Tag Archives: jobs i’ve had

Jobs I’ve had: wrap-up and outtakes

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

So, 13,000 words and 28 single-spaced at Times News Roman 12pt pages later, that’s every job I’ve had before my current job. Well, almost. There were a few that didn’t get their own posts:

Working for my mom’s office

Most everything there is to say about this experience I already wrote in my history of my time on the Internet post.

Internship with Kinetic Design

Same for this one.

Web developer for The Volunteer Channel, the University of Tennessee’s student television station

1) This wasn’t a “job” in the sense of getting paid, and 2) there isn’t a whole lot to say about it. I was in the communications school at UT, and The Volunteer Channel was looking for, um, volunteers to do things. I signed up, and it ended up they needed someone to make a website. So I did, and that’s about all there is to the story. The site you see there now is not the one I made, but the logo is the same as it was, and the content and basic structure of the site isn’t much different. They have some videos there, which they didn’t have when I was there.

News writer and columnist for The Daily Beacon, the University of Tennessee’s student newspaper

Like The Volunteer Channel, writing for The Daily Beacon wasn’t a paid job. Spring semester of my second senior year, I started out there and wrote two news stories which were not very good. Then I wrote a weekly column during my last summer in Knoxville and was on the “editorial board.”

We got to meet John Shumaker, who was president of the university at the time, after we wrote something critical of what he did. I don’t remember much from the meeting, but I remember thinking even then he must be a pretty insecure dude if he cares what a student newspaper says during the summer when no one is reading. Not long after I graduated, he was caught in a shitstorm with more charges than are worth recounting here and resigned.

Some of my columns were okay, some of them were awful. I made no effort to write about UT events, instead just choosing random national topics. I learned writing a column is hard, and you have to practice to get better at it. The first two or three I wrote, I sat around staring at my monitor for hours before I thought of a topic and got much of anything down.

My favorite column I wrote was about decriminalizing marijuana. A copy editor who also happened to be a stoner was very happy when it came across his desk and practically hugged me when I came in for an editorial board meeting.

If there are any jobs I forgot about, I’ll just tack them onto this post later rather than writing a whole new one.

Enough people have hopped on board the meme train since my last post that they’re going to get an unordered list instead of Oxford commas:

Jobs I’ve had: community organizer

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

While there is no shame in working at Best Buy or for a temp agency or as a seasonal driver helper for UPS, after a few years of jobs like that it did start to feel like I was piddlefarting around. Because I was.

Fortunately a blogger friend of mine knew of an opening for some part time work as a community organizer. It paid double what Best Buy was paying, so I could make the same money in half the time and spend the rest of the time looking for more permanent work.

I’m calling this “community organizer” because “project manager of a community planning project” is not a very catchy title, even though it’s a little more accurate. Really, both are vague and could mean pretty much anything. In my case, it meant I was an assistant to a consultant who had planned out a series of “visioning” meetings with citizens in an exurban Georgia county along with the Chamber of Commerce there.

My job was writing press releases, maintaining the website, helping set up community meetings, transcribing, giving input at planning meetings and on conference calls, and nagging people to do things when necessary. I didn’t have to nag much because the people in said exurban county were well-organized and always followed through with what they said they were going to do.

Visioning is a process where you get maybe 100 people in a room, break them into smaller groups, and ask them to answer a few open-ended questions as a group. They talked, scribbled furiously with markers on giant notepads for an hour or two, and then we took the pads back with us, transcribed them, and tried to make sense of them. In this case, we were trying to formulate a strategic plan for the county’s future, so we asked citizens questions about what they liked and disliked about their communities, and what they’d like to see in the future.

It’s a neat process to be involved in, very little-d democratic. The only real downside to it is it requires a lot of sustained energy spanning multiple future generations of leadership for a community to stick to one of these plans, as they don’t have the weight of law behind them. It works better in some places than it does in others. It will be a decade or more before we’ll find out if the work we did will pay off or not.

