Bellend battery and call centre calamity.

Found out today that one of the guys at work had left for greener, molestier, pastures. Before he began his short-lived and very promising career in tech support young Wheezy (named after his similarity to the Toy Story character) used to work in a kilt shop, helping to get guys kitted out in manly skirts and pretend they’re William Wallace while walking down the street after the reception at the wedding they were no doubt going to. One day, while going about his duties, a customer turned round and slapped him about the face with his chunky erect cock. He promptly left this tartan brothel, rode the dole wave for nearly a year and landed in the same call centre as me. All five foot, rotund, balding, speccy, Eve Online playing social retardedness of him. He wasn’t even 25 yet. In any case, he was the closest to the stereotypical nerd there was in our training group, but a fairly harmless guy that has at least six years before he kills his own mother and scalps her to use her hair as a wig. Total puppy. He never liked working there and was open about his intentions to move on as soon as something better came up. The fact his concept of better is returning to work in the place he got dick slapped across the jaw immediately validates every complaint I have about the place. Or maybe he liked getting a mouthful from the public rather than an earful, who knows?

"I feel a molesting coming on!"

One other event helped to sate my inner drama llama and love of Schadenfreude today: that girl (with the boyfriend, accomplice in my bad behaviour, and who hasn’t spoken to me in months) had a bit of a breakdown on the call floor and was sent home. Tragically I missed the live show, but Marsha’s boyfriend saw her crying outside, so being the compassionate fellow I am I leaped onto Facebook to see if she’d posted anything about it. It would appear she burst out crying on the call floor after a customer said they couldn’t hear her and one of her programs wasn’t working, so she broke a keyboard and was sent home with a paid holiday. She’s blames it on her boyfriend keeping her up all night by not being in the bed with her. As time goes on, the more similarities I see between her and Ex, and the less I regret losing what friendship we had. I do feel kind of bad that she felt rough enough to fall apart like that, but on the other hand I can’t help but roll my eyes that she’d let some shitty call centre job get her down rather than just get her mad now and again. But hey, she can do whatever the fuck she likes, I’ll just be keeping an eye open in the off-chance she decides to Hulk out again.

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Budgeting for excess, and my motivation’s triggered once more.

I’m going through one of those horrible phases where things aren’t half bad. I have a bit more money in the bank than I used to, my car is running, I don’t own anyone anything, work is trundling along without incident. Nothing is happening. I’m bored senseless. Right now my life is comfortable and uneventful, which is a bit pathetic all things considered.

I did some maths too, and figured if I saved just £2 a day, I’d save what scientists call a metric fuckton of money. See, that’s actually less than what I’m paying getting my lunch from the work cafeteria, because I was lazy and didn’t make myself anything to eat before I left the house. Now, over the course of a five day week, that’s a tenner. Over a month, forty quid. Over a year, £480. Holy fuck man, I’m spending nearly half a grand on shit processed tepid food I don’t even like! That’s a few ounces of weed, nearly a ton of tabs of acid, 190 or pints of beer, a rollicking good evening with a lady (or two) of the night, or enough petrol to drive through France to Zürich, down to Monaco, and drive the coast to Malaga, with enough left over for a celebratory drink once you got there. Or the gym membership that I was actually trying to budget for in the first place.

As you might be able to tell, things have fallen by the wayside fitness-wise over the past three months or so. Still not having bread, but that’s been replaced with whatever shit is on offer at work that day, normally meat wrapped in pastry with a side of mediocre chips. It doesn’t taste that good, but it fills a hole well enough that I’m not more grumpy with hunger. My shifts have been straddling that line between starting too early to do anything, and finishing too late to do anything. By which I mean I can’t go walking in the woods with my dog in the dark without seeming like a nutter. Though now I think of it, wouldn’t that make the people judging me nutters too? In either case, I’ve fell off the wagon, and I’m wanting to get back on it. Already the diet has improved, I’ve got a couple of joints worth of weed left then I’m done with that (and subsequently smoking altogether) until at least a hot summer’s day months from now, and I’m already feeling a bit lighter and better as a result.

