Just shoot me and get me out of my misery. That sums up the life of a Call Center Rep. Call Centers locate in areas that have a high number of unemployed people, hungry to work for the wages they are offered. I started at a Call Center for $8.50 an hour. The Provincial Government at the time was offering compensation to any Company that would bring their Center to Nova Scotia. They were financially helped to get the office up and running. The Government paid for our training and for the next year paid half of our salaries. Sweet deal isn't it.

The Call Center that I worked at was a U S based company that has been in the business for over 50 years. They came here with many promises for advancement, above average pay and incentives to motivate their employees. There was little advancement offered, the pay was below average even for a Call Center environment and the incentives were soon unattainable because of the amounts we would have to sell to reach them.

If you work in an office job that allows you to gossip at the water cooler consider yourself lucky. Our water was consumed during breaks and although we talked for a living we were told no liquids on our desks. If your office pretends to not notice your bathroom breaks then consider yourself lucky again. We had a maximum of 9 minutes a day for bathroom beaks. If you used your minutes every day then towards the end of the month before the stats were printed you would not go to the washroom because you had to get the stats up. This office was huge and if you happened to sit by the windows it took one and a half minutes to get to the washrooms.

Personal calls were forbidden at work. They would take a message and hold it until your break. Then they would give you the message if they didn't forget or they weren't too busy themselves.

On one particular day my friend was being induced with her first child. It was totally forbidden to have your cell phone out of your purse. On that day I broke the rules and had it in my pocket on vibrate. Shortly after my break that day the phone vibrated. I took the chance of walking into the hall to answer it. The precious baby was still born that afternoon and the new mother was calling me to tell me the news. I knew I had put my self in a precarious position by answering the phone. We spoke for 6 minutes before I told her I just had to get back to work and I would call her the moment I left the Center. My Supervisor was standing by my desk when I came back. She

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