A lot of my Democratic friends will bristle when someone says “Chamber of Commerce.” My experience working with this group made me see what a disservice they’re doing themselves. The group I worked with were not free market zealots like Democrats seem to believe all Chambers of Commerce are, but rather goal-oriented people who are pro-business, but also interested in all other facets of community improvement. They didn’t much care how something got done — whether through public or private means — so long as it got done somehow.

It was also eye-opening to see significant demand for transit, walkable communities and other things that I think of as liberal, urban ideas that far outside Atlanta. There’s more demand out there for these things than our current leadership would have you believe.

Not too long after I started this job, Amber helped me find more part-time work with the company I still work for now. I worked two full days at each during the week, and split my time on Fridays. The offices were only a few blocks apart, so it was easy for me to walk to the second job after lunch.

This was a good period of time. Neither job ever felt much like work then, and I was rebuilding self esteem that had gone AWOL years earlier. I owe Amber and Joe thanks for helping me land these jobs and getting me into a better head space. So, thanks.

Eventually this job ended when the project ended, and I went to work full time for my current company. Since this is a jobs I had series, and not a jobs I have series, it will hopefully be a very long time before I have a chance to write about it.

I’m going to write one more entry with outtakes from the jobs and other things I did that didn’t get their own posts, and that will conclude this series.

See also: Amber’s time at the Baxter Street Bookstore

Jobs I’ve had: Geek Squad Agent

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

Of all the jobs I’ve had, Best Buy had by the far the most intensive interview process. I applied online, and eventually was called to come into the store for an in-person interview. They gave me one of those tests where they ask the same questions six or seven different ways to see if I gave different answers. I interviewed with the sales manager of the computer department twice, and the manager of the Geek Squad unit once.

While I wouldn’t want to make a career of working there, I’m glad I spent the better part of a year there. Like the company or not, it’s awe-inspiring how they break everything down to a science. Every day was chock full or miniature sociology and psychology experiments. They told you not just how to greet customers and what to say to certain responses, but also what people were often thinking as you spoke to them. Our store was experimenting with breaking people into one of four or five personality profiles. And they were right more often than not.

As a Geek Squad agent, there were two things I did most of the time: work the counter, or work the repair bay. At the counter, I entered service orders and tried to sell add-on software like anti-virus software or, better, to convince someone they needed an Agent to come out to their house to help set up a wireless network. In the repair bay, I fixed computers and answered the phones.

A lot of what we did was clean spyware and viruses off computers, upgraded RAM, and did hard drive back-ups. If someone’s computer was too infested with viruses to repair, we did a system restore (people were asked to bring their disks in when they brought their computers). Sometimes we replaced video cards if someone’s display port went out. If they had a laptop in need of a hardware repair, we usually sent it to our service center or occasionally shipped it to the manufacturer. It’s all the kind of stuff I’d been doing for friends and relatives for years prior to working there.

I wish I had a story about something really weird happening with a customer computer, but all I’ve got for you is one person’s tower came in with a cockroach infestation.

Like any other retail job, the unpleasant part was working Saturdays and days near holidays and explaining policies to customers when something went wrong. No, our service plan doesn’t cover you spilling orange juice on your laptop. No, yelling at me isn’t going to change that.

To answer some questions that are probably on your mind, yes, Best Buy has received negative attention on blogs and in the mainstream media for:

  • High pressure selling
  • Stocking items with model numbers that no one else carries so they won’t have to price match
  • Using a corporate intranet version of the website instead of the live web to price match
  • A Geek Squad agent installing a hidden camera in a customer’s shower

Among other things I’m sure I’ve missed. If there’s a problem, I believe it to be one of enforcement of policy in particular regions or stores, not one of bad policy or company-wide malfeasance. The sales manager in the computer department at my store did ask sales people to be more aggressive than I believe corporate would have liked, but he mostly did so within the rules. The rest of it? Didn’t see any of it in almost a year working there.

Thing is, you don’t have to cheat to get people to spend insane amounts of money. Most of the time, all you have to do is ask.

