February 18, 2004 (early Tuesday, about 12:42 a.m.)

Just got home from my worst sales day ever at Accent… 0 sales. I did get 5 or 6 email sign ups (we call them MySams, why, I don’t know) which they require you to ask each customer for, but which don’t count towards sales stats or extra money, but I could not sell shit tonight for the life of me.

Things weren’t helped by the fact that during my 8 hour shift, I was pulled off the phone for two hours for two separate ‘team meetings’, time wasters designed to do nothing except keep people off the phones in order to bring service levels down.

Deranged though it sounds, although management is constantly harping on us to make sales, sales, sales, if our response rate is too high, Sprint gets bitchy, because they feel that if the calls are being answered too quickly and people are sitting with their phones on AVAILABLE for too many minutes between calls, that means they are paying for reps that they don’t need. Therefore, when that happens, they will offer VTO (voluntary time off) and if not enough people take VTO to impact the response levels, they pull people off the phones for ‘team meetings’.

What happens in these team meetings? Well, whichever management person has drawn the short straw basically sits there like an idiot for half an hour, forty five minutes, an hour, because they have very little that they can do with us, since these team meetings are for no purpose except to pull people off the phones. They will offer to answer any questions we might have, but no one but very naïve people ask questions, because the answers are always contradictory… something we’ll get back to in a moment, I’m sure. They will go over training we’ve already had. Sometimes they will put us through excruciating training exercises meant to teach us things that we all already know, such as, if you spend too much time on any one customer, you are making all the other customers wait longer and that costs Sprint money (except, of course, for right now, when we have so few calls coming in that they’re taking people off the phones for two hours out of every eight).

This was my first shift on my new 3:30 pm to midnight shift. I no sooner signed on and took a call than I was told to sign off for a team meeting. I spent an hour sitting in a hall with a group of eleven other people, going over something we had all already been trained on. During the course of that meeting, I was given a tip to help keep my talk time down… if I see the call is going long, I should ask the customer if I can give them a call back. This is always tricky because customers want to know why, and the APM in charge of that meeting told us we should just say “well, I only have so much time allotted per incoming call, so let me call you back and then I can get this fixed”.

Other suggested ways were to lie to the customer… say we had static on the line or an echo in the headset and we wanted to call them back on an outside line to get a better connection. My preference as a customer service rep is to lie to my customers as little as possible (when you get caught, it just destroys rapport and you never get it back, plus, I don’t like to lie in general anyway), so I considered the first advice to be pretty solid and made a note of it for future use.

That team meeting lasted until 4:30. Much later that night, at 9:45, I was pulled off again. In that meeting we went through a tiresome, childish exercise in which we had examples of customer service regarding ‘Tim’s Tire Store’ laid out on a blackboard for us, so we could all see what happened when irresponsible workers called in sick, showed up late, or took too much personal time. (Basically, Tim’s Tire Store lost a lot of money when people wanting their cars and trucks serviced had to wait too long and went elsewhere.)

Now, in the first place, I’m not a moron nor am I eight years old. I know that in general, if you don’t service your customers quickly enough, they get annoyed. In the second place, Sprint customers can’t go to a garage down the street for Sprint customer service. They’re just gonna have to wait on hold. In the third place, no one is waiting on hold in our queues right now. The whole thing was a colossal waste of my time… time that, as with the first meeting, I could have been on the phone taking calls and maybe making sales.

Figure five minutes between calls. Figure maybe five minutes per call. That’s roughly 12 calls I missed, give or take, from being in ‘team meetings’. Had I made sales on all those calls, this would have been one of my best days, not my worst to date.

This is far from the worst of it. The worst of it is, during that meeting, the APM running it directly contradicted two things, one of which I’d been told in an earlier meeting, one of which was stressed over and over again in our training. The first, well, when I brought it up (foolishly, I’m learning to NEVER SPEAK IN TEAM MEETINGS, but not quickly enough), I was told to never, ever tell a customer I’m only allotted a certain amount of time on each incoming call. Customers will grow irate at that, I was told. They will not understand. Personally, I think most of my customers will certainly understand if I tell them I’m going to call them right back; that indicates it’s not that I don’t have time for THEM, but simply that I only have a certain amount of time on each incoming call… which is true. Our talk time is not measured for outgoing calls, though; I can stay on with a customer for an hour if I’ve called them and it won’t show up on my stats.

Nonetheless, the fact remains… at the start of my shift I was told to do something by one supervisor, at the end of my shift I was told never ever to do that thing by another supervisor.

Second contradiction, and this is a big one: we are, technically, allowed two minutes ‘wrap up’ time after every call. This is supposedly for making notes in the account and entering our sales on our tic sheet, if we made any (and if you do anything complex on the account or make any sales, this time is woefully inadequate). Supposedly, you have this time after each call. However, our trainer told us, over and over again, that we should only use this time if we needed it. She advised us that out on the floor, many experienced reps would tell us that we were ‘entitled’ to that time, that it was ours and we should always take it, no matter what, between every call. This would keep your individual daily call total down, which would mean you had to make fewer sales to hit your quotas, since they are calculated as a percentage of total calls taken.

This, we were flatly told, was not true. We should only take the two minutes if we needed it.. If we didn’t need the full two minutes we should go right back into available and take another call, because otherwise, what we were doing was called ‘call avoidance’ and we could be disciplined and terminated for it. It wasn’t fair to the other reps, or to Sprint, or to Accent. Furthermore, we were told that our APMs could monitor our wrap times (and of course they can, it’s all on the phones and they monitor every second we’re on the phones) and they would know which reps always took two minutes (or more) of wrap time and which ones didn’t, and they would respond accordingly.

