I work too much?

So today I get into work and what do I see in my inbox? Email wanting an explanation of the 88 hours I sumitted on my timecard and why it was there was overtime. In fact, there were multiple requests les less than a hour's span by the time I got through my 3 day weekend backlog of email.

Now I'm not exactly sure why it was called “overtime” as it was two weeks at 44 hours each, which isn't enough to qualify for the time and one half of "overtime". OK, my scheduled shift is 4 days at 10 hours each day (10.5 if you count the unpaid lunch), so maybe that's what my boss's boss was referring to.

So I say how yes, my shift does end at midnight but I am supposed to stay until the last agent finishes their last call and is logged out. Sometimes that is at 00:15 and sometimes it is 00:45, but usually it is by 00:30. So, an extra half an hour per day times 8 days is an extra 4 hours in two weeks. Because of that, on average I clock in a base amount of 84 hours every two weeks. Occasionally less if call volume has been light for a few weeks.

On top of that, given the nature of my job and how I have to be easily accessible to whomever, I have been told multiple times by my boss and my boss's boss that if it is too busy I am not supposed to go for lunch. Nor can I go for lunch or break unless I can get some other centre to remotely watch mine while I am gone. That is the basis of why why my position is the only one who is allowed to have food & drink on the production floor. Perk for having to eat while on duty.

So the last two weeks were busy, new software and watching Kelowna while my counterpart there has been on vacation, and I was not able to take a lunch break any day. So, again 30 minutes per lunch is an extra 4 hours in a two week period. An that is what made it 88 hours. While this is not always the case, nor has 88 hours been unheard of. Except for sick days (a whopping 3 total) My clocked hours for the past year and a half have consistently been between 82 and 88 hours each pay period and nobody has said anything until now. Indeed, there have even been a few 90 hour pay periods with actual real 1.5 time base wage overtime thanks to an agent being on a two hour long call that started 15 minutes before the end of my shift to which nobody said boo.

“Just because it's been happening doesn't make it right” replies my boss's boss, less than ten minutes after my explanation. “I would like it to stop immediately.”

So I reply that “sure, I can trim my hours to exactly 40 per week, but that means I can no longer stick around after midnight for the last agents to finish up their calls. In fact, I cannot guarantee that the queue will even be drained by midnight for me to announce last call to the agents before I clock out,” so could he please let me know how he wants me to do things from now on? After all, he was the one who told me that I had to stay as long as the last agent to logout and to not take lunch when it was too busy.

That was at 13:18 in my boss's boss's timezone, almost six hours ago. So I'm wondering — why no reply in less than 10 minutes this time?

Well, I can hardly believe it, but it's been 6 and one half months now since I started worked for Marusa Marketing/TeleperformanceUSA here in Cambridge.

In my last post about this I had just finished the firast day of learning lab which the two weeks after the training in which you have to get used to actually taking calls from customers but not expected to perform to production expectations (call length, number of sales, etc...). At that point I was pretty much in a "grit my teeth and bear it" mode simply because I needed a job and this was it.

But on the last day of learning lab, a Friday, I heard that a position in Mission Control (more on that later) had opened up. I filled out an internal application for that, emailed a soft copy of my resumé to the training manager as soon as I got home that night, came in on Saturday to specifically drop a hardcopy. On Monday, what was to have been my first shift on the production floor, I came in about 3 hours early, all dressed up with a tie, to try and get myself an interview for the position. The idea was to show that if I would do this much to try and get and interview then just think of what I will do if I get the job.

Shannon, the Mission Control person on shift right then, told the Branch manager about me and about an hour or two later she came into the cafeteria where I was sitting and said "My shift is done soon and when I leave we won't have a Mission Control for this evening. Kim [the centre manager at the time] said to show you what to do and let you be M.C. for the evening." So for 15 minutes Shannon tried to show me what I was supposed to do for the evening and then she left. Later they told me that the problems that night were some of the worst they had had since the centre opened, and by the time of my telephone interview later that evening to corporate head quarters Salt Lake City, Utah, I was feeling very overwhelmed and much like a chicken with its head cut of.

But I must have acquitted myself well because Chad, the person in charge of hiring me, told me that the interview was just a formality since I had proven I could do the job even after getting thrown to the wolves. I ended up working 55 hours that week, coming in early so that I would be there at the same time that Shannon was (her shift ended about 2 hours before min began) so she could show me what I was supposed to be doing. But I was glad — I was off the phones!

