Ah, the advantage of being bipolar
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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As a two decade veteran of call centers I have had this happen to me.
You worked a call centre for twenty godforsaken years? What are you? Are you a golem?
Autistic. But close enough. I sold monthly shareware subscriptions on CDs, Highlander TV show video sets and trenchcoats, animal videos, long distance, gay men's clothing, bedding sets, golf clubs, did tech support from the days of the Nokia through birth of the BlackBerry, iPhone, Android etc, saw the death of the Windows phones and even spent time at a defense contractor. I'm one of the most overqualified Helpdesk/CS/TS call center people ever.
And you still have to follow the script or you'll be written up.
Funny thing about that. One of my jobs was with the absolutely most rigid follow the script places to have ever existed. The radio ratings. Not only could you never not follow the script verbatim but between calls you could read nothing but the handbook. Countless people must have read this thing cover to cover over the years. But, apparently, not one person had ever understood what they were reading or proof read it. I found 21 errors. And in one of those errors was a little bit of text that explicitly stated to never read the script verbatim.
In most centers the follow the script thing is for newbies. Then you don't meet the KPI numbers and they threaten you. Then people get desperate and stop following the script. If they get results then no one cares about the script anymore. The top performers never follow the script.
And as a general rule the absolute top performer not only doesn't follow the script but is a compulsive liar. But they get results and the returns are justified by the sales.
Except at the radio ratings place. Follow the script or die. Even if the handbook has one tiny section that says don't follow the script.
This app depends the type of call center. You are very focused on sales call centers, which I have been a part of. But tech call or just customer service call centers are much more abundant. I have been a top performer metric wise in all 3. I was never a liar in the sales centers I worked in, I just provided facts backed up and let them handle themselves and worked for places that products weren't shady. In the 2 centers I worked that had shadyish products, I achieved top performer quickly, but quit as I didn't believe or care about the product. I'm the other centers I've been in yes, tier 1 were absolutely required to follow a script. These were usually people that had 0 clue about what they were doing, so a script was needed. Beyond that you had to hit basics, but at the higher tier 3 or beyond there was no scripting, just fix the issues.
All that cellphone stuff and the defense contractor were all service/tech/helpdesk.
Much less script based. Maybe you get a script for day one of some launch but otherwise you are on your own in most competent operations once you are out of training and shadowing.
But in sales the script is god until you break free and hit those KPI.
Twenty years... Ghastly and chilling. I spent just a short stint in online and phone sales at a motorcycle parts manufacturer, ten years ago. I got calls back then that I'm still annoyed about.
I feel certain that the precious store of good will towards humanity I ever had would now be deep in the red had I stayed. Not that boat insurance has been great for my mental health, but at least I get to hear fisherman's tales without the bother of buying them beer. I turn the inherent risk of crabbing into box wine, and if it involves calling dumbass hospital billers sometimes, so be it.
I left the building each day and left it behind me. One time my roommate worked at the same call center. I was so good about leaving work behind that I forgot to tell her about a bomb threat we had had 2 months before that wasn't on her shift.
Goddamn. I wish I was either more autistic or less, I just mildly suffer all the time.
"You go to war with the autism you have, not the autism you want." -- Not Donald Rumsfeld
🫡
There was a study on judges and parole hearings, and early in their shift they were much more likely to grant parole, and the closer it got to lunch time, the less likely they would grant parole.
After lunch, they were again much more likely to grand parole, but as the day wears on they are more and more strict.
Consider this an anecdote I am not going to track down the study to prove the great debate or anything I'm tired
That's been debunked. Or rather, it's never been replicated.
I bet you could also see that theory in action by plotting how hostile a lammy users comments are over the span of a day haha
I have a very feminine voice, and my customer service voice is even higher. In person though I look very masculine. So I get people complaining that the lady they talked to on the phone didn't know as much as I do all the time. I am the lady on the phone.
I'd call them out every single time. I worked in food service/customer service (yay I can totally clean the kitchen, take orders, deliver orders, work the front desk and phones, process payments, fix mixups and upset customers, order necessary kitchen supplies/ingredients, and be the only one there in the evening for when it gets robbed, noooo problem!) and honey, they didn't pay me even a fraction of what I needed to give a fuck. It was in a very affluent city in the states and I swear, the people on the poor side were much better decent individuals vs the absolute shitstains that expected everything on a goddamn silver platter, 5 minutes ago, every time.
It gets me all hot and bothered thinking about watching them stumble over themselves as they try to backtrack the words coming from their mouth.
Hilarious and also sad because it's true. I was privileged to attend a private school for a bit and the grocery store across the street had to ban the students. I also worked 2 jobs at the school so I was able to talk to a lot of the various workers there and got talking to the cafeteria manager.
He told me that the theft at the cafeteria was insane and they had cameras and could identify who was stealing. Overwhelming it was the students from the richest most wealthy families.
Some of us got there through scholarships, some of them got there through money.
