Vindication

Dateline, 1997 - I'm working in the call center taking my calls, serving the members, and listening to my bosses shout "We need you on the phones! Watch your Work time!" Ahh...there it is. Work time. The time you spend on After Call Work. Time NOT spent taking calls. Some people abused it, many didn't. Yet the combination of abusers and inexperienced formal call center management resulted in the chanting of that mantra, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. One day during a meeting there was some time at the end and management opened it up to the staff. "So what's going on in the center? Anything we need to know about?"

I decide to say something (note: the odds of my "saying something" turning out well for me up to that point of my life had NOT been good unless I was rebuking my Nemesis, yet for some reason I decided to throw the odds out the window in this instance), and it comes out like this - "I know we need to focus on taking the calls as efficiently as possible, but sometimes I get so sick of hearing 'Watch your Work time!' that I just wanna throw a shoe at your office window." Now I'm not sure where that falls on the Things You Shouldn't Say to Your Boss in Your First Six Months list, but I'm pretty sure it's in the top 20. And needless to say, things didn't go overly well after that.

Fast forward to 2007. My old boss is now my peer, but in a different call center within the company. We're in call center management training and the question comes up, "What do you do when you're busier than expected and you're not meeting your service objectives?" Of course the response about getting your agents on the phones was interjected, and was swiftly met with a firm, "No!" As she started listing off the steps to take, out of the top 5, tracking your agents down and ensuring they were actively servicing a phone call came 4th. I have no idea what the first three were, though, because I was too damn busy laughing at my old supervisor/peer across the way (who was also laughing, mind you) as we reminisced about all the times people were shouted at to get on the phones.

After ten years, vindication is mine!

(For what it's worth, I pledged to myself that if I ever found myself in her shoes, I'd never harp on Work time like they did. In two years, I've said it five times.)