The Floor

A couple of years ago I sped through a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. It was for an introductory class in Social Work, which I hardly ever attended, but which was headed by a very sociable and very intelligent Dr. Elbow. This was at Texas Tech. In this book I learned of the hardship that most working people have to endure to make ends meet. I wrote a poorly-worded essay codifying my reactions to it, mistakenly called a treatise, and turned it in. I passed the course. The impacts of the philosophies learned therein I am now beginning to experience.

Summer has been busy, full of events, afterevents. Ryan finally came down the weekend of the 17th, and we spent three glorious days together on South Padre Island–actually, in reality, it wasn’t so much glorious as it was painful: I fell down on the sharp rocks at the Jetties and cut myself, the ensuing 7 1/2 mile walk up to the beach was also painful on my legs and bowels, and was done on Father’s Day, no less. But more than anything, we had a great time. I had almost forgotten what Ryan looked and felt like. When he stepped out of the truck I had rode in all those months ago back in Lubbock, I hardly recognized him. He was taller, darker, much more muscular: I couldn’t believe that he had come back and I saw him in front of me. We stayed at a yellowed excuse for a “gay-friendly” hotel, which shall remain nameless, and consummated what had been a whole year of tears and anticipation within each other’s arms. I took plenty of pictures, and have posted them online, for all to see.

However my wonderful little vacation, for all its briefnesses, was cut short by work, and that’s where that little statement about working comes in, for now I have had to endure three months of hardship and long hours at the hands of a corporate slave-driver and the mainly white, affluent overseers that run it. I applied for a position at a meager little call center here in town, whose clientele is Bank of America. That faceless leviathan hired me to be one of its fraud associates, and since June 5 I have dealt with nothing but complaint and frustration, from customer and persona within alike, endlessly complaining of either phantom charges or simply but very angrily refusing to conduct themselves like civilized humanity, or otherwise throwing temper-tantrums because the bank has stopped the card due to some minor inconsistency with the credit account.

Needless to say, even now I’m beginning to wonder if it’s possible to be happy with this career. I am faced with two different realities: if for some reason I should leave this job, I would have to find some other means of work, and certainly that would jeapordize my chances on paying off the new computer I finally treated myself to, or anything like financial freedom, which I’m trying to establish.

I will say for my own part that I got this job because 1) it was easy to get and 2) I did it so that the two most important people in my life, Mom and Ryan, wouldn’t worry about me. Ryan was happy that I got a job, and started “feeling better” about my situation, but to be quite honest I’m miserable. The worst thing about this job is by far the people we deal with. They are horrible. The men are easy to deal with, because you have to talk to them on a straight level (never mind about one or two assholes who don’t have time to deal with the situation at hand), the older customers are frail and somewhat leary about giving over their information (which we have to ask for). The kids one can easily relate to, but by far the most horrible aspect is being confronted by a woman of about 30-60 years old, mid-menopause selectively, who may or may not have children but most certainly is either married, engaged, seperated or divorced but still feels a sense of entitlement and rage over the fact that you, from your seat 3000 miles away, decided to block her card. These medusae-in-SUVs will either sic their equally irate husband on you, or subject you to an intense debate over who you really are, whom you represent, and how you got their number. Most of them are professional or semi-professional, and won’t make any compromises from here to All Saints’ if they have to. They also will whine, complain, grumble, curse, or demand to speak to a supervisor if they don’t get what they want when they want it.

One such example occured one greasy evening when an associate from Customer Service very hurriedly brought on a woman who was irate that her interest rate had been increased due to a late payment on her part, and when she was told about travel arrangements, she became uncontrollable. She was sent to me for a resolution. I asked for her credit card number, so that I might pull up her account (any other way is even more invasive). She said, “I won’t give you my account number. I should not have to deal with this. I shouldn’t have to tell you where I’m going. That’s something you should know already, when “you all” (as if we’re some kind of all-seeing eye or something) see my account.” I said to her that this was a part of the protection package that she signed up for. She said she had no recollection of such an offer. This customer also had a fairly short fuse–I had, moments before, seen another agent take the same call with this same Harpy, who proceeded to berate the customer, calling her ethnic slurs based on the nuances of her accent, and saying she had “an attitude problem”, which was some sort of veiled comment, as I assumed it to be, concerning her race. I attempted to calm her down, but by this time it was already a shouting match. She hung up, called in again, and this time was dealt with accordingly by my supervisor, who, because she would not cooperate, willingly placed a hold denying access to the funds available on the card until she could call in again and civilly proceed with the business she needed to have attended to.

Another time our systems went down for maintenance. A woman called in and said to me, without even saying hello–how’s that for treatment?–”I want you to remove the hold from this card and let me pass with this purchase. I remained as calm as possible. I said to her, “I can’t do that right now: my systems are down.” She said, “What? Well do something about it. I’m right here in front of the counter of the store and I’m so sick and tired of getting blocked.” Just then the service I use for checking the accounts went up again. I looked at her account. She had been primarily blocked because of the fact that she had traveled out of the service area. “Why should I have to tell you (yes, insignificant, inhuman little me, who has no feelings, who loves no one, who is but a lifeless automaton who reported for work that day) where I’ve been?” After some time explaining our position she consented, I removed the hold, let her on her way, but not after suffering some tension caused of this woman’s way of speaking to me. I think the stipulation that most ethnicities work in situations like these only compel me to believe that slavery or forced servitude really isn’t dead, it’s just been cleaned up and forced to wear a company logo, and instead of referring itself to slavery it’s more appropriately called “outsourcing” and “customer satisfaction”. At what cost though? To have someone boot you in the face and say “you mean nothing to me, because I’m rich and well-established and this better not happen again”, to have angry untidy businessmen rail on at you because their precious time spent at titty bars and cushy business meetings with their coevals has been disrupted by a tiered watch on their account? Now that I have seen the dirty face of American society, smeared in greed and self-satisfaction, and a rage brimming just under a very calm and resonant exterior, I am confident more than ever that we are a frivolous nation. I mean, men are dying for this in Iraq. Nuns are being beaten to death in Sudan; children starving in India, dead men floating in the River Yangtze, to say nothing of the political prisoners suffering ling chi on the cliffs above, and all we here at home care about is what we can buy? I hope humanity isn’t this depraved. Please, someone let me know that there’s more to life with these people than just their salaries.

So much to talk about, so little to say: I’m so unhappy, but I’m so well-paid.