#10
Posted 07 April 2013 - 03:21 AM
Oh man, worst job? During my junior and senior years in high school I was in a collegiate program, so there really wasn't time, but as soon as I graduated, my folks were pretty much shoving me out the door to go find one. Mind you, I didn't have a car or a licence, so I was kinda desperate to get something held down because until I had the money to get those things on my own, my brother was going to have to bus me back and forth to work. Very first "job" I interviewed for and actually got was this shitty calling center in downtown Houston called "Public Safety Services". The place was a total fucking joke and still is. The idea is that they call people to solicit donations to fund-raise for local police fraternities, but it was all just a bullshit front; the calling center pockets practically all of the money.
You worked six days out of the week, six and a half hours a day with no breaks and you spent the entire time wedged between other people (no cubicles) holding onto a big early 90's-era phone receiver because the center was too cheap to bother buying headsets (the managers that worked there didn't handle the actual phone calls and often joked about how we would all have carpal tunnel). As a "representative" you didn't do any dialing; the calls were automatically placed, so you just sat there waiting for someone to pickup, spending those few precious seconds trying to figure out how to pronounce their last name.
There are two departments; there was their larger cold-calling department that just solicits people randomly, and then there was their "TAPS" department. I forget what TAPS was an acronym for, but it basically focused on calling people who already donated. The interviewer liked my voice and put me on TAPS the first few days I worked. You'd think that'd be easier because the people I was talking to already forked money over, but they were usually just really pissed off that we were calling them again (I had one guy tell me that he'd donated just the week prior to my call) and tended to get nasty and while I took offense personally, I totally understood why. After two days of being on TAPS and generating exactly zero revenue for the center, they busted me down to the main department, and it was there that I learned about their discriminatory wage policies. Before I started working there, the interviewer told me NOT to discuss my pay-rate (10$/hr), but when I got moved to the main floor, a black guy that was sitting next to me was complaining about how they hadn't given him a raise in nearly two years and that he was still making only 8 dollars an hour. I guess he read the incredulous look on my face, because he asked how much I was making and proceeded to audibly (and justifiably) freak the fuck out when I told him. He started asking other white people in the room and by and by it became obvious that every white person was getting started at 10 dollars an hour, whereas every black or Hispanic person was only getting 8.
The center told people that they interviewed that we had to make it through at least one week, otherwise we wouldn't get paid and since this was my first job and I was pretty naive, I didn't question it. I tried pretty hard to stick it out, but the next two days got even worse when all of the non-white people stopped showing up. Eventually the managers traced it back to me telling someone about my pay-rate and they tried to pin the whole thing on me. When confronted, I pretty much lied and told the manager that I simply told the black guy what the interviewers told me; that they started EVERYONE out at 10 dollars an hour (which, in itself wasn't a lie. They really did say that). They let me off the hook, but the next day I made it through the first two hours of the shift and then ducked out, figuring I'd just cut my losses and look for something that didn't suck phenomenal amounts of ass. I didn't see or hear from them till about six or seven months later, when they sent me a w-2 form in the mail, apparently wanting me to file income taxes for income I never actually received. That led to a really pleasant phone conversation.
EDIT - Holy hell, that was TL;DR.
This post has been edited by Emerica: 07 April 2013 - 05:52 AM
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