It's been awhile since I wrote on here but after almost 8 years of working in a call center I think it's time I write my review.
In order for me to properly paint a picture of what it's like I first need to talk to you about the game of Basketball. Anyone living on the planet earth even if you hate sports understands basketball at least to a degree. You know if you put the ball in the hole you score points, you score more points than the other guy, you win. The people who follow basketball knows there is a lot to basketball, and stats is a huge part of that. If any of you have ever played basketball on a team be it a summer league, or for your school you understand you have a coach. This coach will constantly tell you what you can do to be a better player. Back when I was playing basketball for my school in Riley Kansas, I was averaging about 10 points a game and about 17 rebounds. This was pretty good for 7th grade. You know what my coaches told me to do to get better? Just keep practicing, I was on the right path. In professional basketball you have players that used to play such as Shaquille O'Neal and I am sure you have heard of this guy. What do you know about him? I would bet the first two things that come to mind is he used to break back boards and he sucked at free throws. The guy shot 52.7% from the free throw line over the course of his career. Then you got one of his old teammates Kobe Bryant who shot 83.7% from the free throw line over the course of his career. Then we can talk about points per game differences between the two. Kobe Bryant average 25.0 points per game and Shaquille O'Neal averaged 23.7. The two are very similar when it comes to points per game, and had Shaq actually made 83.7% of his free throws he would have probably averaged higher than Kobe in points per game. What do you think the coaches had Shaq working on every practice? I bet it was probably free throws. Over the course of his like 10+ years playing, it never got any better. So this is where I start talking about call centers.
Call centers are very much like basketball, literally to the point to where your direct managers are called coaches. Your coaches will find every little thing wrong with your calls and then attempt to help you get better at this piece of the puzzle. Because just like basketball, call centers have stats. Some call centers force you to read off a script other call centers tell you they do not have scripts and then during training hand you what they call a "call flow" which when you read it, it sounds like a script. This call flow is not meant to be your bible, it is a guideline... okay that sounds easy enough. The problem is you get surveys from customers, and when they give you a low survey this immediately sends a coach into panic mode thinking you did something wrong. Their job at this point of course is to find everything you did wrong, and then talk to you about it. Here is the problem I see with that mentality... so you take every call almost exactly the same, typically say similar things on every call, usually you get good surveys then you get that bad one. So your coaches need you to change your entire call because you're not taking your call properly. So the 98 other scores I got saying this exact same stuff and get a perfect score meant nothing because the 2 times I said these things and they gave me a bad score, that's all that matters. So by all means you need to work on x-y-z because you didn't do them on this call, but you also didn't do them in the 98 other calls but those were acceptable because you got good scores. But this is the problem, this is what caused these low scores, and until you fix it, you will continue to get low scores. So Shaq, what I need you to do is practice free throws every day because even though you're ultimately scoring the same amount of points as Kobe every game this is your area of opportunity. Fine, that makes sense right? So Shaq starts practicing free throws, all day long every day, as much as he can. What happens? His free throw percentage stays the same. So is this Shaq's fault? Is it the balls fault for not wanting to go to its home? Is this the coaches fault for improper coaching? Who knows? We don't have a time stone like Dr. Strange and can't redo everything 400 million times to find the end game. Basically working at a call center, you get kicked in the teeth by the customer when they give you a bad score because this affects your monthly bonus and then you get kicked in the teeth again by your manager because they want to make sure that you get it right.
