Congratulations Me: Certified Call Center Whore!

November 27, 2008 (ignore the date; this letter was just given to me yesterday)

Lio Loco
Technical Support Representative
America’s Fastest Internet Service Provider (and the Chosen ISP of Hollywood Stars, if I may add; yes, we talk to A-list celebrities in America - Jennifer Lopez, Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis just to name a few; one of the few consolations of being an ISP Tech Support rep)

Dear Lio Loco,

Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have achieved regular employment status in the company, effective December 8, 2008.

As a result of your successful performance reviews during your probationary employment, you are definitely on your way to building your career in Makati’s Highest Compensating Call Center Company. Your passion for performance and drive for success are fundamental to the Company’s vision of becoming best in class with its people, partnerships and performance.

Thank you and, again, welcome to Makati’s Highest Compensating Call Center Company family!

Sincerely,
Makati’s Highest Compensating Call Center Company

Geez! Isn’t my company so fuckin’ sweet to sugarcoat the fact that after six friggin’ months of being enslaved every night in a red swivel chair in front of an idiotic lifeless circuit of motherboards and RAMs and talking some technical gibberish in a fake American accent to some dumb Occidental on the other side of the globe to avoid being called an Indian (For call center agents, that’s the foulest, vilest, ugliest taunt you’d never wish your customer would hurl at you by the way; and of course, that’s something I haven’t been branded with in my entire, almost 20 months of call center experience! Ha! Puh-leaze!), I am still in Makati’s Highest Compensating Call Center Company andstill kicking ass at that!

Oh yes, Virginia, money is a great motivator I tell you. I have endured this sissy clusterfuck Twilight novel vampire lifestyle of being a yadda-yadda nocturnal contact agent because of the moolah that comes with it. Had it not been for the five-digit salary that I get every 15th and 30th of the month, I would have long been gone to this odd job that curtails your right to live a fuckin’ normal life. Since I was burdened with a “social responsibililty” that needed urgent attention after graduating from college, I had to make a choice between practicing the profession that I studied for more than four years or jumping into the burgeoning call center business back then. At that time, I was still the next door, giddy-two-shoes good boy, not the clusterfuck narcissistic, angst-ridden bastard that I am today. Naturally, my priority was the social responsibility over personal ambition so I picked the “call boy” offer and put my CPA ambitions in the backseat. Which brings me to this whining, drowning abyss that I am wallowing in right now.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, the moment you sign the call center contract the sly, backstabbing HR hands you, you must be aware that by affixing your signature in the paper you are giving away your freedom and right to a healthy lifestyle, family bonding, and romantic relationships. You have to accept and be aware of the things you have to unwillingly compromise - time, friends, sex, relationship, romance, gimmicks, family, lifestyle. These are the words that will have to be deleted in your vocabulary. Where before, you have the luxury of unlimitexting friends and fiends for carefree what’s ups and what nots, now all you can do with the ticking clock is make it sufficient for a sleep-eat-work life cycle. And if you can still get away with an eight-hour dozing, then you’re already lucky. ‘Cause anything below that is considered just normal.

So just in case you have plans of jumping into this call center bandwagon, allow me to help you think a hundred times and decide rationally lest you bang your head in the wall later after you’ve been caught donning the suit of this freakin’ much ballyhooed job of supposedly high stature. When you become a call center agent, be prepared to:

• Destroy your body clock. You come to work at night when a hot and steamy sex action between your two, horny as hell cohabiting next-door neighbors is in the offing everybody is oh-so-fuckin’-drooling in their beds like some naïve retard and you sleep during daytime, when a slew of PUVs keep honking their horns like mad during rush-hour traffic (Fuck these imbecile drivers! What good exactly does blaring horns do in the middle of traffic mayhem? Can it cut the queue short? No, it just annoys everybody else and starts a domino-effect barrage of more irritated drivers honking their horns as well. So go screw your neighbors’ mothers’ diaper-laden cunt you clusterfuck bastards!).

• Violate one of the sacred Ten Commandments of God. Expect that even during Saturdays and Sundays, you’re doing the call center work treadmill. Gone are the days when you could go out and live out the cliché of smelling the roses and bathing in the glorious Sunday sun. Dream on because rarely will you get weekend offs. So you write an apology to gawd for being an atheistic sonuvabitch and make a bargain to move the Sabbath during your days off instead. Of course He won’t budge because you’re an insignificant, lowly nothing unworthy of the divine favor, so you either cut your throat and find your name in the next day’s obituaries while we go on with our oh-so-boring, rule-conforming lives because again, you’re just an insignificant little twit or you stop your motherfuckin’ whining and content yourself with a fuck-me-Freddy weekday off.

• Lose your virginity pseudo-existing love life. Unless the freakin’ rotten apple of your narcissistic eye is also a call center whore, you can never have a healthy give-and-take romance with your beau, hence your partner’s irrevocable tendering of resignation to a one-sided nurturing. I mean, for chrissake, how could a relationship work out when both of you are living different worlds? She’s available at day time, she texts you those cheesy, mundane one-liners asking whether you’ve already eaten or did you already shit or are you masturbating your underprivileged joystick to eternal damnation and by which time, you’re already releasing your orgiastic moans while doing a one night stand with Megan Fox in your wildest dreams. On the other hand, when you are wide awake at night, she’s already feeding her slit with a black dildo in her night gown surrounded by her autistic teddy bear bunnies. Now tell me, how could that kind of topsy turvy setup work?