Best Buy actually makes little money on the computers they sell. Sometimes they aren’t more than a few dollars over breaking even. They make all their money on accessories and services.

When someone buys a computer, just ask them if they want anti-virus and anti-spyware installed. They say yes as often as they say no, and you just made the store $60 or $70 in pure profit even after paying employees and the software manufacturer.

While we’re in there, do you want us to clean all the demo software off? Sure! 10 minutes of someone’s time, $30 to the store.

Want a new printer and some paper? That’d be rad! Another $30 or $40.

USB cables for that printer? Cost the store a dollar, sell for $16.

I rang one person up for about $600 of extra services on top of his computer once, just by asking him if he wanted X service or Y service. That wasn’t anywhere near a store record either.

I liked my first manager more than my second manager.

Geek Squad is a delicate balance between a sales job and a service job. You have to sell people stuff, but you also have to try to maintain enough critical distance that you can make honest recommendations without trying to push services and expensive hardware on people who don’t need them. If you hard sell people, they stop trusting you and you lose sales later.

My first manager was more service-oriented, and the second more sales-oriented. The second guy also wrote me up once for something that was total bullshit just because he had to punish someone for it. And he cut people’s hours, which pissed us all off.

Aside from going to work for corporate, being an in-home installer was the most coveted of Geek Squad job duties. You don’t have to interact with as many customers, you don’t have to try as hard to sell, and you got to drive the Bug around all day (you’ve surely seen one of these on the road by now). Mostly you could just do your job without anybody much bothering you. Alas, I never got to do this.

The uniforms (white shirt, black tie, black pants, white socks, black dress shoes) would have been bad if I’d actually worn the cheap dress shoes they gave me, but I bought my own all-black tennis shoes instead. We weren’t supposed to do that, but nobody ever gave me any grief over it.

See also: Nikki writing about being unemployed.

Jobs I’ve had: UPS seasonal driver helper

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

I had hoped the temp agency would find me more mindless work, but it didn’t. So I spent a few months sending out resumés with no luck, and then took a job as a UPS seasonal driver helper as much to get out of the house as I did to make any money, since it didn’t pay much.

The job was simple: deliver packages to people’s doors to take some of the strain off the driver since there was a much higher volume of packages at this time of year. If there was anything remotely complicated about a package delivery, like needing to get a signature, the driver did it himself. It was the definition of mindless work. I never got to play with the DIAD, the magical electronic clipboard-looking device every driver carries that seems to keep UPS’ entire worldwide operation running.

Since I didn’t care if I got fired from this job, I blogged extensively about it, as it was happening.

My time was spent working with two drivers: a skinny, surly, cussing, chain-smoking redneck whose skin looked like beef jerky; and a socially awkward slob who frequently made inappropriate remarks. I mostly had fun working with the first guy, but not so much with the second guy.

In just a week or two working with the second guy, he managed to explode a fire extinguisher, get his truck stuck in a trench, and cost me and someone else a whole day of wages because he called the wrong person. The cab of his truck was full of apple cores and squalor, enough so that I felt compelled to make a diagram later:

2004 12 14 dash marked Jobs Ive had: UPS seasonal driver helper

But what beats all were some of the awkward remarks he made. He talked politics in a confrontational way, oblivious of how much tension it would have caused had I happened to disagree with his beliefs. That this guy voted for Kerry maybe should have made me reexamine my own beliefs. But here’s my favorite story he told me:

At some point we were talking about Asian women versus Brazilian women versus Italian women. God knows how I let that continue past one sentence. Anyway, he felt a need to defend the fact that he’s 45 years old and has never been married, which I didn’t know and hadn’t given a second thought about until that point. Even better, he said he’d been dating a girl for about a year and that “things got real intimate, real early.” Like I didn’t hear him the first time, he repeats, “real intimate.”

Customers were funny and weird.

One was a sexy senior citizen, which in retrospect is more awesome than weird to me, but I guess I was a little more prudish in some ways at the time. When she answered the door, she was wearing a penis amulet and broke out into song.

