Darth Marr

At one point in Robert Asprin's book Phule's Paradise, one character complains that he "doesn't like" what his employer, the local underworld, is asking him to do. To this, his boss replies, "You're not supposed to like it. If you liked it, we wouldn't have to pay you to do it."

Last week at work was one of those weeks.

Let me preface my account of last week's festivities by saying that I've been reading The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster recently, as has my friend and co-worker, Allen. He told me last Tuesday night that this author's writing style reminded him of me, and that he thought I could (under the right circumstances, I presume) make a pretty good Sith lord. I didn't know whether I should feel flattered, or whether I should just crush his trachea with my thoughts. I decided to let it slide. If he can be turned, he could become a powerful ally.

When I arrived at work on Tuesday, I had no reason to expect anything but a routine shift. We were only running one new job, and that one was very similar to one we'd run a few months ago. We had a couple of new people, but nobody working for the first time that night. And we had temps, but Jack (the quality manager) was acting as Overlord, so I wasn't worried about that.

But there were a couple of issues we had to look out for. We handed out a memo to the interviewers that day reminding them about certain policies that several people seem conveniently to have 'forgotten'. You know, things like taking breaks without signing out, wasting time between calls, taking 10-15 minutes after signing in for the day before starting to take calls, eating on the call floor — things we cover in training, things employees sign off on when accepting employment, and, quite frankly, things anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature ought to know anyway. But people get bored and forgetful, I suppose. There was a little grumbling, especially when we started enforcing these things last night — taking food away, for example. But everything seemed to be operating within normal parameters.

Then the fun really started. Elizabeth, the building's cleaning 'lady', showed up in the front office asking demanding to speak with Jason (the call center director). When I indicated what he was gone, she wanted to know who was in charge. Lucky me. She took me into the men's room where I saw, to my considerable chagrin, that one of the walls had been tagged. Yep, gangster graffiti in the workplace. She proceeded to spend ten minutes telling me what a disgrace it was and how the building was going to Hades in a handbasket and it was all our (my company's) fault. Pointing out that there were/are other businesses that use that restroom was worse than useless; it just got her more fired up. She ended her rant by saying that the owner ("Harry", let's call him) wanted to see me. Now.

So I spent the next fifteen minutes hearing exactly the same thing from Harry. He brought up everything from the graffiti to our employees who smoked too close to the building^a to parking areas^b to overcrowding on the call center floor^c. Basically, he blamed everything that was wrong with his precious building on us.^d Just lovely — twenty-five minutes of my life that I can never get back. By the time I left, he might have felt that I wasn't showing him the proper respect. Well, when someone thinks it's okay to grill me about issues that he already knows I have no control over, it bugs me. And when I try to answer an objection, just to be cut off and then have the subject immediately changed, I get a little irritated. And when things like these happen repeatedly, I tend to lose respect for the idiot individual doing them. So yeah, if he felt a little dissed at the end, it doesn't break my heart.

Harry closed our little lecture meeting by demanding that I have Jason call him tomorrow so that they could set up a meeting "with the whole group".^e When I asked Jason about it the next day, he told me that he had called Harry and left him a couple of messages but had never heard anything back. Figures.

By the end of that experience, I was having a bad day and was ready to make sure that anyone else who irritated me would have a bad day, too. But I took a deep breath and carried on. I had a little conversation with one of our interviewers who is also a musician — a real, honest-to-goodness, actually played with Elvis musician. I commissioned him to write me a song. I gave him the title^f and let him work from there. When I talked to him on Friday, he already had three verses done and was ready to talk about residuals. I laughed and told him I just want to be there when his blues band premieres it.

That was pretty much the end of the difficulties on Tuesday. If there were any other problems, I seem to have repressed them.

Wednesday, as usual, was training day. I had a class of 14 scheduled, of which 10 showed up. The class went just fine, and all the contestants passed the skills test at the end. But it took too long. Even with a large group, I should be able to finish up at least half an hour faster than I currently seem able to. I'll have to look at things more clearly and see if I'm spending too much time on things that they can learn later on.

Friday brought another surprise. One of our long-time problem children employees had apparently been caught making long distance calls on the company phone. To England. Repeatedly. The main office had faxed over a copy of the phone bill, and it showed more than three dozen different calls, all to the same number. So part of that night's festivities involved checking her time cards for the days in question to see if she had even been on break when she'd made the calls. For the most part, the answer was no. Needless to say, she has been terminated, and all expenses, including the excess break time, will be deducted from her last paycheck.^g

There is one bright spot in all of this, though. The offending interviewer is part of a group that always sits together, a group we fondly refer to as 'Zone H'.^h If we've been living right, some or all of these people will either leave with her or decide to resign in protest. We can dream, can't we?

Fortunately, time passes, and things tend even out. That is the way of the Force, I suppose. With any luck, there won't be quite so many things pushing me toward the Dark Side this week.


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^aEveryone else who works in that building is always at least 25 feet from any door when they smoke, apparently.

^bOur parking area is out in the sticks, at the far end of the property. And there is no handicapped parking, so some of our older, less mobile employees park closer to the building. Not that we ought to have people with disabilities working there anyway, really, because there is no elevator in the building. I swear, when I finally brush the dust of that place from my shoes, I'm going to be sorely tempted to call the ADA office and give them his name.

^cHe asked me how many interviewers we had there. I told him, and then he went on this little tangent about what the capacity of our area 'should be' and how he had tried to help us 'solve the problem' by renting us more space. He kept bringing up this topic, usually finishing by saying, "If there's a fire in there, it's going to be on you, not me." I'm touched by his concern.

^dExcept for the fact than in two full summers, going on three, his people have never got the air conditioning working properly. It must have slipped his mind.

^eHarry also alternated between saying that he wanted to solve the problem 'in house' and making thinly veiled threats about calling the owner of our company. I don't know WTH he wanted. Maybe he thought he could intimidate me. Heh. Bring it on, buddy. I'm training to teach high schoolers.

^fI suggested that we call it The 'People at Work Had Better Start Acting Smarter or Somebody's Gonna Lose a Spleen' Blues.

^gWe have had interviewers do a lot of dumb things, but this is as dumb as anything I've ever seen here. Did she think that nobody was ever going to look at the phone bill?

^hThink 'Preparation H' — as in, 'these people are a bunch of pains in our collective backsides'.