A Brief Moment For Our Sponsors

So I haven't really talked about me in a long time.

Let's talk.

I'm a phone monkey. Which is to say I work in a call center.

I hate being a phone monkey.

Please, help me raise enough money to stop being a phone monkey.

Take a look at this link.

Thank you.

Down Again (Call Center Blues)

Not much to say.

Ah ... so the call center I work for is a contractor for many major corporations worldwide, part of why I'm not actually allowed/supposed to mention names here, I guess. They're a good company, though, as far as I can tell.

Well recently I mentioned I lost my old posting. I don't think I mentioned the fact that they transferred me to a brand new contract with a first-time client, but they did. And ... then that client pulled out due to the fact that they were paying our department per-person per-hour, while almost no call volume came our way whatsoever.

It was easy and really pretty awesome, and well ... other than fighting off boredom (I'm good at fighting off boredom), 'no call volume' combines with 'unlimited internet access' to become 'absolutely amazing job posting.'

The free lunches end by the end of October. I'll have to transfer to yet another contract (my third this year, jebas), and ... that's stressful.

I think it's partly because I kind of had become settled. Attached, maybe. Other than the Ren Faire which I signed up for as early as humanly possible, I only missed like one day total ever. I bought a plant for my desk, got a bit settled, all of that. I was expecting to be with the contract until it ended or something better came about (something I'd like to do more than something that pays better; not living alone means I don't have to worry so much about my paycheck), I just ... wasn't expecting the contract to be gone so quickly.

They had nothing but compliments for the company as a whole, it just doesn't make business sense to keep a contract of that nature going when there's no call volume at all.

In practical terms, that means I get to go to another contract and finish training just in time for the Christmas ramp-up (because basically everything ramps up for Christmas, it's America, land of the consumerists.) Not only will it be a new contract with a new desk surrounded by new people and new work obligations with a new company line to toe (and probably different Internet restrictions, I think we're not allowed to use Google) - even assuming I get the offer to transfer - but it will be a veritable deluge of calls and probably mandatory overtime anyway.

Oh, and I created a kind of prototype map based on another map that I enjoy in Minecraft. So that was fun too.

A Sense of Darkness

Hell, why not, this is why people keep journals, right?

Tonight is Saturday night. I leave work the same as I always do, a little later than most everyone else, but not terribly so. There's a woman waiting for a ride, so I briefly chat with her. I've been given a kind of honorary ... thing which grants me better parking spaces than most of my coworkers, so I look for the allotted parking space before I leave.

As I reach my car, I am nearly overwhelmed with the sense that I should not take the Interstate. As I mentioned, I tend to listen to my instincts, even if they make no sense. The weather isn't bad; there's no reason to take the other route, but I feel like I should. Pulling out, I turn right, and am torn between two options. For no discernable reason, I turn right, taking the slightly longer path out of the lot, past a stand of trees. Everything looks like the stray limbs of some eldritch horror, but if something was watching me, I could not say. Night driving takes a toll on me, not because it is so dark, but because of the brief flashes of intense light.

There is something off. I am on edge the entire trip home.

When I cross the train tracks, near to my work, I am confronted with a red light, and there is a man in the center of it all, directing traffic. This is unusual. To my right, along the side of the road, there is a vehicle with lights flashing, though I can see no cause for this disruption. It does not hinder me terribly.

It is hard not to see the Tall Man in the many stands of trees, though truly I doubt He was there.

He is after all so busy elsewhere, is He not?

When I enter town proper, there are more flashing lights, and a siren. As I pull up to a red light, a fire truck speeds through, going from right to left across my field of vision.

There is not much else to report; my sense of dread seems to have been unfounded.

Of course, when I finally arrived home, there was a wild, swinging party going on at my neighbor's house, and no parking to be found the entire block. This was unusual only in that their gathering made any noise at all; in months prior, it had been deathly silent in the house located at the epicenter of the lost parking, and only the leaving visitors were any indication of where to lay blame. Tonight I had to use a back alley, and come through the back fence. Every shape seemed ominous until identified. Even the large tree was vaguely threatening.