I fully understand that consistency is key, and this is the case in basketball too. I remember there were times playing on the courts outside the school where I would find my sweet spot and hit 15+ 3 point shots in a row without breaking a sweat. Move my feet an inch and I missed the next shot. And you know if my coach was standing there he would have said, I didn't flick my wrist enough, I didn't give the ball enough spin, I gave the ball too much spin, I flicked my wrist too hard. But he said nothing about the 15+ shots in a row I just made before that one miss. As a person there has always been one thing I lack when working at a call center and that is empathy. I try to mask or hit it as a check list so my coaches can listen to my call and say "cool he said something", but the reality is... I have no empathy that you dropped your phone in the toilet. Stop taking your phone to the bathroom. I have no empathy that your kids changed your settings or dropped your phone and broke it. Learn to be parents and tell your kids to leave your phone alone. I have 3 kids, you know how many times they have used my phone? Maybe a dozen times, and that was usually just to watch a movie or something during a road trip or because we had to wait an hour at a restaraunt. So this has been a struggle for me, and for the most part... every single month I am either the top tech on my team in stats, or one of the top techs in the entire building in stats. Then you got other pieces of a call, like recapping why they called in and making sure they say during the call that you resolved all their reasons for calling in that day. I used to recap, then I stopped and my stats actually got better. Must be something with not sounding like a robot or scripted. But of course if I have a month where at the start of the month I am struggling with customers calling back, it must be because I am not recapping my calls, because this metric is supposed to help with that. I mean completely ignore that I can show you 7+ years of data showing me not recapping and having no problems, but this time this is the problem, it has to be. No way it could be because... maybe we had a network outage the next day, maybe their dog chewed on their chord, maybe they dropped their phone in the toilet, maybe they need to pay their bill. It's none of that, it's because I haven't recapped. This is why I feel like every single person I have talked to that has worked at other call centers before says they are all the same. This is an inability to go against the grain or the status quoa. I get it, you have bosses and it's hard to stand up to them because you feel like you could be put under a microscope and maybe down the line lose your job over this. So let's talk about Shaq's coaches... he had a few different ones, do you think any of them worked with him on maybe trying a different way to hold the ball, to flick your wrist, maybe where you stand on the line, maybe how you shoot the ball? Probably not, they just probably told him this is a problem, every other person shoots the ball this way, if you keep doing it this way you'll get better, I promise. Ten years later the same free throw percentage... great coaches very intuitive, they read of a script to coach him to not be better over the course of ten years. Do you know how innovation happens? Do you know how efficiency happens? Perspective and thinking about things in a different way. Yes the big wooden circle thing can roll around, but what purpose does this have? What can I do with this? What if I had 4 of them and then build something on top of them where I could sit, I could now roll down a hill. But by all means just keep running all the call centers the same, read off scripts, coach the same way to everyone it works right? That is why the job is hated by many and has one of the highest churn rates of any profession.
Working at a call center is probably the worst job on the planet it is not for everyone. Some people can handle it, and some people handle it because they have to get a pay check. There are so many factors outside your control but you're expected to control it all every single call all day long or put your mouth guard in.
So it's been about a week since the last time I did anything with this, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. I moved over the entire web-server over to a Linux computer rather than the Windows computer it was on before. Couple reasons for that, reason number one is because that Windows computer constantly reboots itself, pretty sure there is a piece of hardware inside that box that is malfunctioning, it has been doing that for a few years now which is why I got Trent a new computer. The other reason obviously being security, Windows is terrible when it comes to security. That all by itself took quite a bit of time, and I still got quite a bit more to do. I have to setup the SQL server on that computer as well as the World of Warcraft server that I run over my LAN so kids and I can just play without having to have a subscription for every account. I also been building stuff... so our new couch has a little gap behind it between the couch and the banister so built a little shelf to go behind the couch to fill that gap for when we let the bearded dragon out so he doesn't fall 20 feet if he runs over the back of the couch. Also build a little table for Paula's cricut machine she just got so she can easily do her cricut stuff while she is sitting on the couch watching TV.
On top of all that I been doing a lot of thinking and watching a lot of videos on the education system, home schooling and un-schooling. When we had our kids we decided pretty much right away that it would probably be best for us to just homeschool. There were a lot of different reasons for that one being that Trent has Apraxia which means he would need special help if we sent him to public school. Another major one was that both of us felt like we never really got the education we felt we needed when we were going to school. When you think about it there are really only a few pieces of those 12 years of school that you actually retain throughout your life. The rest of that information you learn in school has one sole purpose which is to retain it just long enough to do well on your test; then you never use that information ever again. So I been watching a lot of videos over the last week as well as documentaries and the numbers are pretty astounding. It makes me wonder why the public school system exists at all anymore. But I understand why, and this will not be a popular sentence that comes out of my mouth but one of the main reasons it exists is because it's a free babysitting service. When you get down to the nitty gritty of it all and start you really understand the education system you will know very quickly that the reason it is failing is because it was designed for a world we no longer live in. The education system and all the standardizing was valuable when the education system was introducted back in the 1890's. We needed it to be that way and it made a lot of sense because kids getting out of school were all going to be getting jobs in an industrial world and jobs were plentiful. That is no longer the case, most of those jobs that were needed to be filled by the students just graduating the education system have since been filed by machines that do the job better anyway. Think about car factories, there would be hundreds of people working them assembly lines, now you got a couple people that make sure the machines don't mess up or just there to click the buttons for stop and go. When I think about my education, even recent education with all my college I know for a fact that this is not preparing me for anything. The hard part of all of this is that a majority of the world thinks that everyone needs to follow the same set of rules because we did, and our parents did, and our parents parents did. So when I take my kids to the doctor they ask them "what grade are you in?" and of course my kids don't even know how to answer that question. This was starting to get to me so I signed the kids up for Time4Learning, which is actually pretty cool if you ask me, it's online schooling just I have to pay every month for it. No big deal to me because I want the kids to be smart. But I literally moved away from my initial goals for my kids because I started caving to peer pressure. When I seen the kids unable to answer questions like what grade they are in, what did they do in school today, or do you know your times tables? When we were growing up I am sure most of you heard your teachers say the line "it's not like you're going to be walking around with a calculator all the time so you need to learn this". Some of us even at that time would snicker cause we had our cool watches that had a calculator on them. But now, we really do... we have a phone in our pocket at all times this phone is not just a calculator, but it gives you access to every piece of information you could ever want or need. So why is it important to know what year the first automobile was made? I can just pull out my phone and google it. Teaching the kids how to weed out bad information from good information and how to use the information they have access to is more important that memorizing that information at this point.