Customers are always pissed the first time you speak with them. When I have to call them I do a quick first call and let them know its immediately being worked on, ask them if theres any other information that might be helpful and Ill get back to them when I know something, they are ALWAYS better to deal with on the second call.
I do this because I can always get off the first call with "Respectfully, I'm not customer service. I'm the guy who fixes the problems and the longer I'm on this call is time I'm not fixing your problem. Now I need to go and I'll call you as soon as I have a resolution"
People just want to be taken seriously.
People just want to be taken seriously.
Had this experience yesterday. I called in to get an update and the first guy was a dry jerkoff who would cut me off in a condescending tone. The second guy said virtually the same thing as the first guy, but let me speak a bit and ask a couple of questions, and that made everything 100x better.
In their defence its also a lot easier for me because I'm not in a call center, my calls arent recorded and I dont have scripts or churn times to adhere to. Customer service in a call center must absolutely be someones definition of hell.
I've point blank said to customers things like "Look, I appreciate that you're upset. Please believe me that I am upset too, because I have to go ask that idiot why he did what he did, document the conversation and I guarantee you the answer wont be a clever one" and "This is definitely our fuckup, not that I should use language like that with customers but 'mistake' just doesnt cut it"
The typical customer service is 45 mins ++ of waiting on the line, to be greeted by an agent with a heavy Indian accent that will go through the script before having any chances to have a shot at maybe fixing your issue.
20+ years in various customer facing roles has shown me that customers rarely know what they're talking about. And they are not capable of reading either. The size of any sign is inversely proportional to their ability to even notice it exists.
Hello my account is locked out.
*Checks the account, last login was 45 days ago
Oh I see here that your last login was quite a while ago so your account has probably been disabled due to inactivity you should have received some emails about that.
Oh, I don't read emails you should have messaged me on teams.
*Bangs head on desk
It's an automated system, we don't know your account is going to get locked out. There are 5,000 people at this company, no one's going to take the time to explicitly contact you. Read your damn emails.
Yeah, but when you DO know the system is totally fucked.
Calling customer service that have no cmie what they're taking about either, pushing you through a script. One fun time my internet connection was broken and I called the provider. They walked me through all the windows settings to check if I had set up things correctly. I did run Linux, but hat set up Windows for other people so frequently that I knew how each dialog looked and how it'd respond to the failure, so I just lied. FINALLY in the end of the call that guy scheduled a reboot of my port on the provider's DSLAM which made things work again...
(And no, not all customer service is like this. I also got amazing support of people who know what they are talking about, but they cost more for the companies than just outsourcing to the cheapest generic call center.)
The level 1 agents are always useless.
I don't know a single call centre where the level 2 agents don't constantly complain about the utter incompetence of the level 1 agents, who appear to have never even used a mouse before.
They escalate tickets such as "the users screen is upside down", and "callers operating system has changed to papyrus needs to be changed back". Things that could have been fixed by both the first line service agent, and the caller, if either of them had bothered to do a 4 second Google search.
I always assume anything written big, is also repeated in the smaller print, making the big writing safe to ignore, and therefore invisible. It works well about 0 times out of 10.
I’ve been accused by multiple customers of lying to them about how to access our bathrooms. I have no idea what their lives are like that they assume strangers would just do that to them for no reason.
Couldn’t possibly be a problem with accessing the bathrooms then.
Sure it is. We used to have crimped laundromat coins and if you put it in backwards, it wouldn’t work. This was baffling to people.
You’ve already made a significantly healthier assumption than that strangers seeing you in need want to lie to you.
I say “used to,” because we switched to a combination you enter on the door handle and they still can’t figure it out. Now they tell me there aren’t any buttons on the door handle.
Recently, I've had everything I've said be completely ignored by the person taking my call. After calling back I eventually reached someone who did listen to me and was able to take action based on what I said. Sometimes, we do know what we're talking about.
Inside of you there are two wolves. Yesterday and Today.
I had that happen when I was on call once. Some guy called me at like 4am having internet problems with his laptop and I asked him like the basic troubleshooting questions and he got pissed an hung up (he had woken me up so I might have sounded bitchy but I was trying to help). Then he called back at like 11am still having problems and I got him up and running and he was like "wow thanks! the guy I talked to this morning was an asshole."
Self improvement was successful.
they took their meds.
So yesterday, they just phoned it in.
1st-day performance vs 2nd-day performance. 💪
When I worked at a spanish electric company callcenter, I had a client that called and after to discuss their energy plan and he just started in an excruciatingly fast paced rant about Pedro Sanchez while on my mind I was like "bruh I'm not even from Spain", after that and helping him with his inquiry, he called me "too professional for this company", again I was on my mind "thanks you but you ruined my median call time".
Didn't lasted that long in that callcenter, but that was one of the most bizarre interactions I had.
Yeah this is accurate to dealing with customers
Life as tech support be like
Yeah I was also a piece of worthless shit today. Thinking about changing that today. Maybe tomorrow.