call centers and restaurants are the two industries i'm seeing doing most of the complaining about not being able to hire, and having worked a long time in both, let me tell you, i'm at risk for a schadenfreude overdose every time i open the bird app.

i took a call center job because i got tired of working factory jobs, and because i thought it would be easy street compared to throwing 55 gallon drums off a truck, but i think only one of these jobs caused long term damage to my health, and it wasn't the labor one.

you hear about restaurant jobs and bosses being horrific a lot of the time, but i've been out of the call center business for over a decade and reading acronyms like AHT still cause the acid in my stomach to go into overdrive

just the absolute worst combinations of brain-dead and vision-less leadership, tyrannical and unqualified management fiefdoms, completely meaningless measures of performance and utterly delusional criteria for successes

there are some upsides to these jobs — they sometimes pay a little better or are easier to get into without experience than most entry-level gigs, and they're more accommodating for folks with physical limitations than labor, but sweet jesus, you pay for it in other ways

and the call center industry *now* is *way worse* than when i worked in it. i have a client who has a few call center clients, and i strenuously refuse to work on any of those projects, they're all cursed and all you're doing is making the lives of the damned even worse

some of the smaller support providers are better now than tech support used to be from a working standpoint, but the billing/features/sales lines are as bad or worse than ever before

when i was regularly working in the industry, offshore call centers were at least a little less miserable, because while the idea that they were middle-class jobs there is bullshit, they were better-than-average jobs for young people and poor people with a few technical skills

to this day, i am extremely good at knowing what time it is, almost to the minute, because your job in a call center absolutely depends on being able to predict it, like some kind of superhero with a power no one wants

i will add a caveat, though — you, consumer, are a big part of why these jobs are terrible. you're not the only part, but you're a big driver. every time you complain about waiting on hold, an AHT demon gets another tine on his pitchfork.

you may think you're doing the rep a favor if you fill out your CSAT survey with care not to ding them but ding the company you're mad at, but i promise, you're not, none of these places care that much about those distinctions, it's usually a binary good/bad metric

the best thing you can do for your call center rep is fill out your CSAT survey with the enthusiasm of someone who was just gifted a puppy and a mansion to live in it with, and the second best thing you can do is delete it from your inbox unopened

anyway to cap this, i can't really say whether i think one or the other is worse, but for reasons i understand, i think restaurant conditions tend to get a lot more publicity than call center conditions, despite the latter being *at least* as awful as the worst restaurants can be

one other thing: anyone can work at the “cool” restaurant. there are no “cool” call centers. no one wants to know what your job is like there. no one has any respect for you doing it. it’s another thing that makes it different and miserable.

you don’t get friends who come by to say hello there. no one thinks you’re doing anything they want to know about. it’s all of the very worst parts of an office job with none of the perks.

you see a lot of really, really fucking dysfunctional and awful relationships in call centers because it’s a job that no one on the outside wants to relate to or hear about or sympathize with if they aren’t actually doing it.