My Fourteenth Job

It really wasn't Direct TV that I worked for. I worked for a company that did customer service for Direct TV. This was really my first taste of how horrible a corporation could be. When I was hired, I asked if it was incoming or outgoing calls. They assured me that it was incoming only. I told them that I would only do incoming calls. They said fine.

Now, to get to work, you had to park a mile away and take a shuttle in. You had a small window of time to clock in. When you were on the phone, the second someone would hang up, there would be a beep and the next call was put through. That's fine, but you weren't allowed more than the standard 1 hour total of breaks for the day. In other words, you couldn't use the bathroom unless it was an emergency. So, it was constant calls. They also just raised their prices, so it was a solid 8 hours of people yelling at me for something I had nothing to do with or had no control over. I don't know why they think yelling at a customer service representative would help, but they tried. (Interesting side note, it didn't help. They never lowered their prices again. So, don't bother calling). This was all fine. I could handle all of that.

One day, they took my team and said that they were going to make it a collections team. In other words, outgoing collections calls. It was horrible. I hated collections and as soon as you were off a call you were to call another person. We were required to make quotas and the person with the highest calls would get a prize like a bar of "Dial" Soap for "dialing" the most. Isn't that fun? In other words, you made the company the most money in the hell of a crappy job, here's a bar of soap. I requested to be taken off of the collections team saying that I was told I wouldn't have to do outgoing calls. They refused saying that I didn't have anything in writing. I wrote an angry but intelligently written letter, suggesting that they would keep a valuable employee by simply keeping their word. I delivered it and never got a response. Goodbye Direct TV.