About three weeks earlier, the evening M.C. had come into my training class to fix some computer problem — so originally I had thought that Mission Control was the IT department. Ironically, I had said to him "I want your job". :-)

But it's not IT, not really. Mission Control's area of responsibility is basically making sure that the agents on the phones can continue to take calls smoothly and use the various software tools for that and for accessing the customers' accounts. To do that you need to know some systems administration stuff but there is an actual IT person who takes care of the LAN. Mission Control is also the liasion between the local centre and Sprint's über-Mission Control in Kansas City and the other TeleperformanceUSA centres running SprintPCS traffic. This is so Sprint can send out real-time directives to the centres and because problems which affect one centre can often end up affecting all centres.

All in all, even though the new position wasn't quite what I thought it was when I handed in that internal job bid on the last day of learning lab, it is something that I like far more than I would have felt about being on the phones. I am glad I have it.

If you get an email from an address like this FirstLast@invitation.sms.ac, don't even bother opening it. It is spam-scam crap.

It looked shady to me the first time I got one and as I have been getting more and more (and always from people on my MSN contact list) I decided to look into it. On one web page about it I found the following:

"Once you put your mobile number in to agree to send free SMS', they will deduct $3.00 from your mobile phone account for every 3 messages you receive through them. They then send you an sms every day containing advertising so that you are automatically billed for $3.00 every 3 days! For receiving adverts!"

This spam-scam has even been mentioned at ripoffreport.com. Read than you'll be suprised at how unethical sms.ac seems to be.

Also, some person by name of "Sean" has left what appears to be the exact same comment (cut & pasted?) in the followup threads of multiple blogs saying basically "Oh, if you'd just read the terms properly..." as well as insulting people who complain about sms.ac's spam-scam crap.

Not only that, but sms.ac has sent cease and desist letters to bloogers who had posted entries warning people about the spam-scam. Check the list of links below to see what others say about sms.ac.

• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five

Whatever you do, do not sign up with sms.ac!

Well, Bill Gates might have finally done it — said something to surpass his "640kB should be enough for anyone" bit. In an article on C|Net news, Gates said:

In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.

In response Ben Goodger, one of Firefox's developers has this to say:

Bring It On

As business savvy as Gates is, he's never been very visionary — as that 640kB line shows — and neither has Microsoft been so. Virtually everything they supposedly pioneered they copied from somebody else. What Gates and Microsoft did do well was utilize their economic leverage gained from being chosen by IBM to provide the operating system for the original IBM PC - the first widely popular home computer.

But Microsoft has never been about what the consumers want — or at least only insofar as it will get them some market share so they can force down the consumer's throat what Microsft things should be like. The 800lb gorilla of the software world but unfortunately not even half a smart as a chimp.

Gates's response to the mention of security and Internet Explorer is to bring up autoupdate and how with that you don't have to think any more. We've all known it for a while, but with that Microsft has finally revealed that they aren't about Where do you want to go today? but really We'll tell you what to think today.

Truly — our only hope is open source.

On August 16th I started a new job with Marusa Marketing Inc, a subsidary of TelePerformance USA, providing inbound call support for an American cell-phone service provider. After four weeks of in-class training tonight was the first night of actually taking calls.

And I survived.

These next two weeks are called learning lab where we're to get used to taking calls and ramp up to production expecteations.

Obviously I can't can't give too many details (confidential customer data and all that), so suffice it to say it wasn't as bad as I expected. I knew how to do most of what I wanted to do, though I did have to ask a number of questions but the only real problem I had was something that even my supervisor could not fix, so I don't feel too badly about that.

Part of the job is up-selling, or, in internal corporate lingo: MAXimizing. It's where I say to the caller something like "I notice you've got this snazzy phone would you like to get the Internet package - I can give that to you free for the first bit to try it out." In the one hand we're told that we're not supposed to pressure the customer but on the otherhand we're told to try and overcome their objections. I've never worked in sales and I'm strill trying to wrap my brain around this dichotomy.

The production expectation is a MAXimize offer rate of 85% (i.e. making an up-sell offer 8 or 9 times out of ten) and a success rate on MAXimizing of once per hour or ~8 times per shift or about 1 success every 10 calls. The first part, merely making the offers, that I can handle even though I kept forgetting to do so until after ther customer had hung up. The actual success rate is something that has me anxious because of the previously mentioned dichotomy. If I'm expected to have minimum number of successful MAXimizes every day, to me that says that some pressure is used. Because how else do you overcome customer objections? And if it is supposed to be no pressure then how can I guarantee that I will get this minimum number of successful MAXimizes? We're told to think of it as customer education, but to me changing the name doesn't change the reality.

Like I said, I survived to today. Things weren't as bad as I had feared but neither can I say this was a good day. I can only work on remembering to make offers more often, pray that I will get used to doing this and hope that making enough offers will result in the minimum of successes simply through volume.

Yippee! I have had more or my excess verbiage printed in The Record and once again it was on the subject of so homosexual rights (this is getting to be a habit for me). So, for your reading pleasure I have included here both my letter to the editor an dthe original which provoked my response. Enjoy or disagree strenuously — your choice.

