Archive for August 18th, 2007
Pays me funny monies plz
So as I mentioned before, I got a new job. And it uses the phone, which scares the flippin’ hell out of me since I suck at talking on the phone. Not to mention I think my hearing is going. In short what I have to do is call up people and get them to do surveys, which I enter the answer into a system using an interface with radio buttons. The whole thing is pretty simple for those who have used any real chat client/site before (which I obviously have too much experience with). It’s definitely not the most complicated job in the world.
However, it’s not so simple. Well OK it is. So a run through of my training today (I did some online quizzes the other day, simple memorize and answer multiple choice things). Today I had a conference call that started at 5pm. Well it started off shaky when Naomi called my cell instead of my home phone (When asked to give a contact number, I gave my cell solely because it’s better to reach me. I assumed they’d ask for a number for work after, they didn’t. Oh well). So that threw me off a little, then she called my home phone and we were all set. In the call there were 4 other people being trained, all women. So of course since women always sound better on the phone, my confidence shrunk to the size of a gay man’s junk at a Dyke Hike.
The call was planned for 5-6 hours. Which given that there was 5 people being trained, would mean an hour each were you not teaching them at the same time. Really, I have to question the other ladies’ experience with computers beforehand because it seemed really limited. Naomi obviously knew her stuff really well, but I’d think I could have blown through everything in 30 minutes or less were it just myself. A lot of time would have been cut off if they had just down what was requested in the emails we had received before, but they didn’t. Naomi: “If you click the schedule tab, it will take you to a list where the schedule docs are listed” Woman: “Are we supposed to be in the ‘General’ tab?” Naomi: “No, click the ’schedule’ tab”. Needless to say, I had to click the mute button a lot to keep from both laughing and swearing at them. Oh well.
There was one girl though, think her name was Xani or Angle, she had a good grasp on it. So wasn’t completely alone in knowing what I was doing. Eventually when we got done the mock-calls we went off and did some real calls. My first call was an answering machine. My second call was an answering machine. My third call was a “This number is currently unavailable. Please try again later” so I had to ask if that was a busy circuit or # not available code. My next 3 calls I got hung up on before I got 1/2 way through the intro (Got through about “Hello my name is Jeff and I am” before they hung up). The next dozen calls I got the same previous things, didn’t actually get to do 1 survey so kinda sucked.
The job sounds easy, and honestly as long as I can memorize the script/questions and add smile to my voice they’re going to pay me to get hung up on. I’ve been doing that for free for years. I’m totally going to the labor board about back pay issues, so watch your back Mags!
