November 2nd, 2006 by erisian

Written for the National Prostitution Magazine some people and i are starting. anyone who wants to join is welcome. not all topics are Whoredom related. we need all varieties of content

I have been climbing the ladder. Eventually I may reach the top and find out what it looks like to peer down on others with disgust and derision. On that day I hope to own a gun, one that will fit in my mouth.

For 10+ years now I have been slowly moving rung by rung up a metaphor. Starting with my first office job: Sears “Emergency Warranty assistance and repair”

What a thrill I had when I received this job. I was excited! I was going to be making more than minimum wage! $5.15 an hour was a hell of a lot of money for a high school kid who didn’t want to flip burgers. Minimum wage in the state of Utah was below $4.75 at the time.

My first day on the job started the downhill slide that is my whoredom/career. I walked toward the door to a sad, squat, single floor office building of the red brick variety. I was dressed in a nice button up short sleeve shirt and my best Levi’s, the ones you wear when a real impression needs to be made. I approached the building and butted out my cigarette. This was a “no smoking” facility and there were no ashtrays in sight… Fixing my hair in the reflective door, I entered the building and was asked for identification by rental security. 15 minutes later I was being walked through a bland building that was filled with various individuals with varying degrees of emotion bubbling out.

I was navigated into a small cell that was labeled “training”. Concrete walls on all four sides had inspirational message posters geared toward helping the reader reach their full potential. I was instantly uncomfortable here, and in an effort to ignore my building feeling of dread, I began to fiddle with all the old computer equipment contained in the room. All electronics in the room were once white plastic, but had slowly aged to an unpleasant mottled yellow. For the next week, I sat in that room for 5-6 hours. They taught us the info we needed to allow us a healthy and long career at Sears.

My job itself was fairly mindless. I was paid to show up everyday and sit in a cubicle. A telephone headset was screwed onto my head and I was plugged into the network. I felt like I was working for the Borg/phone company in the 1967 James Coburn movie “The President’s Analyst”. As Sears customers called the support center, it was my duty to help them. They were all consumers who had purchased a refrigerator/freezer/washer or what have you and opted at time of payment to get the “Extended Life Warranty”. Should they have some issue that caused them to require repair, we would schedule a time for a tech to drive to their home or business. In times of an emergency we would work with them to get someone out to their location in 24 hours or less. All of this was done whilst wearing uncomfortable shoes and dress clothes, because “looking professional makes you ACT professional”. I was to be one of the historical employees who proved the saying wrong.

Mindless…. Every day for the first week of my employment I would go home and be so utterly exhausted that I just wanted to go to sleep. Mental exhaustion is worse than physical exhaustion any day. I would smoke a J, eat some food, recoup for a bit, and then take off to go find some fun. Days like this really began to drag on.

Call centers of all forms are constantly trying to track your calls. They attempt to determine if you are working up to standards, how your calls compare to other peoples, whether you could use more responsibilities. After one phone call I remember getting fairly angry at the caller and smashing my hand down on the release button, letting the call go into the ether This was the beginning of my corporate rebellion. When I slammed the phone, it released the call, but did NOT set me up for another one.. Thinking I could milk the break, I let it sit there untouched and thanked the call center gods for their kindness. An hour later, I was still with out a call. And not one person had been alerted. I had a loophole! And it made me appear to be working. I fiddled with the phone for a while and determined a precise method for ending up in this buggy position. For a week straight I took only one call a day and then bumped myself into the hole. I came into work a week after this and found that my phone had been replaced. Curses.!

Well, I still had a job so they obviously felt that I had been working with a faulty phone and that my calls were just not registering. Boredom sets in with the return of the actual workday routine… I decided that I should attempt to put a little effort into my job and make it more challenging. I started to take phone calls in foreign accents.

It started out as something to get me through one day. I was talking to an angry individual and they could not understand what I was saying. I apologized and told them I was from another country and immediately pushed into the stereotypical Indian convenience store accent. The customer was more polite to me as I attempted to assist them. I WAS IMPRESSED! Soon rules formed around this. I could take calls in other accents provided I did it in such a manner that no one listening could determine that I was faking it. If I used a really bad fake French accent, it would need to be consistently really bad. This would prove to be more convincing to the people involved. Fake accents could only be used during overtime hours. This was due to the fact that overtime calls were not monitored because they were doing the company a favor of sorts.

After that first two days, the rules had already evolved. I could use accents during normal scheduled hours, but only on every tenth call. This would minimize the likelihood of getting caught. A day later it was every 5 calls.. This is where the cut off was. I would never go below the 5 call threshold. As the first accent week continued, I found I was running out of accents to use, so I started to combine them. Chinese w/East Indian, Russian w/Valley Girl. I was New York City. I was everyone from everywhere. Combining accents with verbal ticks or consonant replacement was also enjoyable. A Russian valley girl who pronounces her L’s as R’s was fantastic!

Another week begins. Every five calls… every five calls.. but that means I would be bored AND WORKING for four calls?! Well, I couldn’t break the rules. I would pick up the call and either immediately hang up or transfer them back into the departmental queue where people could help them. Every phone call became the 5th call. Problem solved!

A week or so later I found myself sitting in a quiet room with the call center management.
“HI HO! Thank you for calling Sears warranty support! You can call me Kermit. How can I assist you today?”.. The tape recorder played back my best muppet impression with surprising clarity. I was prompted with questions. “Did you not think you would be found out?”, “Don’t you like your job?”, “Why would you do something like this?”. All the questions they asked had a similar mental answer, “can I go now? I really want to smoke and go hang out with my girlfriend…”

They pulled out paperwork to have me sign and the tape cassette falls out of the manila folder and onto the floor. I tried my best to cover it with my foot so I can take it home as a medal of honor. They wouldn’t let me leave the office till they have located it.

Sucking on the teat of Sears was like drinking warm curdled milk. I wanted the fresh organic 46º milk that would give me strength and make me feel loved.. Like a good whore, I went back out on the street and tried to find someone else’s teat to suck on.

More to come.

Fnord Inc