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I can begin by saying that I'm not an idiot. There have been instances I called a Call Center and did speak with an idiot, but I did not assume that each person thereafter with whom I spoke at a call center was going to be an idiot. I get the impression that I may just be an idiot when I get that slow voice that repeats the request in the same words. I didn't need you to repeat your request more slowly for I do understand each word you have chosen. I may have responded in a way that sounded confused because what you need is not something I am trained to handle or I didn't exactly hear a request within the story you've given me. It is also possible that I could not give you what you needed for another reason than I was not smart enough to figure out how to do what you wanted.

A Call Center environment can have a way of dehumanizing everyone involved. It can dehumanize the customer by asking them to give up their God given right to be in control, and admittedly it can seem like the person on the phone is just waiting for you to hang up. More, though, the worker can feel dehumanized. A customer can dehumanize you by speaking like you're a machine or like they know much more than you. Your own workplace can also play a major part in your own mechanization. In actuality you are nothing more than a number of people getting calls out of the way. Whether you're measured in calls per hour or sales per call or lowest account cancellations, you can be summed up in a statistic. "We have too many people on the phone. We'd best send three home." "You are ranked number forty-one compared to the other statistics we have. It would be great if you were able to improve by forty places." Each day you have a reminder that you as a person is secondary (if counted at all) to you as a statistic.

If you can keep your head up and still feel like yourself each day when you go home, it is possible for your call center job to remain with you for a number of years. Just when you start to feel less overwhelmed by your too-short training and survive each shift worrying that you've loused everything up, you begin to realize that the nature of your job is more repetitive than you ever thought possible. You begin to forget individual instances of the day and generalize the feel of the calls you've had. The calls you do remember are the bad ones which can sour an entire days' work if you don't have some perspective. I have a question for current and past call center workers: Have you ever

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