Introduction
Life doesn’t always follow the path that you expect. In fact, life doesn’t usually follow that path. I have learned this firsthand since finishing school and entering the workforce.
Freshly out of college with a degree in music education, I worked as a retail sales representative and sent in application after application to teaching positions. That year, I faced the job hunt excitedly. I felt called to be a music teacher and I believed the perfect job was out there, waiting to find me. Of the 13 applications I sent out, and the 2 job fairs where I speed-interviewed at half a dozen schools each, I interviewed at 5 schools, and received 2 “offers.”
The first offer was in an urban school district at an arts academy. I was incredibly excited for that opportunity, and jumped right on accepting it when I received the offer email. While I was writing my acceptance, not more than 10 minutes after I received the initial offer, I received a follow-up that someone else had accepted the position.
Devastated, I called the school district office immediately to clarify— surely, I was misunderstanding. How could someone else have accepted my offer? It turned out that they had sent the offer to someone a week earlier who had not responded in the requested timeframe, and they sent the second offer to me. When the first person responded— immediately after they offered to me— the district accepted and I was out of luck.
The second offer came one week before school began at the end of August and was in a flailing school district with part-time instruction at a middle and a high school. I agonized over the decision— the commute wasn’t great, the district was in a desperate state and I was going to be thrust in with little assistance.
But this is what I wanted, wasn’t it?
To complicate matters, I already had a job offer in hand, with better pay, at an automobile dealership service call center. I ultimately decided that the good could not outweigh the bad— there’s always next year, right?
That next year? 11 applications, no job fairs, no calls. In the intervening months, I applied where I could during the school year, with no results. I rarely even received replies; it felt like I was sending applications into the void.
The next year, everything was upended by COVID-19, and I didn’t send any applications. Everyone was holding onto their positions, lucky to still be employed in a relatively safe sector, or leaving them because the conditions were increasingly unbearable.
After such a long time away from school and teaching and with the addition of COVID conditions, it forced a reckoning— did I still want this? My teaching certificate was set to expire in fewer than 3 years at that point, about halfway through its life. I had made no progress and stopped sending in applications. I was making more than my teacher friends in my call center job, and I had just received a promotion.
Fast forward another year: I left that company for a better paying job with better hours and a remote-hybrid schedule in a different call center. I made the decision to stop looking for teaching gigs completely, instead kindling my passions for music and education through leadership positions with community and church choirs. For full-time work, though, the call center is currently my present and future.
Lessons
My time working in call centers has taught me a number of lessons, the first of which is: life’s plan changes in ways you can’t even imagine. It sounds like a cliché, but that is because it is so pervasively true. Remember: a life that follows a planned path is an exception, not a rule. What this cliché doesn’t tell you, though, is that, once you accept the changes, you have the ability to welcome and enjoy them.
Don't hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.
—Epictetus, Enchiridion
Do I love the time I’ve spent in call centers? No, but it did spare me from being an early teacher in the time of COVID. It did afford me more time and freedom in the early years of my marriage. It also taught me that I value having a work-life balance that is difficult to maintain in a teaching position, especially with the after school and weekend commitments that music teachers often have, and that balance is not something that I am willing to sacrifice.
The change to my life plan, the adjustment to my goals and the re-routing of my ambition humbled me. At first, it was painful, and then I entered a long period of grief. As I worked every day, I slowly started to take back some of the energy that was lost. Part of that became Two Minute Treatise, a project that has involved so much time that wouldn’t have been possible if my life followed my projected plan. Now, Two Minute Treatise is something that I would never want to give up. In the reflection and study process, I was able to distill gratitude for the path that led me here, and begin to make adjustments for the future.
Another, less positive take away from my time is call centers is that people will say anything on the phone. This is a lesson that you can only learn when you have experience in customer service. It doesn’t matter how helpful you are being, or how powerless you are to help, people will say cruel, vile things to you through the barrier of a phone call. Working in automotive service scheduling, I was told that I would be responsible for people’s deaths if their car failed and was called every name under the sun. Once, I was even threatened that the customer was going to “come teach me a lesson” in my place of work. All because I could not schedule a same-day vehicle service appointment.
When I was a supervisor at the automobile call center, I used to tell my trainees three things:
If a customer swears at you, hang up.
If a customer raises their voice to you, transfer them to me.
After your first cry, it gets easier.
I wish that I was being hyperbolic. If you have worked in customer service, you know that these are tricks of the trade. I am thankful that I was my team’s first line of escalation for those two long years; I would hate to put that burden on someone else. Once I had had my first cry, I was calloused up and ready to stand between them and the faceless masses.