• Become the next shameful clone of Betty La Fea-slash-The Grinch (forgive me, I couldn’t think of any better male version of the ugly boob tube icon). Yes, you read that right. Unless you have been blessed with good Piolo Pascual or Angel Locsin physique, chances are your already hideous looks will slowly diminish at its lowest primeval form and you risk your life and limb for being stoned to death by your next-door neighbors for mistaking you as that Zafra-chronicled manananggal that terrorized Manila. You see, working in a call center puts on those horrendous crow’s feet, hollow eye spots, puffy eye bags, and wretched wrinkles in your face without your approval. Graveyard shift gives that gift to you; it’s a good thing then that I was given good genes! Haha! Half-kidding. But seriously, if by any chance, you get terminated sooner than you’ve been expecting, at least you still have the fallback of auditioning for any small Zorayda-slash-Bentong laughingstock part. I had this teammate back when I was stll in cool and comfy Baguio and he was always jeered and mocked behind his back because he looked like the real-life version of Master Splinter. He was monikered Ratatouille not only because he looked exactly like a shrunken, sickly rodent but also because he had this long front teeth that oddly reminded you to brush your teeth everyday or else, and a mouth reeking with the foulest halitosis that was ever recorded in the call center history. Oh fuck-me-Freddy, I’ve always prayed hard not to get a seat beside him every night back then, much more use his stinking headset piece by mistake. So call center wannabe’s, just a piece of advice: if you’re ugly as hell and you’ve always been taunted that you looked like Kampanerang Kuba when you were child, fuck your biased mom for telling you that you’re just as beautiful as she’s expected you to become and please, for the love of gawd, don’t venture into this kind of job. You’re only inviting more fuckarows in your already fucked-up life.

• Slowly lose contact to the outside world. Honestly, when I became a call center agent, getting at least eight hours of sleep is already a miracle that happens only once in a blue moon. You’re shoving the wrong notion up your ass if you think being a call center agent is easy and glamorous because these hydrocephalic creatures are doing a heavy workload as heavy, if not heavier than, as that of an underpaid construction worker. (A digression: Yes, I admit it, most call center agents are really friggin’ airhead sonuvabitches - an observation that I condemn because there’s actually nothing that they should brag about; I mean, c’mon call whores, just because you can speak straight English and earning the best compensation package in the corporate macrocosm does not give you any motherfuckin’ right to walk with swagger in the streets and to feel like you’re the king and queens of social hierarchy, bitchin’ and belittling every bystander you come across with in your put-on American English accent. Truth is, your shit is as stinking and your fart is as noxious as those ascaris-infested beggars in the slums so go find some freakin’ decency and humility in your cabinet.) Yes, we only sit for the entire nine-hour duration but that’s even causing more mental stress than say, carrying pieces of lumber for the whole afternoon. You use your neurons because you’re interacting with a person, someone who is complex and has an arsenal of different emotions in the bag ready to be triggered. Just imagine then how doubly tiring that is if you’re talking to 25 different Americans a night (my personal average so far, by the way) with hidden tendencies of becoming the next Dexter. I tell you it’s nuts and the stressful call interaction is much, much worse than doing menial labor.

‘Nuff said. If you are still persistent though, then by all fuckin’ means, go ahead and meet your suicidal doom. I am cautioning you however to take more than the usual dose of in-your-face guts, revolting determination, and fuck-me-Freddy patience because you’ll badly need it. Call center is not for the faint-hearted. It’s for people whose middle name is Patience in cases where granny customers call and end up thinking you can see the content of their computer monitor just because you tell them that a black screen should pop up after typing cmd in the Run box (”Ooh! You’re good. How do you know I have a black box open? So you see my computer screen, don’t you?”). It’s for the lion-brave, thick-faced bastards and bitches who vent out profane-loaded revolting statements of “Go stroke your fornication-hungry chicken sir, you motherfuckin’ clusterfuck!” do not get pissed off whenever the caller becomes irate and start a verbal offensive of R18 obscenities. And by the way, I did tell you that you have a good command of the English language to meet the cut, right?

It’s an unusual, difficult work, yes, what with all the precious things you have to compromise and unwilling sacrifices you have to make. But then again, the perks are more than enough to keep your whiners out in the dust. I am currently in an account that compensates fairly well. If you make good, they will give what’s due for you. That means a lot of across-the-board incentives and bonuses on top of your basic pay. And besides, with the current rate of unemployment insanely ballooning to a nine-month Juno pregnancy proportion, beggars can’t be choosers.

So I remain loyal to my odd job, bearing with all the crap, learning to love it, or at least like it, even if it’s the farthest job description my course could be attached to. Pledging allegiance means knowing how to deflate the hot air in your irate customer’s head, how to be a virtuous man to an old-slash-drunk-slash-deaf-slash-physically-impaired customer, and how to keep your cool even if you feel like busting the phone into the hell-cursing Johnny Doe’s head.

And at times when I’m on the verge of already pulling the call center trigger, I keep playing the Bill Gates-rich Lio Loco image inside my head and tell myself that this is just ephemeral. Hang on there, double douche bag sonuvabitch narcissistic bastard, the best is yet to come.