I have no tolerance for gatherings, even at the best of times. I am not invited to such parties because I have no interest in such parties. I must confess I do not like people very much, and I have grown very tired of having to solve their problems over the course of my employment. Except that I am still in need of revenue, I cannot say that I will be displeased to become free from my tether.

Every day I am forced to think because another person refuses to, I find the façade cracks a little bit more, and I care a little bit less.

I am just so tired of people.

Note to Self

Do Not Taunt Cthulhu.

So, I mentioned a while back that I was going to purchase ( X ) contacts, and also that I work at a call center, right?

So, Wednesday I forked over the $170 to buy the contacts as a kind of joke/taunt, because apparently, I don't like life, or living, or continuing to not be dead/insane (perhaps one, then the other?)

Right, so I should also mention here that all calls at my call center are recorded. All of 'em.

So, finally, I set Slendy as my background pic on a whim, since the last person who had my computer was a massive XBox fanboy, specifically Halo, which I don't like enough to want to see every day. Still question the wisdom of that decision every time my screen saver goes batshit fucking insane while I'm out on a lunch break.

So, I come back from lunch on Friday, March 4, and I get pulled pretty much immediately to do a meeting.

When I get back to my desk, I find I've been logged out, so I log back in and take a call. About two minutes in, there's massive audio distortions in the phone line, followed by a disconnect.

This continues for the rest of the day, and for select computers even into today, Saturday, March 5.

Shortly after all this started?

The satelite radio sees fit to play: "I always feel like SOMEBODY'S WATCHIN' MEEEEEEE!" just for emphasis.

All I could manage was a kind of horrified giggle.

Now, I'm willing to chalk this up to the phone people being there and fucking around.

But still.

Creepy ass coincidences freaked me out.

Still no Slender Man SIGHTINGS in Iowa though~

Sensory Overload

So, in an attempt to be somewhat more cheerful than Friday's uh ... BLACK ABYSS of DESPAIR, I decided I'd elaborate on some of the topics mentioned there, especially the sensory thing, which you might have guessed by the title.

Because describing my perception of the world has always been incredibly cheerful before. Yep.

So, TL;DR: I seem to have reasonably acute senses when measured against other people. Kind of. The end.

For anecdotal proof, read on:

I took some psychology classes in college and high school as electives, because the subject interests me. I can't really recall if this happened in college or high school, but one of my psychology teachers set up sensory tests as part of the chapter on the senses. The one I remember vividly involved the sense of taste: the teacher presented four jugs of water and insisted only one of them had a minimal amount of sugar. This was untrue; all four jugs had a different amount of sugar in them. All four of the glasses of water I was presented with tasted different.

So yeah. That's nice.

The hearing ... hm. I've got a couple of stories on that. When I was very young, they put us through a few hearing tests, one of which was off in a kind of in a quiet room. Essentially, the idea was to raise your hand when you heard a beep, depending on which ear you heard it in. Well, I raised my hand when a phone three rooms away rang, despite the noise-canceling headphones I was wearing at the time. This sense hasn't really diminished much at all over time, probably because I don't really think "bleeding ears" is an acceptable decibel level for music to be played at. On a practical level, this is a huge advantage in my current - and previous - lines of work. At the haunted house, it allowed me to filter through the din of all the ambient noise and music to hear where a group of customers was, pretty much throughout the house. At a call center, it helps when a customer is softspoken and can't seem to figure out which part of the phone to speak into.

Sight is ... interesting. As I might have already mentioned, I've got significant visual disturbances that no eye doctor has been able to attribute to actual physical damage. It's probably some kind of disruption in the nervous system. Or alternatively, y'know, crazy person. I also wear corrective lenses as I am nearsighted. That said, up close especially, my eyesight is fairly acute. In addition, I have remarkable night vision, which is both a positive and a negative. On the positive side, we have all the normal benefits of good night vision, plus things like this post, which was written with the aid of a very dim, green, LED bulb placed across the room in otherwise complete darkness. With the aid of a glow stick, I was actually able to write at almost my normal font size, and read with no difficulty. On the negative side, we have a certain amount of photosensitivity: bright lights are uncomfortable, especially oncoming headlights on the road, for example, but also a bright, sunny day can, if I'm not prepared for it, lead to a bright, shiny headache.

