Perplexed Employees

The Fail Agent

Posted by Winston on December 20, 2012
Posted in: Perplexed Employees. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

Fact: The most residents per capita in Mississippi live on Failing Street. You don’t need to tell me twice not to enter.

Considering the type of employees at Telescreen, you would figure it’s not that hard of a job. If you barely need a high school degree, limited “customer service experience,” and must be a chain smoker with two kids driving a rusty pinto, you would think the job is pretty fucking easy.

From reading some of my past blog posts, I’m sure you also get the sense that this it’s probably one of the more stressful jobs out there. Take a normal cubicle job, but toss in appeasing the screaming toothless redneck while navigating ten different near-obsolete applications as quickly as possible, and you’ve got a recipe for a shit job.

Me, I like to keep shit simple. That turns a stressful job into sometimes, an easy job. For example, some dumbass calls in and starts bitching about their bill. I throw free shit and money at them. They then quit bitching, hang up the phone, and leave me the fuck alone. See how simple that is?

Of course it’s not always that easy, but if you strive for simplicity, it really makes the days a lot easier. In a place filled with ESP’s, easy is a key savior of sanity.

Some employees aren’t quite that enlightened. They go by the book and seem to think they can solve everything using the bullshit mandates from the upper echelon of Telescreen. Of course all of the rules thrown at us don’t help us with our jobs, but only impede them. You’ve got to think outside of the box, and well, actually think in the first place to survive the day to day.

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The Phone Sex Badass

Posted by Winston on November 8, 2012
Posted in: Perplexed Employees. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 3 comments

“Oh yeah, it’s definitely getting hot in here.”

Sometimes employees don’t get mad, they get even. I plot pretty much every single day how I can get even with these idiotic assholes, but so far I’ve come up with nothing. One employee was much better at plotting than me and ended up getting pretty fucking even.

I’m on the phone with some raging bitch who’s pissed about something I don’t give a fuck about. She’s insistent on talking to a previous agent who was working with her the previous week.

Customer: “I need to speak with John, he promised me he would get a technician out here today!”

Winston: “Well let me see if I can track John down then.”

Customer: “No, you get up and you find him right now!”

See the demanding bullshit I deal with on a regular basis? I put the raging bitch on hold and tried to track down John, the poor employee that had to deal with this psycho. I looked him up in our directory, and it turned out he had just quit earlier in the week. Smart bastard. That’s par for the course as the turnover is fucking unreal at Telescreen.

Winston: “I’m sorry ma’am, but it looks like John quit earlier this week. I’m not sure if you had tried calling him…”

Customer: “You’re damn right I have! I’ve been trying to call him all week, why do you think I’m so frustrated? Every time I called that number, you know what I got? A phone sex line. S-E-X! You know, that porno stuff. Can you believe that?”

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Is That Spanish?

Posted by Winston on July 3, 2012
Posted in: Extremely Stupid, Perplexed Employees. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 3 comments

The nerdy version of Fight Club.

I know I mock the Telescreen customers all the time, but shit, the employees are dumbasses too. Here’s an example:

Winston: “Are you looking at the notes on the account?”

CSR: “Yeah, I see a note from a John in your office. It says, ‘Couldn’t call customer back due to queue.’ Is that spanish, you know, like que? Is that a typo?”

Winston: “Um, no. A queue is like a line. A bunch of items waiting to be addressed. We can’t call anyone back when we have a line of customers waiting to be helped.”

What the fuck am I, dictionary.com?

CSR: “No, that doesn’t make sense.”

What doesn’t make sense? I fucking defined the word for you. Are we in 3rd grade English and you’re at the kindergarden level?

Winston: “Again, a queue is kind of like a line. When lots of customers call into Super Department at once, they have to wait in line to speak to someone. The queue is the line. Right now there are 30 people waiting to talk to us, and they’re answered in order, just like a line.”

I couldn’t have explained that any clearer. There’s no way he couldn’t understand that…

CSR: “No, I think it was a typo.”

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Master of the Custodial Arts

Posted by Winston on June 21, 2012
Posted in: Job Security, Perplexed Employees. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments

For some reason this guy thinks he’s cool because he’s a janitor.

You know your job is a piece of shit when people fight over custodial duties. No, I’m not joking, gentle reader. As always, your pal Winston tells the truth and nothing but the truth. Allow me to elaborate.

Because Telescreen is so fucking cheap, they don’t pay for enough maintenance crews around our building. Mind you, the call center is fucking huge, with over a thousand people working there, but apparently Big Brother wants to buy some more weekend hookers, so we’re stuck with the few illegal immigrants we have. Then who’s going to pick up the slack? I guess the dipshit management will just have to utilize the workers they already have to fill in on cleaning duties.  Well, let me be specific, they can only use the workers that are experiencing some downtime, which is pretty much never. Hence why the competition to join the cleanup crew is so fierce. Who wouldn’t want a nice break from a continuous onslaught of stupidity?

I found out about this “perk” by going outside one day during training, even before I started in Super Department. I walked outside with some of my coworkers and headed over to the smoking area. This is by far the most popular place in the building, next to the cafeteria which serves a plethora of fried food. This should give  you an idea of the work environment I’m dealing with.

