If You're Reading This, I Hope I'm Dead

An Inconvenient Murder

Tuesday

If you're reading this, I hope I'm dead.

I figure the only other option is that I'm in prison. Between the two, I'm rooting for dead. Preferably after a long, uneventful life.

I probably shouldn't even be putting this into writing, but tonight has been the worst night of my life and I feel like I'm about to go crazy, so I gotta do something. Maybe writing it all down will help keep me from cracking up in front of other people, so I can avoid that whole 'prison' option I mentioned.

I don't even know if anybody will ever read this, much less who that person could be, so I guess I better start from the beginning. There's no telling what you could have heard about me or what I did.

Let me explain what's going on here. I'm going to tell it exactly like it was, no sugar coating. If anybody tells the story different, screw them. They weren't there.

About 3 months ago, I started working at a new job. Nothing all that special. A cubical farm on the 18th floor of a building downtown. I had been a low level supervisor at another company, selling flood insurance in the midwest. Once I finished my online MBA, I figured I should look around and I ended up getting into a management internship program at the new place.

Basically the same job, but with a bit more potential for getting promoted. And instead of flood insurance, I oversee teams that sell medical supplies to doctors offices over the phone.

It's not as different as you might think. My job is to get my team to sell as many of our company products as possible each day. Whether it's insurance policies or medical widgets doesn't actually matter all that much.

These jobs are both the kind which no child dreams about having when they grow up. It's just where you end up because you're looking for the best paycheck after putting in your time at school. In exchange, you just have to let a corporation crush your soul a little more each day as you come to grips with the fact that you're most likely to spend your life as a cog in a machine instead of whatever it was you wanted to do as a kid.

If you have a bad boss, it goes from being a little soul crushing to a situation which makes it hard to get up in the morning.

On the other hand, if you have a good boss and/or co-workers who you actually like, you can ignore the mundane mediocrity of it all and just try to find enough enjoyment to make it all worthwhile from one day to the next, from one weekend to the next.

On any given day, I just have to make sure that my team is performing well enough so that I might grab the occasional promotion or raise. So I try to keep them focused on the metrics — don't let your calls go on too long, otherwise you can't sell more widgets on other phone calls — keep your tone friendly and professional in case the quality control team is listening in on you — did you try to close the sale at least 3 times before getting off the call? Same crap everybody else at every other call center in America is telling their teams.

The only way being a management intern is different from being a supervisor is that it gives me a bit more upward mobility to get into a director position, or maybe even an executive role down the road. As anybody who has ever worked in a call center can tell you, the main goal is to have a job where you never actually have to take a phone call.

My day-to-day looks pretty much identical to a supe, though. I go to all the supe meetings, I do the same stuff with my team that they all do with their team, and worst of all, I have to take supervisor calls. You know when you get so pissed that you ask to speak to a supervisor? Yeah, I take those. They're the worst. People yelling for me to do something that I can't do. So while it seems like I have a better job than the phone jockeys in my section, I'm not so sure. I have to do loads of middle management grunt work and then take their worst calls on top of it.