Snippet on Strange Relationships
One of the strangest thing about working at a call center like mine… where we do both inbound and outbound calls, is the sort of relationships you have with your callers. There are frequent customers, who in return are old, some are drunks and sounded like hill billy , I have dealt with them for a long time and I can finish their sentences for them and know what they need and what they want to convey. That’s actually pretty cool. Those people make my job easier, and sometimes I consider some of them my friends.
Though majority of my customers are not my friends. They are in that grey area of almost acquaintances. It’s like flying on a long flight where you actually talk to the person sitting next to you. You may be friendly, but you accept that you will never see this person, so you actually make no real attachment. It’s weird to get to the end of your day and you can’t remember half of your conversations.
I know that its fairly unrealistic to think I would have the sort of conversations where we share deep feelings, talk about things that matter, and develop meaningful conversations. Yeah, that’s some serious B!@#$%^* I guess the thing that bothers me is that spending all day talking to people, having such curt, cold conversations makes me feel kind of cold and lonely. Sometimes, I think the nature of call center work varies on how you deal with it…some makes you feel a little cheap, boring, challenging, out of this world issues like you are paid to be pleasant to people that are only calling because they want things from you, and the rest are all techie issues….and what nots!@#$%, some are personal things.
I’ve always been very good at keeping friends, or developing best friends. The nature of my job just seems to amplify that. I guess I want to actually talk to people, to talk about things bigger than mutual funds and bonds, and to feel that they hear me and have experienced same things like i did.
Marxist were right when they said that work causes alienation. It alienates you from what you produce, and the people around you.
At least I can still press the mute button and abuse my customers that way. That always helps.
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