If anyone even reads this other than myself there is a cool documentary on all this on Amazon Prime right now called Most Likely to Succeed. Watching this documentary really opened my eyes and reassured myself that I am doing the right thing with my kids. When you look at the footage of kids in a classic classroom setting then you look at the kids in the high tech high setting you see a different kid. You see kids that are excited to be there, excited to learn and excited to be alive. When you see the kids in the classic classroom setting you see zombies that are stressed out about what the teacher is saying, will it be on the test? when is the test? will I do well on the test?
It's so interesting to me how watching movies can really get me thinking. Tonight I watched The Perfect Score which is a movie about a bunch of teenagers that are trying to pass the SAT exams to get into college. The scores they need to get into the colleges they choose is not really happening and they are about to do the re-test but decide to put together a plan to steal the SAT scores. The plan itself is pretty elaborate and out of the 6 of them only one of them ends up going to jail because one little piece of their plan goes wrong. The end up either not taking the test or not cheating by using the answers. The movie itself is trying to teach people that cheating is not always the right answer and that if you study and work hard even as a team you can still be successful. What I get from the movie is that 6 people with extremely diverse backgrounds and personalities can come together and do something that you might think is impossible. It really shows that you should not judge a book by its cover because even the guy with the 0.0 GPA scores the highest on the SAT exam in the county. When you think about it, life is a lot like this. If you are starting your own company, you're probably not going to get a bunch of like-minded people that are all good at the exact same skills, you're going to get a diverse group of people that all bring different skills to the table. So why does school try to standarize everyone and everything?
So since I started my Friday night off with watching The Pefect Score it seemed fitting that I would watch Accepted which is another great movie about education and conforming or not conforming, and shows people that individuality is a good thing. The movie is about a bunch of kids that applied for college and didn't get in, so their parents of course think it's the end of the world and they are throwing their lives away. Well, one of the kids decides to trick his parents, but ultimately they mess up the fake web-page and a bunch of kids end up at their doorstep with acceptance letters to their fake college. They end up doing a lot of unorthadoxed learning but what really gets me is the end of the movie when they are trying to get accredited and they are presenting their case to the board of directors. The main character of the movie is making his speech and he says something that really hits home about the education system of our country, and really just our country in general. He says that not everything works out and turns around and asks the parents in the room if things worked out as they planned. How many kids or young adults end up going to college and don't get the jobs they dreamed of? I would go as far as to say most college graduates are not doing the job they went to college for currently, and quite a few never even got interviewed for one of the jobs in the field of study they went to college for. This is quite sad really, and I fall into the bracket of people that are just completely unhappy with where I am career wise. How do I change that? Going to college literally taught me nothing except to tell my kids they don't need to go to college if they don't want to, but I won't stop them if they choose to. Does that make me a bad parent or does that make me an educated parent? Having my kids rack of debt only to find themselves doing something they are not passionate about would just destroy me. I want to make sure my kids are doing what they want to do when they grow up. I know the reality of that is slim, but I am going to do everything I can to push them in the direction they want to go in, and I will help them any way I can. This is why I feel it is so important that I figure this all out and start my own company. Do I need to be a millionaire or a billionaire? Nope. It would be cool because I know I would do a lot of good with that money in the world but if I don't get it, as long as I am happy and the bills are paid that's really all that matters. With my current work situation I can pay my bills most the time but happiness doesn't exist so I am failing 50% of my career choice.
Here are a couple videos that I draw inspiration from, these companies started off so small and were so influencial to the world of gaming we have today. My goal is to figure out what they did, get some friends together and make this a reality.