Another had an unhealthy addiction to QVC. No joke, every day I rode with the first driver we delivered a package from QVC to her.

But my favorite thing I did during that time was to snap a photo with my cell phone camera anytime someone had a steep driveway. Rich people with long, steep driveways were the bane of my existence during those weeks. I posted the photos to my blog under a series of posts called “Your Driveway Sucks.” They looked like this:

2004 12 02 driveway3 Jobs Ive had: UPS seasonal driver helper

Amber started reading my blog about this time and later told me she was intrigued, asking herself, “who is this guy who keeps posting photos of people’s driveways?”

See also: Amber’s time as an HTMLer for an Internet startup and as an office worker for the Humane Society.

Jobs I’ve had: temp

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

Truth is, the fallout from the newspaper job messed me up for a while. I was even more bitter and cynical than usual, which is saying something.

I had interviewed for a P.R. job with DeKalb County government after I’d been friendly with the guy who came on to run the operation near the end of my time at the newspaper. I almost landed the job too. It came down to me and one other person, and she ended up getting the job. She was someone I liked and respected and who was a better candidate on paper, so I couldn’t blame them.

But it was the last straw that made me want to get away from that world in a professional capacity for a while, if not forever. While I was regrouping and figuring out what I wanted my real next step to be, I had to find a job of some sort. Temp work was the logical thing to do.

I always imagined working for temp agencies as filling in for someone while they were on vacation for a few days or maybe a week, or going in as a buffer worker after someone was fired or quit; doing mindless office tasks like copying and faxing, something where there was no commitment or expectations whatsoever.

And it turned out to be pretty mindless and easy. I had to call dentists’ offices and find out if they had already installed the new version of the company’s software. If they had, I marked them off. If they hadn’t I scheduled an appointment for someone to walk them through the installation. Eventually, I also got to walk them through upgrading their software. That really was it.

As time went on, I did less scheduling and more walk-throughs. I could read blogs and write blog posts on my first blog all day while this went on, until they started blocking some sites through a proxy near the end of my time there. I had the routine down cold and could read and talk to customers at the same time.

My contract was for six months, but the job bled into about eight as contract work tends to do. They were hiring, and I interviewed for a full-time support position there, but my heart wasn’t in it. The interviewer asked me what my dreams were, and no shit, I told him my dream was to drink beer and play golf all day and get paid for it. The semantics bugged me I guess. Ask me what my goals are, sure. Even ask me what my hopes are. But my dreams? That’s a little lofty for this interview bub.

Obviously I was self-sabotaging because I didn’t really want to work there. The mature adult, yet still slightly passive-aggressive response might have been to answer by talking about goals and making a point of emphasizing the word GOALS.

Speaking of unprofessional things I did at this job, after they decided not to renew my contract, I wrote an email blast to the product team in pirate speak on my last day. The awesome thing about having a blog from that time is I printed the email I wrote there, with company and product names redacted:

TO: Everyone
SUBJECT: Ahoy!
CONTENT: Alas mateys…

Today, nine July in the Year of our Lorde 2004, ’tis my last voyage on the S.S. [PRODUCT NAME].

Good luck to everyone. If you need or want to reach me for any reason, send an email to [other email address]. I’ll be out of town next week, but will hit you back when I return.

I did meet some cool people at that job I wish I’d kept in touch with.

The week prior to my last week, I went out and got lit with the guy who’d been my supervisor. He was a fellow UT grad, did a stint in the Army, and had a lot of good stories. I think he might have been bullshitting a lot of the time, but I didn’t really care.

He knew some of the bartenders at Dave and Busters, so we got well drinks three-for-one that afternoon, slammed six each, and staggered into a strip club around 6:30 or 7. If you think strip clubs are weird places during peak hours, try wandering into one when it’s still daylight and you’re ripped out of your skull. I blew a lot of money that night, which might not have been the smartest thing for someone who knew he was about to be unemployed to do.

