As a white male growing up in the Midwestern United States, I can safely say that I have no idea what it’s like to be oppressed. The academic shackles that kept me from breaking free of high school somehow fail to compare to the Jews’ plight in Egypt, and the closest thing to true liberation I’ve ever felt was moving out of Mom and Dad’s basement. Let’s face it‚ when your idea of ‚Äúthe Man keeping you down means squabbling with Human Resources over your yearly allotted sick pay, and the most frustrating part of your day is coming home from the bar to find that paid programming is the only thing on television, you’ve got it pretty easy.
But just because I haven’t actually been oppressed doesn’t mean I won’t still complain about it. After all, that’s never stopped white American men before, has it? We have different names for it‚ ennui, malaise, or disillusionment, to name a few‚ but the idea is the same. We’re not impoverished, imprisoned, or imperiled; we’re bored. Instead of blaming it on the King, the Plague, or the Lord Protector, we blame this condition on something we call ‚ the modern world. And we complain about it endlessly.
In 1995, I would discover‚ and begin complaining about‚ that same vague sense of dissatisfaction felt by so many white men before me. I was 18 years old, fresh out of high school, and staring blankly at a future that was as wide open as it was directionless. Graduation’s greatest benefit seemed to be the freedom to hang out at Denny’s past midnight, and the most tangible change in my life was the presence of a red and gold tassel swinging from my rear-view mirror. Without a high school administration to defy, I suffered from a serious dearth of oppressive figures in my life, and my sense of purpose quickly began to wane. Lucky for me, it wouldn’t be long before I’d have a new opponent in my war on Weltschmurz.
A company named TeleTech had recently opened a new office in town, and was looking for people with computer skills to fill what must have been a hundred open jobs for telephone tech support. Within days of applying, I was called back for what they termed a “group interview”‚ in essence a roundtable gathering that felt more like an AA meeting than any part of the job screening process. After answering tough interview questions such as ‚ÄúWhat are some of your interests? and ‚ÄúIf you could talk to anyone, living or dead, who would it be? we were offered the job en masse. I wasn’t sure if we were a team or a herd, but I’d get my answer soon enough.
Training was mostly comprised of unfunny computer jokes (“Now THAT’S what I call a serial port!”) and mind-numbing exercises entering fake customers and their fake problems into our fake customer service database. Though I would later regret not relishing these precious moments away from the dreaded telephones, my time in this circle of Dante’s Inferno was mostly occupied weighing the pros and cons of getting to leave work early by stabbing myself in the eye‚ and my depth perception was losing value with each passing day. Had training been any longer, I might be wearing an eye patch today.
If training was an experience worthy of escape through partial blindness, getting out of working the phones altogether might have been worth learning Braille. One thing is certain: being blind would guard one from the call center’s soul-crushing décor. Lined with pop-art posters of Warhol and Lichtenstein to give the company the illusion of being hip, the hallway gave no indication of what lay just ahead. At the end of this hall, a pair of doors opened up to a wilderness of gray carpet and 4-foot-tall cubes, all arranged in small clusters lovingly referred to as ‚Äúpods. At the center of each ‚Äúpod was a supervisor’s desk, positioned conspicuously higher than the others, serving as a menacing reminder that we were always being watched. As if this panopticon-like arrangement were not enough, an elevated platform against the far wall housed the ‚ÄúQuality Assurance Team, who gazed coldly out onto the floor through tinted glass windows, listening in and scoring the calls of any employee they might choose.
It was in this environment that I first learned to complain about the malaise of the modern world. In other parts of the world, wars might be tearing up entire countries, but who cares? This job sucks. As a privileged white American, I demand more. There’s got to be a better way!
That’s not to say the job didn’t suck; it did. It is incredibly taxing to know that your every move is being monitored, and talking to irate and inexperienced computer users is an awful lot like training a monkey to not slap its own puddle of pee, but there are worse situations out there. I could have been settling credit card disputes for adult websites, or working prayer hotline for the 700 Club. Yes, it could have been worse. But that’s not going to stop me from whining.
Today, I guess there aren’t many of these kinds of jobs left in the United States. Like manufacturing before it, most telephone-based customer service and tech support has moved to countries with lower labor costs. Think what you will about globalization, but while Americans might lament the loss of these jobs, it is indisputable that their introduction into developing countries has been a major boost to their respective economies. And if all goes well, and the quality of life continues to improve for the citizens of these countries, maybe someday they’ll have the privilege of being as dissatisfied as we are.
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