Two big things have triggered this: firstly, the people I work with. Not the stereotypical shut-ins you might think work in tech, but not exactly a crowd of Olympians either. They’ve got what I’ve come to think of as the “IT Physique.” Few are obese, but most are walking around with soft, shapeless bodies, with little pot bellies and ridiculously skinny arms because that’s the only part of their body that moves with any frequency. Some have really bad hunches from using computers for so long, and I’ve started to notice myself slouching in my seat, my spine all curved, and I really don’t want to end up like them. Secondly, Phill, the big fat guy I used to go to college with, has started losing the beef at a rate of knots, and annoys me that I haven’t been the one to do it first. Given he’d always been that way and I used to play sports six days out of seven, I kinda have to belittle his achievement by going one better, and beating him at every possible thing in the world. Infantile I know, but it has to be done man.

Nanu nanu.

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Broken zips and swollen ears.

Had the probation review, which seemed more like another tour of the entire building than anything else. At first I was lead to a small room by my manager, shown the same stats as yesterday, told that I was handling a fuckton of calls, and all I had to work on was “quality.” As far as I can tell it doesn’t seem to be tone of voice, or length of calls, or general rudeness, but more that I don’t tell the customer their own name all the time. I find it hard to care if that’s the main complaint. My probation was extended another three months, which changes absolutely nothing other than having to wait even longer for a staff discount, which is about the only perk going. There was a “between you and me” moment where the manager said she wasn’t confirming anyone’s post just now, from the sounds of it because she doesn’t want to appear too soft in her new job. Whether or not I believe her is another matter. She was very nice, saying I was a pleasure to work with and she was glad that I didn’t have any complaints or look like I hated getting out of bed in the morning to come to work. I was tempted to rant, but it wouldn’t do much use.

From there I was whisked away to the other side of the building to listen to what customer’s themselves had to say about me. They randomly select a few people, ring them back after they’ve gotten off the call with me, and ask them what they thought. It seemed like a flawed system, where one guy had nothing but praise but gave the lowest possible score because he’d waited so long on hold beforehand, another that was unhappy because I didn’t fix a problem I was specifically told a hundred times I wasn’t to touch, and one that gave a middle of the road response where everything was sorted out and the lot of it was uneventful. The numbers were shit, but what people were saying was good. I was given a sheet of paper to sign showing that I had indeed been told I wouldn’t be getting a staff discount for another three months and that I’d listened to a few voices I didn’t recognise and whom I would never speak to again.

It was a pisser of a day, and I had earache to top it all off. It’s swollen up and stopped me from being able to clamp my jaw shut properly. It’s that kind of annoying throb that can’t really be described as pain, but it just makes everything a bit harder to do. I couldn’t think properly, time dragged in, all I wanted to do was go the fuck home. Now I’m here I can’t settle my mind on doing anything. My zip broke on my jeans as well, so I was wandering around trying not to look either retarded or perverted, and also holding back the urge to scream at the top of my lungs that my zip had indeed broke, I was aware of it, and the problem will be rectified by tomorrow morning.

I need to go out now with my swollen ear, buy a new pair of shit jeans at a supermarket to do me until the weekend, and then see about passing out until morning. Goodnight!

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Thalidomide drumsticks.

I sat in the cafeteria in work today across from a man with a stunted arm whose hand was the wrong way round. He picked up two spoons, one in each hand, and proceeded to start smacking them together, his stub flailing about madly as he threw his head back and started singing and laughing. As fast as he had started he stopped, put the spoons down, and told me all about why I should tell every customer to rotate their cables, because all the fibre optic electrons will gather at one end if I don’t. With the show and the speech done, he hopped up, crotch-thrusted his chair back into place, and fucked off with a slightly effeminate wiggle. I spent the next ten minutes wondering if he had a special mouse to use, and what it looked like.

Got my “probation” review tomorrow, where I’ll either be kept on permanently, given another three months probation, or sacked. At least I think that’s how it works. I was given a formal looking envelope, telling me the details of when it would be (tomorrow, too late to be early, and too early for me to finish my shift straight after) and informed I could have a union rep in there with me. Does anyone bar teachers and those in the emergency services even have unions anymore? If it isn’t a job for life, you’ve got nobody standing at your back. The whole thing is just me and my manager, don’t even know if it’ll be done in a separate room or just on the call floor. Bit of a waste of the nice thick paper they printed the letter on if they aren’t going to bother going the whole hog and make it a shirt and tie tribunal.