There was also a Tech grad I went and had beers with a few times and shot the breeze with at work all through the day.

Both were smart guys and fun to hang out with. One day for lunch we drove down from the suburbs to The Vortex in Little Five Points for lunch. Not a big deal now since I drive by there several times per week, but at the time I’d never spent any time in Little Five Points other than to drive through it by accident when looking for Manuels.

They talked about starting a business together, but I’m pretty sure this never happened.

Jobs I’ve had: newspaper reporter

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

“Hi, this is Russell Tanton. I’m a staff writer for the DeKalb Neighbor.”

“Oh, the one they throw on my lawn?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

Neighbor Newspapers is a chain of a couple of dozen suburban weekly papers published by Times-Journal, Inc., a company run by a kind-hearted, wise, personable, racially tolerant man named Otis Brumby.

I first interviewed with the Marietta Daily Journal, the flagship daily for Times-Journal. The editor didn’t think I was ready for that job based on my college newspaper experience, and he was right. He was about to send me out the door when he noticed I’d laid out my clips portfolio in Quark. He asked me about it and we kept talking, and he decided I should interview with the guys who managed the weekly papers.

I nailed that, then interviewed with an old money guy who was editor of the Northside Neighbor. He was a perfect fit there since the Northside Neighbor spent a lot of time covering old money. That might not sound flattering, but he was cool. He gave the okay to hire me to write for Northside.

While I wasn’t looking forward to writing stories about debutante balls, I was comfortable with the idea of working for him and was excited to have a foot in the door to the journalism industry.

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Jobs I’ve had: construction company gopher

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

Now we’re hitting post-college jobs. This was temporary work I took on a month or two after graduating from Tennessee while I was living with my parents and looking for a real job. The actual work I did as a gopher was unremarkable: sweeping, shoveling, going to pick stuff up at Lowes and other places that sold building materials to contractors.

It gets its own post primarily because I spent a lot of the time working inside the Country Club of the South, a gated community where many of Georgia’s richest people live.

I wouldn’t quite describe the houses as mansions the way you see mansions on Bells Ferry near the governor’s mansion, but they were big. Driving around the neighborhood felt like being thrown into the fourth world in Super Mario Brothers 3. It was totally normal to see Tom Glavine on his front lawn playing catch with (I assume) one of his kids, as we did a couple of times.

The houses were full of things people collected and didn’t use, and the people who owned them never seemed to be home.

One house had a workout room in the basement stocked like a miniature Bally’s. There was no smell of lingering sweat, and the lat machines may as well of had shrink wrap on them. That house also had at least six or seven plasma screen TVs hanging on the wall. They were probably plugged in, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if they hadn’t been, as some were mounted as impractical viewing angles.

Another house had a hand-carved pool table in the basement which looked like it easily could have cost $100,000. The felt showed no signs of wear. I had to help move that fucking thing, and it nearly killed three of us it was so heavy.

The funniest house to me had its own movie theater inside. The owner had an entire room full of unopened DVDs he collected. I don’t know if this is true or not, but a co-worker said they walked in to him jacking off to porn on the big screen one day.

There were a couple of co-workers who were interesting. The guy who came with me on runs to pick things up always had a good dirty joke. And there was an electrician who also did some blacksmithing in his spare time, crafting iron door handles and hinges for dungeons to accurate medieval specifications. I saw some of his work in the basement wine cellar of another house.

This job only lasted a couple of months before I was hired to write for a newspaper. That post may take me a while to put together, so bear with me.

If you’re looking for more narcissistic drivel like this, Nikki and Amber have new entries for your perusal.

Jobs I’ve had: web dude for a failed concert promotion company

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

This was another job I mentioned in my Internet history post. I wrote:

I also worked briefly for an ill-fated concert promotion company along with Furious D. I designed a couple of web sites, got drunk with some sketchy people, and got into some free concerts. There were two things I actually learned that were useful to me though, both having to do with clients we tried to get but didn’t land.

