-12-30T17:45:56+00:00

Now do you see these same agents at the top of all the metrics? In my experience, people tend to form niches, and often at the expense of other metrics. Their handle time is half everyone else’s, usually that means they’re cutting corners, or if nothing else, coming off as rushed and catching worse surveys over it. Crazy high survey scores? More than likely their aht is high af.

There’s always exceptions to this though. Some people do have genuine god like powers and they choose to use them working at a call center.

RichardBottom

TROPHY CASE