If too many people call back, it's a shift in Azkaban.

Had a one-on-one session for a few minutes as well, something they’re keen on to help you progress and develop and other forward thinking words. The whole thing could be summed up thusly: I’m not making technical mistakes, I’m not rude, but I’m not a barrel of laughs either. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to phone somewhere up and hear a cheery voice at the end of the line. Why are you so fucking happy? I know the kind of place you’re working in. If your shit breaks, and you need to phone somewhere up to get it sorted, do you want to spend an hour talking to a lovely person who’ll ask you how your day’s been and what the weather’s like, or do you just want some cunt that will see what the problem is, fix it, and get you the fuck off the phone and back doing something more enjoyable?

You might not be able to tell, but I’m not really invested in the company. Sure, the logo is everywhere and we got free mugs(!) but man, I’m just not feeling it. Maybe because it’s an outsource company, which by its very definition means we’re doing the work that Daddy can’t be arsed doing himself. Now, when Daddy wants to cut back on some money, he doesn’t have to worry about looking bad in the papers with lost jobs, because all he’s doing is cutting back on the money he’s giving to another company. And the company I work for doesn’t need to worry too much, because they don’t have a large public presence, and have an easily replaceable workforce. Sure, you might get an article in a local paper if you lay off 1000 people, but wherever you go to next will love that you’ve made 300 new jobs there instead! I could work in that place for a decade, and if I dropped dead one day there’d be no mark I’d ever been there. I’m ranting again, I promise that I’ll make no more mention of that sort of thing until I’ve finished my manifesto and found a gorgeous idealistic young woman to have a tumultuous relationship with that will be remembered through the ages.

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Hi money! Bye money!

Got paid a couple of days ago, big chunk of it is already marked out to be spent. £100 on digs, £60 for that fine, £100 (minimum, unless I’m wanting a truly awful pair) for glasses, £30 at least to replace my boots which are falling apart, another £30 again on jeans as I only have the one pair, £60 at least for petrol money, and £30 for my phone bill. Still to get a new mattress and the car in for a service. To top it all off my MP3 player seems to have given up the ghost, so unless I can recover all the data from the hard drive I’ve lost pretty much all of the music I’ve gotten over the past ten years and all of the films. It’s the music I’m most bothered about to be honest, as it was the closest thing I had to any sort of “collection,” and it had a lot of songs in there that I knew mainly by sound rather than name so I doubt I’ll ever properly find again. Woe is me. If I can’t get it working again then that’ll be another three figures to replace it.

Having said all that, that is a month’s worth of spending, and a lot of it I know I’ll put off. Glasses? Pah, even if they are rusted and leave marks on either side of my forehead, I’ll be in hospital with metal poisoning before I need a new pair. And shoes? I’ll swagger more and call it the grunge look, which will go in perfectly with my washed out torn jeans! And do I really need a mattress? All the springs have flattened out sure, but I definitely read somewhere that a soft mattress is actually bad for you. Plus until I can verify that those definitely are bedbug bites, I don’t see any reason to fork over hard-earned cash. Petrol? All I need is 99p masking tape and I can drive away without paying each and every time!

In all seriousness though, the only extravagance so far this year has been a Zippo lighter I ordered off of Amazon for less than a tenner, and a little bit of weed, which I haven’t and won’t be getting in every week. All in all I’m saving up quite well, considering getting a motorbike, but I’m going to see if it’ll still save me money, or to stick with a car alone. Trying not to let the money burn a hole in my pocket, but also not work and save up as much as I can only to go and spend the lot of it on entirely mundane things.

Also, I’m in the process of setting up a twitter account, as I feel the need to spout shit in short little bursts from time to time. I’ll post up the details once I’ve made it, figured out how to work it, and perhaps find a decent widget for the sidebar on here to save you all the trouble of having to travel over there to see anything.

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