I’m watching Telemarketers and it’s reminding me of shady jobs I’ve had in the past.
I worked for Rent-a-Center doing collections. It’s a place that preys on the poorest people in America, getting them to pay extortionate interest on rent to own furniture, appliances and electronics. We had customers who would end up paying thousands of dollars on a couch that wasn’t even new when they got it. Even worse was people who would hit hard times and get their stuff repoed and end up with nothing to show for thousands of dollars in payments.
My job was to learn when these customers got paid, or when they got their disability or welfare check and hound them over the phone or in person. If they didn’t pay, I’d be sent out to knock on their doors. If that failed I’d be sent to repo it.
It was a soul crushing job. I’ve had shit jobs, but I’d never had a job that made me feel like I was doing harm to people before. Some of my coworkers would deal with this by demonizing the customers, acting like they were all deadbeats who deserved to get fleeced. Others would blame the customers, saying shit like, ‘Anyone stupid enough to buy here was going to get ripped off by someone, and it might as well be us’.
I couldn’t do that, so I started getting fucked up at work like Pat Pespis. I started pretending to do my job, dialing the number and then hitting the flash button and faking the calls. I’d get sent on a repo and my coworker and I would go out to eat or to the mall and pretend they wouldn’t answer the door. I expected my collection stats would fall low enough that I’d eventually be fired, but they barely moved at all. It turned out that hounding people to pay a bill wasn’t actually doing much.
Phone tech support for Bell DSL internet in Ontario and Quebec, Canada. The night I walked out was the night there was an actual outage that Bell didn’t want to declare as an outage because that would have lead to consequences for them. A full shift doing the same troubleshooting steps that we all knew wouldn’t do a damn thing. My last call was a little old lady on a fixed income, who my supervisor told me to tell to hire a local tech to look at her computer in person. I told her it was actually an outage at Bell’s end, signed off, and handed my headset to that supervisor.
Edit: We were also scored on our ability on the tech support line to upsell callers on Bell’s rebranded Norton antivirus subscription service. I refused to, so I got stuck with the overnight shifts.
I did dialup tech support and the same thing would happen. Certain numbers would go down all the time and the techs would know something was wrong. If they bosses acknowledged it, it would be considered downtime, so we’d do pointless troubleshooting for hours until it came back online. Tons of wasted time just to keep the fiction of 99% uptime intact.