We saw one of the veteran Super Department agents outside with a broom and dustpan, cleaning up cigarette buts. I knew from prior experience that this guy happened to be a douchebag, so I took the opportunity to ridicule him. “Hey man, congrats, I see you’re now a master of the custodial arts. I knew you could do it.” “Hey, fuck you man,” he unsurprisingly replied, “This is way better than being on the phones.”

In that moment, Douchebag Coworker was right, cleaning up cigarette butts is better than talking to extremely stupid fucking idiots. I was determined to make a career change…or just volunteer the next time “cleanup duty” was offered.

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Winston Gets A Raise

Posted by Winston on June 6, 2012
Posted in: Job Security, Perplexed Employees. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

Something tells me the fake bills on the shirt are the most this guy has ever seen in his life.

I didn’t see it coming. It was a day like any other day, filled with useless fucking morons, clueless rednecks, and yelling bitches. Then a friendly message from my boss pops up on the screen, “Yearly review after your call.” Um, okay. I end the call by telling the genius that because the bill reads $35 they in fact do owe $35. The guy next to me happens to be off the phone, which is rare, so I ask him what these reviews are. “Oh, they’re just these dumb evaluations they do each year.” “Sounds stupid,” I reply, right when my boss appears at my cube. “Well, let’s see if it is,” he says. Timing was never my thing.

We go into the empty, dark, cold office in the back of the bullpen. Since no one has an office, we all go to this ugly fucking place for stupid shit like meetings and evaluations. My boss sits me down and slowly shuts the door. He pulls out a manila folder and pretends he’s in the damn CIA or something.

To me, an evaluation doesn’t mean a fucking thing. Since I’m working in the shithole known as Telescreen, I could give two fucks what they think about my performance. The fact that I haven’t jumped off the top of a tall building should be enough to warrant a high evaluation.

Performance is graded on a number system, and they measure your performance based on a score of ten, with categories such as results, customer service, initiative, blah, blah, blah. My boss goes through my performance and everything is positive. He raves that I’m one of the top employees in the department and hails my wonderful stats, because that’s all that really matters around there. I forgot to stop him and tell him how sad it is that a guy who makes a blog humiliating customers and the management at Telescreen is doing “such a great job.” The positive feedback was nothing to be proud of, it actually made me a bit ashamed. It just proves that a retarded monkey can perform my job to a high degree. Great, I have the performance level of a “special” monkey.

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The Hot Dog Eating Contest

Posted by Winston on February 21, 2012
Posted in: Job Security, Perplexed Employees. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Is that giant hot dog flipping me off?

Some companies support a healthy lifestyle by promoting outdoor activities or a discount for a fitness club membership. It’s no surprise that Telescreen doesn’t support a fucking thing that would benefit the employees. Maybe they’re worried that the costs would be too high because an insanely high percentage of the employees are obese. I’m not talking about fat, overweight, or large, I’m talking about obese. Surprisingly, I’m not trying to be an asshole, it’s just a fact. Here are some examples: The common substitute for business casual is sweatpants. Who can tell the difference between nice black pants and well ironed sweatpants? An employee in my department has a bunch of Wendy’s ads displayed in her cubicle. Quite a few of the folks here even have trouble walking and must waddle like penguins. The cafeteria features such delicacies as dirty ass fried…everything.

Someone in HR took notice of this trend and decided it would be far too difficult to help these people, so instead the company would celebrate their large lifestyle. The hot dog eating contest was born.

Emails were sent out inviting participants, warning of the date, and hyping up the excitement. Since I didn’t give two shits, nor should I have given two shits, I completely forgot about the stupid little event. I was eating lunch one day, reveling in the fact that I didn’t have to talk to idiots for 30 minutes, when I noticed some moron attempting to setup speakers. Everyone loves a good DJ, but this guy looked like he belonged in a Star Trek fan club. He got his speakers set up and started playing some crappy Top 40 music. He grabbed the mic and tried to hype up the empty atrium for the hot dog eating contest. Yeah right pal, like you’re gonna tear people away from their chicken fingers to watch some fat assholes eat. Oh how wrong I was.

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The Wise & Great Mr. Trainer

Posted by Winston on April 5, 2011
Posted in: Angry Assholes, Perplexed Employees. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

I remember our first day on the job quite clearly. Our training room was so quiet it made a library sound like a god damn Rolling Stones concert. The awkward silence in the room was finally broken by Mr. Trainer, the wise Telescreen Inc. employee who would be guiding us through the learning process. Wait a second, I have to be taught how to listen to stupid people bitch and moan all day? Apparently listening to dipshits is a refined craft, like a fine bottle of wine. And by a fine bottle, I mean Franzia, the shit that comes in a fucking box.

We’ve spent most of our day signing papers, getting standard HR bullshit, and asking questions. Mr. Trainer begins on the topic of unruly customers, and the fact that we will be getting some extremely irate and threatening individuals on the phone lines. One of my fellow trainees asks if we can hang up on a threatening customer. Absolutely not, Mr. Trainer advises us. If you hang up on an unruly customer, you can be fired on the spot. I can see getting fired on the spot for cruising into work with a .45 or for wearing nothing but a denim loincloth on jeans day, but for hanging up on an asswipe?

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