The first was when the manager of a famous recording artist called us about an estimate for web site development. I was busy with school work and took too long to get back to them, and by then they weren’t interested. So lesson one was a very basic principle of customer service that was later reiterated during my stint at Best Buy: even if you can’t help someone right away, acknowledge them and tell them you’ll help them soon.

The second was when the president of the company (one of the aforementioned sketchy characters) was pitching web development services to a band, and then without warning gave the floor up to me. We had vague ideas about what we wanted to sell — web sites, promotional video packages, and probably some other web-related services to go along with traditional concert promotion. What we didn’t have were package deals and price lists set up. So I learned that just telling someone “we can do anything you want us to do” doesn’t fly. They were coming to me because they have no clue what they want, so it’s my job to tell them and to let them argue with me if they think I’m wrong.

About the president of the company: he was a stocky dude with a bald head and a devil tattoo on his arm the artist had drawn to look somewhat like him. A variation of the tatoo ended up being the company logo. His speech was peppered with colorful, offensive phrases, like when he would observe that something was “cooler than cancer.”

I never trusted him, which turned out to be good judgment on my part. The most I ever put myself out there for the company was to purchase a scanner we needed with my credit card, and I kept that at my apartment (and later just kept it period).

He had a partnership with a pub in Knoxville I’m forgetting the name of, and most of the concerts the company promoted were staged there. Among the acts booked were 2 Live Crew and Sir Mix a Lot. 2 Live Crew was late to their show because they were getting high at a frat house down the road.

The biggest booking was a weekend-long festival somewhere in the Tennessee mountains with 20 or 30 bands. It actually was a pretty impressive effort on paper. I don’t know much about how it turned out since I didn’t go, but there were some pictures, so it wasn’t a total bust.

My other brush with celebrity when working for this company was when we happened to see Jamal Lewis at the Knoxville Hooters. The president chatted him up a bit, and they apparently knew each other. Considering Jamal’s troubles not too long afterward, this isn’t surprising.

There were a lot of deals supposedly in the works for me to do some development work, but ultimately I only made the company’s website and a website for the aforementioned festival. The company went under when the president skipped town after robbing someone’s car. He was rumored to have been part of other robberies, though I never received confirmation about this.

Update 4:59 p.m. – Furious D writes in:

He (/we, whatever) didn’t actually do the booking for the 2 Live Crew/Sir Mix-a-Lot shows. He just knew enough people to get in for free and “take some of the load off the management” (read: stand around and pretend to have something to do with it).

Haha, had me fooled. That actually makes it funnier to me.

See also: new entries by Jen, Sara and Garrett. And also a new player Nikki!

Jobs I’ve had: webmaster of an off-campus bookstore

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

In my “brief” history of my time on the Internet, I wrote about this job:

I got an actual job as webmaster of Rocky Top Books, an off-campus book store. The parent company Nebraska Books had store software, and someone was needed to do some basic skinning and to upload product photos.

The photos I took and uploaded were called out at a corporate meeting as examples of how to do them the right way, which secretly made me a little proud even though we all made a big show of talking about how much we hated the parent company. Little or none of the work I did is reflected on the current web site, but when I was in Knoxville last year I saw the delivery truck still has the decals I designed on it.

Anybody remember when “webmaster” was an actual job title?

When I first started school at Tennessee, there were two competing independent bookstores on Cumberland Avenue: Campus Bookstore and Rocky Top Books. And when I started my webmaster job at Rocky Top Books, it had recently been purchased by Nebraska Book Company, a corporation which owns about 270 college book stores now.

There was a crew of employees who had been working there since before it was purchased, and many of them weren’t happy with the change. Some of them thought the manager was sleazy. They called him The Snake behind his back.

Nebraska Book Company could have put anybody in that position and the employees would have hated him or her. He was definitely corporate and oblivious about some things, but he was an okay guy and was just trying to do a job. I liked most of them okay, but a lot of them seemed a petulant about the situation. It’s probably not a coincidence that the two people from there I still keep in touch with understood this.