Been in pain for the last week or two because I twisted my ankle going down the stairs one of the days carrying too much stuff in my hands. That was my left ankle. I could barely move for the next 24 hours basically. Now when the pain on the left side ends, I get the pain on the right side now. So now I been barely able to move the last couple days and this was the throbbing horrible pain so didn't even want to turn my computer on yesterday. This is why I didn't make any updates on here the last couple days.
On Tuesday I did another workout even though I was almost in tears the whole time because of the pain in my foot but I was determined to get it done, need to make sure anytime I am not in pain I am spending time working out. This is a pretty big change I need to make for many reasons. I am done being "big Rob", those days are numbered. I am hoping to lose around 100 lbs this first year, that's a pretty good goal because that's roughly 2 lbs a week. The whole point is to make a change in my life that I am okay with that will work for me. If I try to stop myself from eating and drinking what I like entirely that is when I go right back into gaining weight again. I sure wish I lived in a warmer climate sometimes because if I lived in Florida right now I can guarantee you that I would have a house with a swimming pool in the backyard and I would be spending a lot of time in that pool every day. Even with a hurt foot if I had a pool I could still swim without even having to use my foot and still get that nice workout.
Also on Tuesday the kids made dinner, it was their first time making dinner. One of Paula's co-workers wanted to teach them how to cook since Paula has issues with the kids being around knives. They made two really huge pans of some kind of caserole with all kinds of stuff in it. If anyone knows me, they know mixing foods and me is very difficult for me. I had to kind of break the caserole apart as much as possible and I just ate a little piece. It was good, but difficult because of mixing foods. I understand why that is what they cooked, because it gave the kids an opportunity to cut many different types of foods to small pieces to teach them about knife safety.
Anyway, that has been my last three days basically. I did reach out to my site director about the issues I was having at work and had a couple conversations about that as well, but that's something that is going to take some time to solve.
Have you ever had that manager where they were the reason why you just wanted to quit a job more than anything else? That manager that literally made your days at work extremely miserable? They are out there, they exist, I always thought there was no way I would ever find that manager because I have had some pretty terrible managers including one that stole my paycheck and then fled the country. But honestly, that manager was amazing compared to this one. It is crazy how much a manager can just completely make you hate your job. It's no surprise after 7 years of doing the exact same job that I never really wanted to do to begin with that I would be pretty burned out. But the thing is I have always just dealth with it, because I know a lot of people do jobs they don't like. You just do your best and get through the day and move on. I will probably have to reach out to my director in the next couple days and see if he can give me a crappy schedule on a different team at work because I would rather have a crappy schedule than deal with this manager.
Last week I made a pretty huge post on my Facebook page about student loans and in the last couple days it has really just further fueled my hatred for the education system in our country. The main reason is because I had wrote something in my post about how much more I could learn from a YouTube video vs. taking a college class and at the time I was thinking, "yeah this is pretty accurate but I am sure my classes taught me the base". Yeah I was trying to learn some stuff in PHP yesterday and went to this guys YouTube page and he has probably something like 500-600 videos on his page that are at least 20 mins long explaining how to do all kinds of different stuff in PHP, HTML, C#, Java, SQL etc. And the guy only had about 20k subscribers or so. So this guy is literally not really getting paid and he is teaching me more than an entire college course can. Why are we paying a college $50,000? We should each be paying these YouTube people teaching us stuff the $50,000 and just get rid of schools if they cannot keep up with a random person doing a better job than their entire school.
Anyway that is my Monday so far, only 4pm so still a lot left in the day.
Alright well it's 5:30 now, just spent about 25 mins on the workout bike in the theater room and then spent another 5 minutes doing some curls with the weights in there. I keep telling myself I'll start next week or next month etc. So I guess now is as good of time as any. This is one of the goals I set recently when I decided that I needed to change my life. I think each month I will take a picture of myself but not going to actually weigh myself. I think seeing results once a month is going to be more of a motivator for me. Time to go make the kids mad at me and see if they finished all their school for the day.
Today I have been really messing around with this web-page stuff trying to figure out other things such as adding a message comment section to each of my posts. This of course is making it to where I need to also learn SQL because the best way to do this is to create a database that houses all the comments and then I need a php script to display the contents of them messages. Then I need to figure out how to do it in real time. It's been pretty fun, and it leads me to thinking about a lot of other stuff too because a database means that I am storing information and when you are programming what you are doing is storing information in a variable and then you just use that variable to display that information however you want.