My third take away: other departments are worse than customers. It’s one thing dealing with strangers being rude on the phone— it’s another when whole departments in the company that you work for are militant against customer service. When tensions rise and blame needs to be cast, it always trickles its way down to the bottom of the pecking order, landing on the customer service team.
The most challenging part, though, is that customer service doesn’t make any decisions—they answer to a team of managers who decide what they can and cannot say to customers. Even in following the instructions provided, blame always finds its way. Much of it comes down the personalities, not quality of work, and management is complicit. I have had great relationships with my direct managers, but if a manager of a tangential department casts blame? Then you’re out of luck. Every day will be a nightmare just trying to do your job.
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own… To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
There is no working world lesson quite like the one that gets taught when you realize that other people can just be cruel for no apparent reason. They have a bad day, dislike their life, don’t care for your personality and all bets are off. They can and will take these things out on you. It is an indictment of our system that people who work for the same company, with supposedly the same goals, will malign you over nothing.
The fourth take away is that customer service skills are valuable and cross-applicable. I have spoken on the phone with upwards of 100,000 people in just over three years working in call centers. That is multiple lifetimes’ worth of phone calls. Soft skills are developed with numbers like that. I no longer have anxiety when I have to answer or make a phone call, at work or in my daily life. I am able to speak clearly and concisely about the information that needs to be transferred in the call. The same goes for emails. The clarity and precision with which I can write emails is something I don’t see in the emails that I receive.
Further, multitasking, tracking multiple things in process simultaneously, and navigating computer software quickly are all skills that I use daily and excel in. Sure, it makes sense that these skills transfer from call center to call center, but they influence my other jobs as well. I know the value of a clear email, and keep my choir updated weekly with all pressing information. I know the value of getting a schedule ahead of time, having had to generate schedules in my supervisor position, so I create a schedule ahead of time for my choristers. I keep multiple irons in the fire each week, balancing a full-time job, a community chorus, the choir I direct, and a weekly philosophy essay. These are all skills I developed in a call center, where it was eat or be eaten.
The fifth and final take away is that burnout is real. Yes, soft skills are good to develop. Yes, an attitude of gratitude is key while you are grinding and positioning yourself for your future. Yes, finding inner peace and confidence can make the blows easier to take. But, after all of that, you may still find yourself at your wit’s end. And that is okay.
The fact of the matter is that our customer service system doesn’t work. It is preposterous that quantity of work is preferred to quality and that everyone in customer service knows what the “first cry” is like. Customer service representatives are treated as second class citizens by their companies and their customers. You can’t fix a broken system with self-care and an attitude adjustment.
We must allow our minds some relaxation: if rested, they will rise up the better and sharper to challenges… unremitting effort will shatter the mind’s vigor, while it will regain strength if it is allowed a small release and relaxation; mental effort permanently sustained produces in the mind a certain sluggishness and lethargy.
—Seneca, On Tranquility of the Mind
Burnout is real, it is valid, and the steps to get out of it are just as unfair as the things that got you there. I got burned out in my supervisory position for a variety of reasons, to the point that I considered quitting with nothing lined up. I thought, with my back against a wall, I’d be able to make something work. I was lucky to land a better gig right around the same time I was having these thoughts, one that paid more and was work-from-home hybrid. This, coupled with the implementation of Two Minute Treatise, helped to greatly relieve the burnout.
Call center work is often the butt of the joke. People think it is the lowest rung of office work and a waste of time and skills. But nothing is a waste of time if you know how to use it. Life will constantly teach you lessons; you just need to know how to listen. Despite the harsh realities of the working world being dumped on my head with the shock of a bucket of ice water, my life will be better for the things I have learned. It was painful at times, but now that I have better tools for reflection and repositioning, I can see the value that was there the whole time.
I hope this is eye-opening to those who have never worked in a call center or customer service, and it is a reassurance for anyone who feels trapped right now. I am, for now, trapped too. But I have learned valuable lessons and, ultimately, it is going to be okay. Value yourself, get over the hump, have your first cry if you haven’t already, and glean every lesson that you can.
Even in the midst of unpleasant and unplanned circumstances, the lessons are there, if we are willing to learn them.
Edited by Jeremy Harr and Abigail McKay Cherry
Thank you for reading this long-form edition of Two Minute Treatise, a weekly essay newsletter focusing on one philosophical topic, (usually) two minutes at a time.
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I can sooo relate to customer service calls. Although I didn’t work in a call center, I was on the phone a big chunk of the day at the insurance company I used to work for. Cold calling dentists to discuss the benefits of joining an HMO network is not as fun as you’d think. 🥱
But, like you, I learned a lot. And even 7 years after that job ended, I still dislike chatting on the phone even with friends.