Days at The Phone Company

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Mes Deux Cents posed a question about her phone bill on her blog and it reminded me of the days when I worked for the phone company. Did anyone out there work for a phone company???

Did anyone work at 411? The speed at which we were expected to respond was insane. But if we didn't do it, we were 'called in' by the supervisor for a 'talk'.

(Funny. Now when I tell my husband I just want to have a "talk" with him, he shivers thinking that all his sins will come back to haunt him and that he will feel two inches tall when its all over. I should take this past experience at 411 to go easy on him! lol)

And all those prison calls. Ugh! These lonely prisoners would call hoping for some outside contact. I guess 411 was free for them. My typical question was, "so what are you in for?" The answers would freak me and i'd find an excuse to 'accidently' hang up.

As time went on, I really wanted to do good at the job and could not afford to fuss with every boy who wanted "the pizza place by my granma's" with no address and no name, save his 'granma's' name.

Thus, if some caller called in to know what time it was, I'd say, "thank you for calling and here's the number for time..." Off they went into the machine to receive their number.
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Eventually, I moved onto customer service. That was a whole new ball game. There I was expected to solve customer problems, transfer them to the right place if needs be, and /or sell products and services. I was a pretty good sales person, if I do say so myself.

But the environment was slowly turning me off. The amount of rogue pay phone companies who would charge such exhorbitant prices for collect calls reeked havoc on peoples' bills. The amounts of 1-800 numbers that then transfered you to a 1-900 number also did a number on peoples bills. There were so many cut-throat companies out there.

The saddest part was running a credit check on folks who wanted caller ID, voice mail, two new phones, etc etc etc when I could see they won't be paying their bills in any near future -but they wanted to have what everyone else had.

Anyways, it was definitely an interesting, fast pace industry.

Fun days...