Nurse the Hate: Hate the Call Center

I don’t know how much money American companies save by “outsourcing” telephone support jobs overseas, but it better be a shitload. Today I spoke to two different women from God Knows Where that couldn’t seem to understand the concept of my call, much less actually help me. Let’s face facts here… Most people that answer the phones to help you when you have an issue with your cable TV, cell phone, computer, etc are total fucking morons. They didn’t take these jobs because of the good pay, opportunity for advancement, and exciting interaction with the customer base. They took these jobs because they didn’t have any other decent paying option that didn’t include having a stranger’s sexual organs in their mouth and/or anus. Whenever you wonder what happened to that stoner kid in your history class, chances are he’s pecking away on a computer trying to figure out why your NFL Sunday Ticket HD is out.

Still, these people need jobs. If these companies don’t hire that stoner kid, or the woman that decided to have three kids with three men by age 24, who is? Nobody, that’s who. They fall right into our social support net. Then they have to get covered by government aid programs that we all pay for out of our always increasing taxes. The other option is to have them try to scrape by as corporate serfs at a Fast Food Hellhole, which is impossible. Now crime goes up, and there is an entire layer of society watching Judge Judy and smoking weed all day waiting for their government check. Meanwhile common American citizens find their taxes go up, because the corporation has already set up some shifty tax dodge so they can max out profits.

For example, today I called Sirius Radio to ask why I don’t get some channel they were running a promo for on air. I first spoke to some woman that really struggled with my questions. She just didn’t have the language skills to answer “Why don’t I get a channel I just heard on a promo?”. I think she said “Cobra bit eye. No channel. Bye-bye!” I then asked to be transferred to speak to someone else, hoping I would get lucky and stumble onto someone that could converse in English. She hung up on me. So Sirius probably saved $8 on that call that left me pissed off.

Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin gets paid a salary of $1.5 million, and a whopping $8.4 million dollar bonus in 2010 from a public company that is by all accounts struggling. I don’t think that guy gives a fuck about my experience with the Third World people he has installed as his first line of contact with the company. He just wants to push the accounting spreadsheets in any way possible to give him the most money each quarter and end of year.

And that is what is wrong with the United States of America.

The CEO guys that get the payoffs write their own rules on how they get paid. How sweet is that deal? If that means they gut the lower and middle class along the way, so what? They don’t give a fuck. While these naïve losers in the Occupy Wall Street movement need to wake up and get in the game, they do have a point about the problem. There is little incentive to run a company dedicated to long term success. The Old Boys Club of CEO’s in their class ties have created a game where you make a company look good on paper for a year, rake in a monster “bonus”, and then leave someone else to pick up the pieces. “Oh, you all lost your jobs when I cut all the expenses to get myself a $13 million dollar bonus? Now the company is in The Shitter? Sorry, but I have to drive around in my mink rocket car now.”

While it may not be time to pull people out of corner offices and into the guillotine, it may not be a bad idea to sharpen up some blades and light a few torches. Let some folks know that we are serious. I’m not even asking for that much. Frankly, I’ll relax if I can just get someone to answer a help line that speaks my language as their primary form of communication. Americans need jobs, and since we don’t really produce anything anymore except Culture, we better find something for the bottom of the totem pole to do besides fuck and smoke weed.