Jobs don't work.

Marco's update: Apparently my legend grows, even those who loathed me (except for the antagonist) say they miss me. I am touched by the sentiment, but sadly sentiment doesn't pay the rent(iment). I am still planning a crowd funding and to add a donation/buy stuff button as soon as I can figure out a product or service other than "miserably bad advice", "swear word portmanteaus", and "anti-corporate screeds."  Hell, I bet I could raise about 50 dollars just for the service of "shutting my mouth." 

I looked back at my work experience, and I have settled all previous jobs into two categories: "Useless Insanity" and "Unskilled Idiocy." I imagine that I am not the only person to categorize so, nor the first to realize the futility of work. My talent for miscreance, and the words of Michael Ventura, Alan Watts (or read the transcript) ,and Harlan Ellison have left me bereft of job morale.

Why, in that video by Alan Watts, he echoes my sentiment - or perhaps I echo his:

But if you do a job, if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd.

He suggests that when we do so, we begin to equate money with happiness. I can't argue, or won't, rather. I don't want utilize my talent for opposition today

My work has been as absurd as Alan Watts suggests. I was taught, rather harshly, that I must have a job. That my talents were not in fast food or factory, that I have a natural savant-like idiocy when it comes to schedules, rules, and policies. A trained monkey with a severe bleeding head injury can follow rules that I find as alien and incomprehensible as Martian mating rituals.

Actually, given my lewdness, I suspect extraterrestrial sex makes more sense to me. 

I was raised to work jobs. I had to have a job, according to my father. I don't blame my father completely. His father was raised on German work ethic and an industrial-revolution perspective of the world. My father would pull apart guns at age six and draw each part, then put them back together flawlessly. And when he performed this miracle, his father and mother told him that it was "nice" , but he ought get a job in a factory.

Lamentable. If a child showed such precociousness today, his parents would encourage him to study math and become an engineer.

My father said the same thing, like a mantra. You have to have a job. You have to have a job. You have to have a job.

And so I spent much of my time working as call center tech support, my stock and "trade". This trade constitutes being yelled at, screeched at, cried at,  for 40 hours a week, but for the blissful two hours a month when we were  droned at or yelled by our manager about our metrics.

No call center I worked for scored me on customer satisfaction. On the contrary, they scored me negatively if I spent the time to actually help the customer.   I was told at TDS Telecom that despite having more "Kudos" (compliments from customers) than other technicians, if I didn't lower my call times I would be fired.

Let that ruminate in your head. A kudos required extra work from the customer, and generally meant they were satisfied beyond mere resolution. TDS threatened to terminate me for helping customers. 


But that doesn't matter. What matters is call times. If your call takes longer than 6 minutes, you are doing your job wrong. Hang up on the customer - so long as they don't call back - and the managers are happy. Avoid helping the customer and - so long as the customer doesn't complain - call centers are happy. 

And if we are being honest, companies placed "First Call Resolution" as a metric only because agents hung up on customers to meet call length metrics.It's hard to fix someone's error in six minutes when you spend two of those minutes gathering required information and another two trying get them to find the start button.

Absurd, absurd, absurd.  Insanity. Put together unreasonable expectations and then get angry when people cannot meet them. That is the nature of corporate jobs.

I don't have a particularly good answer - I have some, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

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Marco's update part II: As I typed this, a  coworker texted me that the blow-job-enjoying manager told the antagonistic coworker to eat a bag of dicks as well. But he did it when they were punched out (and away from the eyes of corporate). Marco's me fired for breaking the illusion of cog-like perfection and order Frank -er, my manager, had cultivated. 
Don't send them hate mail. Send me 5 dollar donation I receive I will mail them a drawing of a bag of dicks. A dollar donation means I'll spent more than 30 seconds proofreading.Or, actually proofread.