Glorified Version of A Stranger

My very first job was for a then popular pager company. I don’t know if they’re still a company or still alive but several years ago, when the cellular phone age in the Philippines was about to take off, I was hired by them for an Outbound Telemarketing job. Of course back in the day, the call centers weren’t known as call centers yet. They were just jobs. And so I started to work there. There were no contracts, no tax deductions, no health benefits. Just report for work, make your sales, then at the end of the day, pack up and go home. Calls were only for about 5 hours, excluding lunch breaks and short breaks. You either had sales or not. If you didn’t have sales, the managers would threaten to fire you the next day if you didn’t improve. At the end of the day, all the employees would meet, and the Ex-Pats would handout several thousand to the day’s top players. Tax Free. That’s about 6,000 pesos per night if you were the top player.

If you’re an asshole with no EQ at all and just don’t have the time to at least read my story, just shout “FUCKING TAKE ME THERE ALREADY!”, or you can read the rest of the piece.

Three months later, I quit.

You’d think I was crazy to give up such a high paying job. I thought the job was worthless for a number of reasons:
1. No stability. No Contracts, no benefits, no nothing.
2. Since there were no tax deductions, I’d say it was a FBN (Fly By Night) operation.

So after that I was employed by another small company called HelloCorp Philippines, under James Coronel. Yeah, that Smokey Mountain guy. From telemarketing, I was kicked ahead to customer service. Chat Support. We serviced the biggest ISP in the United States, answered questions about their accounts, placed orders for various products, and defended the scams that the company had. Yeah. Scams. Believe it or not, I lasted a whole year there. Here are the reasons:
1. Friends.
2. IT Administrators back then were stupid. We got away with installing all kinds of shit in their computers, played network games, online games, etc.
3. We had access to chat. not just MSN Messenger, but Yahoo Messenger, and the mIRC to a name a few popular clients.
4. No blocked websites. We had tons of porn, movies and mp3.
5. No limited user access in Windows. This rocks. If you don’t know why, then go back under that rock that you’ve been living in.
6. My boss had big tits, and was stupid.

So after a year of goofing around and learning about Windows, the Internet, Porn, etc., I quit again. Why? Because I heard news that the account was going to be dissolved soon. Once again, the stability that I was looking for in a company was crumbling.

I applied at one of the biggest and most established Call Centers at that time and was offered a job after about a couple of weeks of processing. Sykes Asia. Finally, A big multinational company with established policies, standards, and a reputation, not to mention a fat paycheck.

I was back on the phones, but this time it was Technical Support for MSN. It was difficult at first, but because of the great training I received, it became a cinch in a couple of months. So what happens to most call center agents happened to me. I learned the ins and outs of my job. I was either late or absent most of the time, I reported for work drunk, I’d sleep on the job, porn, etc. I was one of the best techs on the floor, but also had the worst attendance. I was ready for a promotion, but my attendance hindered me. After 15 months, I quit. Because I was about to get fired. I didn’t want to tarnish my already tarnished 201 file so I applied in another multinational company.

We were one of the pioneer batches, and they almost doubled my paycheck at Sykes. Yes, West Contact Services seemed really promising to me. The day I quit Sykes was the day I started training at West.

This time it was different. I didn’t want to take calls anymore. I was tired of being an agent. I didn’t want to wear a headset, and I felt that I was ready to become a manager. It took me six whole months before I got the position. Now how did I manage that? Show me the fucking tips!!!

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