Played our first game of Adventure Begins as a family, Trent was the rogue, Morgan was the Bard, Xander was the sorcerer, Paula was the fighter and I was the dungeon master. Technically you can play the game without a dungeon master but it worked out. Xander got the final kill shot on the dungeon boss so he got to read off the card on how he killed him. This was honestly the best board game experience with the kids ever. Xander was getting kind of bored for a little while because 3 of them went off and fought an extra monster and Xander went on a core space so he couldn't do anything until the other 3 were done with their Banshee. That Banshee almost killed all 3 of them too. After that we just kind of stayed on the straight core path. It took about 2 hours, but the best part is, no one lost except myself. This is something that always makes board games interesting in our house, none of my kids like to lose. So when they lose they either cry or get mad. That wasn't the case today so I feel like this is going to be a pretty successful game to play with the kids. This got me thinking though because eventually we will play the real game, and supposedly making a character takes a long time and you have to have character sheets etc. Because of what I am doing with web-page and database stuff right now this made me think that I could probably just create a web-page where it walks them through creating their character and then just store all that data in the database and give them a page they can look at from their iPad or iPhone's. Of course when we start playing in the garage we'll have computers setup and the TV will also have a web-cam setup most likely so we can still play if someone is unable to make it to the house that week or whatever. Got lots of ideas for this.
Paula got a Cricut machine today. Apparently you can like make shirts and stuff with it. When she told me it was going to cost $200 I was just kind of like... ummmm? But yeah if it can make cups, and shirts and all that stuff, seems like a pretty cool little thing to have around. One of these days when we get the garage cleaned up I need to setup the 3D printer so I can start printing stuff. Then we need to look at buying a resin printer as well.
Pretty successul and fun day so far, need to go eat some dinner and probably watch a movie. Got work in the morning so that should be fun.
I have been told many times that I should create a journal but I never really thought it would be a good idea. Lately, with how much I have been posting on Facebook and writing down a lot of my thoughts I thought it might be a good idea to start a journal and see how this goes. I am definitely going to call this a journal even though it is online because ultimately it will be a place where I put my experiences and thoughts down on "paper" in a manner of speaking. When I first started thinking about this last night; I thought this is just a blog. But the thing is, it is not a blog because most blogs have some kind of theme to them, this will not have a theme so this is just a journal. Should I start them by saying "Dear Diary or Dear Journal?" hmmm.... we'll see.
The main reason I think it will be beneficial to do this rather than buying an actually journal to write stuff down is because this is also going to keep me mindful of what I want to do with my life moving forward and since I have to code this in Notepad++ (see this, can't do that with an actual hand written journal) while I am writing, it helps me keep coding at the front of my mind. Ultimately this is what I want to do, the question becomes how do I do it? What do I do to break into the field of computer programming? Obviously I have a lot of work ahead of me because no amount of school is ever going to teach me enough to be able to wow an employer when I got to an interview. This is something I need to do on my own, and just like when I taught myself how to build web-pages back when I was like 15 years old I have to keep at this every day.
One of my favorite movies is the social network which is the story of how facebook started. And I was watching it when I started thinking about doing this. I am sure it is not 100% accurate but there are pieces in the movie that you know is true such as Mark Zuckerberg was going to college at Harvard, and that he never finished school there. He became the youngest billionaire while being a college drop-out. Does this mean that everyone can do this? Not at all. But with hard work and the right mind-set all you need is that one great idea and you too can become the next billionaire. So why doesn't everyone do it? Well, quite honestly there is a little piece of luck to it and what's funny is if you have ever seen the movie when he first puts the site live his friend asked him "are you praying?" in my mind my thought is he probably is saying to himself... "please let this be it, let this be that one thing". It is great because there are analogies used in the movie that makes a lot of sense to me, such as when Mark's character says "everyone person that builds a chair doesn't owe money to the first person that built a chair". This one statement helps me understand that there are opportunities out there but we have to go get them. In the past I always thought this would be impossible to start your own business because every idea I come up with, there is probably a patent pending for this exact thing and how will mine be better? Well when I think about the things I do at work right now, most the time it is just taking data that already exists elsewhere and putting it in a style and format that is more user friendly to my team. This is literally like building my own version of the chair. People that use what I create at work absolutely love it because I get them the data they would have to open up 5-6 different tools or web-pages and then set 100 filters to get their data and I give it to them in their face in a "pretty" way, exactly all the data they need. It is actually crazy to me that I am still just taking phone calls, apparently no one at my work realizes the potential I have with making things more efficient. And the sheer fact that everything I do, I taught myself while working there.
I'll close this first journal entry with, there are possibilities and my eyes are open and my days are numbered. I will not continue to be another face in the crowd, I am better than that I just need to prove it to myself and move forward.