The Call Centre Lobotomy

Each and every day which passes reaffirms my belief that when you begin to work in a call centre, you should be given an advice leaflet containing information on how this ‘new phase’ of your life will affect your health, mental well-being and self worth.
A quick search on the internet reveals that more than one million people in the U.K are employed in call centre work so, before I make entirely broad generalisations I’ll be factual for a moment. Firstly, let’s dispel the myth that anyone working in a call centre must be a bit thick or unable to effectively apply themselves. Apparently, 25% have been educated to undergraduate level! Furthermore, (all this is according to some survey I read somewhere) 39% have ‘A’ levels and 22% are knowledgeable enough to have attained some sort of BTEC or HND. So just to be clear, I’m not assuming here that 5% of the workforce in the U.K is stupid yo. I may suggest later that they were unwittingly caught in the capitalist web but that’s the way it goes. Here’s how it works:
Firstly there is the commute – call centres are rarely built in a convenient spot so if you don’t drive you’ll end up on a train or a shuttle bus to a former colliery site/filled in quarry which isn’t entirely sure whether it’s an industrial estate or a poor excuse for a nature reserve. Soon enough, once aware of the daily disappointment at the end of it you’ll begin to enjoy this meander through swathes of dirty fields, passing the occasional birds nest constructed loosely from old Aldi bags and cigarette ends but for now at least, you’re eager yeah?
If a honeymoon period is applicable to beginning a new job, where call centres are concerned the first 6-8 months would certainly be it. No matter whether you’re in service or sales it’s basically the same, you’re still wide-eyed and enthusiastic, licking your lips at all the prospects of promotions and advancement and development which are so clearly available to you, it’s easy to think you could carve out a halfway respectable career for yourself in a place like this after all…
In that survey I was on about earlier, they reckon 40% of call centre workers ‘agree they offer clear career paths’. Would this be the same 40% who ‘would not have considered this type of work before the recession hit’ all collectively having a laugh at the dearth of promotions available in these places? I joke of course because the honeymoon period is all about building your hopes and dreams of a career here. It’s comparable to the U.S Marines - although the process is much more drawn out, eventually you will want to kill.
Once your hopes and dreams of meaningful employment have been sufficiently built up, comes the downside. A year or two into your call centre job, perhaps a little more, things are a little different. You will have applied for a promotion or two, you will have taken the knock backs on the chin and accepted the feedback offered with the good grace expected of an obedient and ambitious employee. With this you’ll begin to adapt and become what you believe you should be from your employer’s point of view.
So you change those smallest parts of your personality which don’t fit in with the perceived ethos in which you aim to progress, all the while becoming less of you, more your job… You are adapting yourself to your environment whilst all the time your environment is changing. Some sort of survival of the shittest is at play here I presume but nevertheless, time and time again you will adapt to ‘a changing working environment’. You are moulding and remoulding into what you think the powers that be want you to be only to be told that this could improve and that could be better, you should do that this way and those don’t go there, you don’t sit here and your job is now this, until inevitably you forget who you are and feel obliged to take 12 weeks sick leave with stress/anxiety/depression (delete as appropriate).
All of this because the simplistic, harmonious and just about bearable world of contact centre employment turns out to be a gladiatorial arena where you’re forced into a constant battle of wits, it becomes an impossible quest to remain true and consistent to yourself, a literal war of attrition, much like fighting against the tide to preserve the jagged edges of your stony soul.
Ultimately you will lose. Gradually you’ll have been worn away and ground down into something vaguely resembling what is required of you. This is your new mindset, one of complete compliance, like the worker bee, zombie-like in persona, neither happy or unhappy, merely content to do whatever you need to in order to get paid, so you can pay your bills and raise your kids to as higher standard as you can muster for as long as you’re able. holidays, social events, the weekends (basically all of your free time) will pale into torrid insignificance, important only to lead you to believe that all your futile effort is worth it, it’s all for something…
It is all for this. You changed into what you’ve become so you are able to go to B&Q with purpose, to give yourself a reason to get blind drunk at a friend’s wedding or so you can spend a few days in the sun each year. You gave up being you only to resort to such mundanaties to try to escape being what you’ve become which in turn leads to you resenting the free time in which you do so, and the anxiety builds as you edge closer to the return to you desk and then, you get back to your work and feel as if you can breathe again. You can breathe a sigh of relief in that you don’t have to be disappointed in not having fun enjoying yourself again for the maximum amount of time possible, safe in the bubble of diminished responsibility to yourself, for now at least. Nothing you say or do here really matters.
By this point in your dog-eared career the work you do is so monotonous, so repetitive and so trivial to you that you can almost switch off, you do it without thinking. This autopilot like state is the best place to be because not only can you get paid for thousands of hours in this frame of mind without straining yourself too much, and besides the fact that it’s the only real rest your brain gets these days, years later the fear of the feeling that you gave up too easily is incomprehensible. Your spare time is a persistent reminder that you have failed, so the pursuit of happiness is replaced as a necessity by an overwhelming urge to never try to be as such.
The repetitive nature of your role is so ingrained on your psyche that you will wake up occasionally mumbling the answering machine message you churn out a thousand times weekly, or you’ll begin to greet friends on the phone with a cheery “how can I help?” It’s in your veins. It becomes so much a part of you that you fear being without your ‘meaningful employment’ and you do as you are told, you change as necessary, you stick as rigidly as you can to your routine because you need it to appeal to your withered sense of worth. That’s how they get you, if they didn’t get you at school that is… If they did then you’re here already and probably love it. Maybe you just feel grateful to be alive, let alone earning a living after the depressive repeating of low test score after low test score, happy that you no longer need to pull down your pants for attention, despite your generic mental disorder or ‘behavioural problems’, someone deems you worthy and able enough to do something, anything. You are unconsciously fixed in failure in the adult world, just as you begin to suspect this might have been the case at school. Perhaps you don’t even realise.
Trapped. Are you trapped? Or are you going with the general flow of what you think life should be? Is this life, or merely what is expected of you from the day you were born? I bet you didn’t see it coming way back when you still had ambition…
So what’s next? You’re intricately ingrained into the rat race and where do you go from here? Much like a fun run, everyone gets a medal but there is only one winner. Do you eventually get used to it? Well, we are creatures of habit.
We’ll settle for plain sailing, no ups or downs of note because it’s easier that way. We’ll either be doing that which we need to or we’ll be trying to forget about it.
Soon enough you’ll die before your time, never getting to see any of that pension money you so prudently saved, wide-eyed and enthusiastic that one day you’ll retire and you’ll lick your lips at the prospect of maybe taking a cruise, or seeing the things you always wanted to.
You’ll begrudge your kids that money too, as they’ve followed the same path as you, and every setback to every goal they ever had comes as a disappointment to you. You never had the ‘ups’, that stroke of luck which raised your platform and enabled you to give your spawn the benefit of your experience because all you have had is all that you know, and they’ll spend your pension on a few days in the sun or down at B&Q on a mundane weekend away from the grind.