First, the original...

The sense in which the nearly unanimous history of human culture has viewed homosexual behaviour as unnatural is independent of statistical considerations, whether anthropological or zoological.

As The Record anticipates in its June 11 editorial, the naturalness or otherwise of human sexual behaviour has always and everywhere been tied to the great good of conceiving and rearing children. "Ah," muses our editor, "but 'most people do not believe that the sole purpose of... intercourse is procreation.' "

True enough, but procreation is a purpose, and furthermore, it is a vitally important purpose for the nurture and survival of civilization itself. Hence the nearly universal care taken by civilizations to protect and foster the fragile institution of marriage.

Clearly, not "every single act" of sexual intercourse can or even should be procreative. But the more relevant question is whether it is acceptable for every sexual act of a person to be, intentionally and with full knowledge, non-procreative. In the human race, sexuality and civilization are bound together because sexuality is the means by which civilization exists and continues its existence into succeeding generations.

It is a unique characteristic of our species that our young remain dependent for many years upon their parents for both physical and psychological development. Where the enjoyment and pleasure of sexuality is separated from the care and nurture of children, society loses its ability to transmit itself through time. Thus, whatever else sex may be about, and it is about many things, it must irreducibly be about children.

This is why the expression of homosexual desires, which undoubtedly existed with as much statistical regularity in other times and places as in our own, has never been given the sanction and blessing of society.

Philip Toman
Waterloo

...and next my repsonse

Philip Toman, in his June 18 letter to the editor, Our Survival's At Stake, has got it all wrong on sexuality and homosexuality.

Toman first says that not every act of sexuality should be about procreation, but he later says that sexuality must irreducibly be about children.

Well, which is it? Human sexuality is obviously not only about procreation. If it were, women would only be interested in sex when they were ovulating. At other times of the month they would be completely uninterested.

At the end of his letter, Toman suggests that we shouldn't sanction homosexuality because it was not done in the past.

Using that logic we should revoke women's right to vote because they never had it in the past.

What about interracial marriages? Shall we go back to the days of Ira Johnson and Isabel Jones being harassed by the Ku Klux Klan, right here in Ontario?

Just because something was done a certain way in the past does not automatically mean that way is the better way. What is important in the present is that we do what is fair.

Cory Albrecht
Kitchener

I recently rediscovered the Internet Oracle, a most wonderful source of wisdom (assuming the Oracle does not ZOT! you for asking a dumb question). Since I survived my first year as a youth group sponsor at my church, I decided to ask the Oracle how I should continue on for next year. Here is my question an dthe Oracle's reply:

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

> Oh wise Oracle, greatest of that delphic clan, I beg of the to answer 
> my question.
> 
> This past year I became one of the adult sponsors for the  youth group 
> at my church. Now that I have gotten the teenagers to like me, what 
> would the best way to twist their little minds to the Dark Side without 
> their parents realizing what is going on? (P.S. This needs to be done 
> on the cheap since it's a small church and we don't have the biggest 
> budget for youth activities.)
> 
> I await with supplication your gnostic revelations on my teen-control 
> strategy.
> --
> Cory C. Albrecht
> http://cory.doesntexist.com/
> Advertising (n): the science of arresting the human intelligence for 
> long enough to get money from it.
>  -- Stephen Leacock.
> 
> 
> 

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} 
} In the future, if you're going to ask advice for how to corrupt young
} minds, I recommend you don't sign your name on the bottom... Mr.
} Leacock.
} 
} I'd say America's already got their bases covered -- teachers can
} already "screen" children for possible mental problems with the help
} of an Texan ex-governor, even diagnose their supposed conditions; it
} gets them started on drugs right away.  Any goody-two-shoes you can report
} as a "possible Columbine risk" to the Pinkerton Agency or Department
} of Homeland Security.
} 
} But I understand you want to expand your base of operations to the
} world, and there is also something /genuinely/ American about a
} do-it-yourself and elbow-grease attitude.  Bravo for not resorting to
} the government to twist young minds.
} 
} Perhaps the most famous corrupter of young student's minds was Socrates,
} whose doctrine of doubt and critical thinking roused a whole city into
} a lynch mob -- well, a hemlock mob, he was an old man after all -- and
} distorted young men's minds for generations if not centuries after him.
} 
} Another example of how critical thinking can twist one's spirit is in
} the Jesuit Order: it's said that the regimen of analytical thinking that
} Jesuit priests have to go learn will either render their faith
} invulnerable, or destroy their faith utterly.  
} 
} I suggest you follow the example of history and teach these children to
} think for themselves, to scrutinize authority, and to pause for thought
} before obeying people who claim to be their betters.
} 
} You owe the Oracle some Jonestown soda-pop, or Davidian BBQ sauce.
}