More after the jump…

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Jobs I’ve had: tech support for Bellsouth DSL

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

I can’t remember now how I heard about this job working for a contractor that provided technical support for Bellsouth DSL lines. Maybe it was on online classified, maybe it was a job fair, don’t know. The important part was it paid $10 per hour, which was good money for a college student in Knoxville. The cost of living is very low there, so that’s like making $15 or $20 in a lot of places.

It was located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville. You probably are aware Oak Ridge is distinctive as having been part of the Manhattan Project and for being a leg on the original Internet. This inevitably led to a few uncomfortable jokes about our job making us sterile, but truthfully the McDonalds I ate for lunch a couple of times per week was more likely to do that.

Everyone had to go through a two-week (!) paid training before they could get on the phones with actual customers. It’s not that I think this was a bad idea, but the trainer was not very exciting to listen to. I think a one-week class would have been better, as the pace was really slow and there was a lot of repeated material.

The class was about half college-aged people and half people in their 30s and 40s for whom it was a real job. Not surprisingly, a few of us college-aged trainees got to be friendly and started making a bunch of smartass remarks. This attitude became contagious, and by the time the two weeks was over everyone was being kind of mean to the trainer (my bad if you’re reading this).

When we finally got on the phones, we all had to choose pseudonyms. Most people picked bland, forgettable names, which was the smart thing to do. One guy went with Justin Tyme. I picked Russell Crowe. Everyone thought that was hilarious at the time, but hearing “how’s Meg Ryan?” six or eight times per week turned out not to be so hilarious for me.

The process to answer 98 percent of the calls for level 1 tech support was heavily scripted and could be accomplished by pretty much anyone who could hear, read and speak. They were severe about making sure you stuck to their process. Even after a couple of months when I could do everything from memory, I still had to go through their questionnaires on screen so they could have a record that I looked at them as I went through the call.

Without warning, supervisors would listen in on calls and then summon me over to tell me what I did right or wrong. They were obsessed with keeping call times down, and I got scolded a few times about calls going long early on. However, it didn’t take long for us to figure out there was a quirk in the system: every time we hit the hold button, it reset the call time. After that, my call time was never an issue again because I could put someone on hold for a split second and they were never the wiser.

Whenever a call was over, you got a period of two minutes or so that was ostensibly to take notes about the call, but which was also a nice breather without having to speak with customers. It only took me 30 seconds or a minute to enter my notes after a call, so I usually got to have a minute to myself.

That minute is what I remember most vividly about the job. On busy days, the ringing phone was relentless, and my minute wouldn’t really be a break because I was full of dread knowing it would inevitably ring again. Most customers were okay, but the longer the waits got, the more likely it was they would be irate, which is precisely when you are out of the required patience to deal with them.

Like any other customer service job, another not fun part was explaining a policy to them that you secretly agreed with them was dumb. For example, at the time Bellsouth offered no support for people who plugged their modem into a router. To offer them support, we had to make them unplug the modem from the router and plug it into a single PC.

It also wasn’t fun having to apologize for products I knew were not very good. At that point Bellsouth had most of its DSL customers on Alcatel modems that only worked if you plugged them into the USB port on a PC and installed Bellsouth software on the computer. The software was buggy and caused a lot of problems.

The worst call I had there was a woman who barely spoke any English and was irate and refused to let me pass her call on to a native Spanish speaker. One of the rules was I couldn’t hang up on a customer unless they were cussing at me and they refused to stop after I asked them several times. I had to just wait for her to shout herself out.

It probably sounds like I’m mostly griping, and I am, but I liked the people I worked with. That made the job bearable. We had a lot of fun playing Unreal Tournament in the break room on the networked computers they had set up in there. And I’d stand around with them outside when they smoked on breaks and we’d snark about customers.

I worked there for about six or eight months before I found another job closer to campus.

See also: Sara’s fourth installment in her Jobs I’ve Had series.