What did the APM of my late meeting tonight tell us all? Always take the two minutes, between every call. Why? It keeps your total call volume down and makes it easier to hit your quotas. It also lowers your stress if you rest a little between calls. He assured us that he would never write us up or discipline us for using our wrap time between every call, and that most other APMs on the floor were of a like mind.

I mentioned to him, because I’m foolish and I tend to speak my mind, that this was directly contradictory to what we’d been told in training, and that he’d also directly contradicted something I’d been told that very day by another APM. He shrugged and said “Welcome to Accent.”

Now, look… and this comment is primarily addressed to a close relative who works in a high up management position at my company, if said close relative happens to read this blog entry: this is shitty management and lousy organization and it’s bad for morale. I cannot stress that enough. THIS IS BAD FOR MORALE. Accent needs to get its act together and get some consistency in its policies on this regard, because as a worker there, it causes me to have little or no respect for my authority figures, or anything I’m told about policy, when not only is one explicit statement directly contradicted within hours, but the constant response to any complaints about all the contradiction is “Welcome to Accent”.

Accent needs to get its shit together, or people are going to keep going through it like a revolving door. It’s one thing to tell people that they need to get accustomed to change. It’s another thing to put people in an environment where up is down, and black is white, and one supervisor tells you one thing at 3:45 and another one tells you the exact opposite five hours later.

My response to this is as follows: in the absence of competent, consistent, intelligent direction, I’ll do whatever the fuck I think is the right thing to do, and as long as my customers respond to me and I am resolving their issues and making them happy that they managed to get me on the phone, I will consider I am doing my job well. If I piss off my APMs, well, that’s life. If I don’t make my sales goals or my talk time sucks, well, see previous comment. I can always go back to washing dishes at the Village Inn, or find some other job, I suppose.

If my managers and supervisors cannot give me consistent direction, then I cannot repose trust in or rely on them. That leaves me to trust and rely on myself and my own judgement, and guess what? I have a great deal of faith in my own judgement, because in the many many many jobs I have held (a significant portion of which I have been discharged from) I have never, ever been fired for anything that had to do with job performance. No matter what job I’m given to do, I do it well.

But I’m very serious about this… Accent needs to get its shit together. Its employees cannot respect, nor can they trust, supervisors that clearly have their heads up their asses. I am fully cognizant that Accent’s clients probably set contradictory demands, but if Accent wishes to build a consistent, competent, well trained, loyal, and most of all, experienced, employee base, it has to do better than this. It has to stop this nonsense where legitimate complaints by new employees as to completely inconsistent directions from management are consistently met with apathetic shrugs and unacceptable comments like “Welcome to Accent”.

Personally, if I were in charge of Accent and I heard a supervisor say that, I’d fire him or her on the spot. You’ve just been told about a serious problem and that’s the attitude you take? Go work for Verizon.

Leaving that aside, I guess it wasn’t all that terrible a day. I was told I’m not allowed to read at my desk in between calls, but I see other people doing it, so screw that. I couldn’t get a sale no matter what, but I got lousy calls, and didn’t get that many of them… call volume was down and they kept pulling us off the phones. I’m annoyed that this means I won’t hit quota for this pay period and will therefore lose money from my next check… if they’re going to harp constantly on making sales, they should leave me on the phones and give me a chance to sell… but whatever. This is not a reasonable job; Accent is a second tier vendor for a large corporation that produces and sells a largely intangible product, and customer service reps should not be expected to make sales anyway (and if they are, they should be paid a realistic commission, not the pennies we do get). So, in all honesty, I really don’t expect that much of Accent and would take this all in stride, except that someone I respect hugely is high up in Accent’s local management structure so I DO expect better… and probably shouldn’t, since that person has little actual authority to make really meaningful changes.

On a personal note, there’s been no change in the Chewie situation, which includes no further visits from the landlord. Not that I’m likely to be home if and when he does drop around, with my new hours.

As to the Thursday date with Krystal, I would have bet real money (small amounts, granted) that our Thursday rendezvous would never actually materialize, and I’m willing to bet slightly larger amounts now. Nothing concrete, but she wasn’t at work today, so I called her at home when I went on my first break to see if she was okay. She apparently was, but she seemed rather busy and distracted, and when I asked if we were still getting together Thursday, she responded, “Um… yeah, maybe… we might do that”.

This, to someone as experienced as I am at being on the receiving end of the dating blow off, has the ring of doom in it. It’s not that I even remotely expected Krystal to take the date as seriously as I did, and of course I’d figured from the start that it wasn’t going to happen… but… still… I was hoping to be wrong.

I’m foolish that way.

Nothing is settled, of course… I suppose we might still do something Thursday. She might have just been distracted; there’s stuff going on in her life and nearly any of it is going to be more important than me at any given time.

Still, that response was in no way reassuring.

As I noted in my chat thread response to yesterday’s entry, I am aware I owe several people email, and there are probably people I’m not remembering right now in that queue, too, but I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment, what with moving at the end of the month (I hope), and trying to find some place to put someone else’s dog, and doing blog entries (which all my email correspondents assure me they want me to prioritize), and suddenly adjusting to a new work schedule, and… well, a whole lot of shit. So I’ll get caught up, and feel free to keep nagging me so I don’t forget, but I may have to get settled into my new digs before I can answer some of the longer pieces I have sitting in my in box. I hate to be that kind of correspondent, but right now I’m a little bit busy.

Sorry and all that.

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RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(c) be a better writer than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

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THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

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