Smell is one of the less useful senses for me, and I seem to be more easily overwhelmed by powerful odors than most people. However, since most of the people I know are smokers due to the whole "call center" thing, it's not really like I've got any kind of baseline to work against If possible, I completely avoid the perfume and detergent aisles of any store; they make me lightheaded and dizzy. Smell is also one of the easiest senses to ignore in day-to-day life, and one of the harder senses to measure against any other person's regardless.

Touch is ... well, pain is part of the sense of touch, right?

I can't say I feel much of anything acutely, other than pain. And cold. And pain as a result of intense cold. Painkillers don't really work effectively for anybody in my family, least of all me. I also tend to ignore my body unless it's actually in pain, and even then, if I distract my mind, I don't even often notice there's anything to feel until it's excruciating. I do know I have a completely numb patch on my right leg that sometimes hurts when touched. I suspect nerve damage from an early-life bee sting to be the culprit: I had a bad allergic reaction.

I like to run my hands along walls as I walk.
It helps ground me in reality.

I don't think I'm really outside the parameters of normal human functioning, as far as sensory data goes. I just know that some things, like the gentle clicking whir and beeping of my computer's normal operation (distinct from the fan), is audible and comforting, while the high, shrill noise of a supposedly "off" TV sets my teeth on edge, and most people seem oblivious to these things.

So there. Probably the most boring thing I'll ever write.

Hooray.

You probably should've quit reading this at the TL;DR.

It rained today. We're under a flood watch.
It was so cold the rain became a centimeter-thick sheet of ice on my car.
It hurt so much to scrape it off with my bare hands.

The Little Things

It's just a job, I am reminding myself.

I have signed more forms today than I care to count, having gone from thoroughly reading my confidentiality agreement to just sort of skimming the code of conduct - I think I can figure out the bullet points, most of which being "we are an outsourcer, and I do not represent us or our clientele." Incidentally, I do only speak for myself, not for any company I happen to be affiliated with.

Forgive my vagueness, I'd rather not speak directly on this topic.

It's a call center job, with all that is implied. But I feel good about it, already finding myself little reasons to be motivated to come back to work, no matter how difficult it is to rotate my sleep cycle so completely. Less than two weeks ago, I was going to sleep at 8AM after cooking breakfast for Mom. This morning, I woke up, grumbling, at 7:23 AM and cooked breakfast for us both (oatmeal with peanut butter for her, oatmeal studded with raisins, dates, walnuts, and chocolate chips for me).

I am, frankly, exhausted.

Hello, Mountain Dew. I have missed your flavor, but more importantly, the sensation of blood flowing through my caffeine stream was becoming uncomfortably tiresome.

It is just a job, I am reminding myself, but a job of any sort means I can afford to live as a person. I am seeing a single-serving pizza in the vending machine and I find myself almost giddy to think I could buy that for lunch. We may, as I understand it, be paid for a single day's work. That amuses me somehow, given the pay schedule, as seems common, is bi-weekly. It doesn't seem like much, but if I were to be paid my single day's wage on Monday, it would make the next two weeks so much more bearable. I may have misheard or misunderstood, unfortunately, I found myself struggling not to doze off.

The workplace seems oriented towards quiet, professional fun. My last job did little to retain employees. This place is filled with little morale-boosts, so much so that I don't have to seek them out on my own. The people are also friendly and professional, which makes them easier to tolerate. I am told and reassured that I will not have to worry about back-to-back calls. I am not afraid that I will be overwhelmed.

The XKCD Tech Support flow chart was posted to the wall, and made me smile.

I feel like I may fit in.