Now look, I've had to deal with my share of people on the phones who would today be classified as "Karens." We didn't have this term back in the day. We simply called them bitches. But as exemplified by the current nomenclature and the myriad of memes, these entitled fucks are now worse than ever.
Today, before I took even my first call, I backed out of the program I'd been in "training" for and said "nope."
As I've alluded to in previous posts, I'm currently trying out a stint of "employment" with a company called LiveOps.
Connected to their recruitment site about a month ago via a link on a YouTube "Work From Home" vlogger video. (The modern day Don Lapre "One Tiny Ad" equivalent?) Accepted immediately, no call in, no interview, just pay $25 for a background check...non-refundable. Gulp.
Despite that "pay before you're hired" scamminess, the company is indeed legit. The onboarding is unpaid, including mandatory Zoom training for as long as the program you sign up for requires it, along with the independently conducted eLearning PowerPoints with very boring automated-voice narration. The live "trainers" in the Zoom sessions weren't much better than the robo-voices either. In fact they were pretty useless.
The gig as a whole is strictly 1099 independent contractor "work" (more on why that's in quotes later) and you get to "invoice" your time spent on live calls, but only the time you are actually talking with a customer on the phone. No pay for "breaks" or downtime or after call work. Are you paid if you need to research something or reach out to a team lead (ARA) and place the customer on hold? Don't know. I asked during one training session and was quickly deflected to ask the client results team about that. So my guess is NO.
All throughout your certification for your program, attendees are consistently reminded through careful wordplay that LiveOps classifies you as a "business" as opposed to an employee. Words like "work" are substituted by "business opportunity" and even "training" is avoided, calling it certification instead. The legalese emailed to you at the start all conforms to this verbiage as well, clearly leaving things like taxes, benefits and "time off" in each business owner's individual hands. This to me is all well and good. I have no problem with it. Yet I do cringe a little at the over-emphasis about this all, especially when I see other trainees falling for the whole "entrepreneur" aspect and start thinking this company is really out there helping stimulate the small business community. They're not. They, like all other call centers, exist to fill seats, in this case virtual seats, with warm bodies and obsequious voices. Get kicked from an "opportunity" due to failing metrics or other such rules? They'd do it in a heartbeat, and don't even think of applying for unemployment...you weren't "fired," since you never "worked" for them to begin with.
So, like the Hulu stint I tried back in '20, a lot of misgivings lie with the "support" staff and the call center "experience." Back then, young cocky thugs were in power, here, the LiveOps team are mainly a bunch of Karens themselves...I mean, just look at them in the pic below. And yes, that Mary Shanks had the super-shrill vocal fry voice to match that very Karen face.
But the ultimate decision to back out of the program I'm in has to do mainly with, well, the program I'm in. It's Nordstrom. That's right, the super-high-end, hoity-toity department store that I wouldn't be caught dead shopping in. Again, what was I thinking? I needed only log into Slack chat once we got access towards the end of certification, of course, since they knew it would be like pulling back the curtain and revealing the true nature of the calls. OMG, rep after rep frantically reaching out to the supervisors, er, ARAs. (They're not your supervisors; you don't "work" for them. But they will certainly call you out if you do anything wrong.) "Customer is screaming for manager." "Customer is upset about a scuff on their Monolo Blahniks." "Customer wants a price adjustment to match a Gucci purse priced $300 less elsewhere, and they want it NOW!" ETC, ETC, ETC!
So, nope, I'm not gonna do it. Not worth 31 cents a minute. I'm on three blood pressure meds as it is.