Hitting The Snooze

Wednesday morning, I glanced over while showering, and noticed something extremely odd. It had otherwise been an excessively normal day and nothing particularly interesting had occurred. So, while showering in the same capacity as I always do, for some reason on that day I glanced slightly to my left and noticed that my favorite poem, "If" by Rudyard Kipling, was inscribed in it's entirety on the label of my roommates shower soap. So there I stood, naked and wet, reading through one of the greatest poetic works ever written, off a soap bottle, in my shower.

" If you can make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings, And never breath a word about your loss;"

I had already spent most of my morning listening to recorded performance poetry, and sitting in the sunlight, half-meditating. It had dawned on me at that time that I had gotten very good at the "sit back and mellow" part of life but that if I wanted to get things done I needed to work on the "get things done" part of life. I started a list of the small items that I still needed to pick up for the business, and that reminded me of how terrified I was of actually having to take on this new wealth of responsibility that I had been slowly inching towards for quite some time now.

Soon enough, I had to go to my day job. On my way to work, the DevPod hit me with "Money (That's What I Want)" by the Beatles and I couldn't help but say to myself, I love that song, but I would have preferred the other version. In addition, another workday favorite, "Hey Julie" by Fountains of Wayne. The sun was shining, by all accounts it was an amazingly beautiful day, and I was headed to work. Work in an office. Work that by all accounts is perpetually making the world a worse place to be.

Directly before my first break, I had an extremely long call about fraud activity on a Home Equity Line of Credit. For those who don't know, a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELoC) is a product that banks offer where you can put up the increased collateral value of your house for relatively low interest credit. My department handles filing the initial claim, but in order to actually discuss anything about the claim, the customer needs to speak with the investigations department. The customer knew that and they knew that the investigations department was closed at that time.

The best part about the call was the fact that I have never been trained on how to read a HELoC account, and since we file fraud on these types of accounts maybe once a year, I was basically figuring out the system while on the phone with the customer. If your customer service rep ever sounds like they don't know what they are talking about, it is because they don't, because to properly train employees cuts into the bottom line, and if you are not going to pay employees enough to inspire them to stick around, there is no reason to train them unnecessarily, and by unnecessarily I mean to be able to do their own job.

Now, it didn't help matters at all that the customer was not particularly prone to logical, straightforward trains of thought. However, while I struggled to understand exactly what the customer was ranting, pell-mell about, he did make some fine points about the fact that the fraud that had been committed on his Home Equity Line was indirectly caused by the fact that we as a company constantly issue "convenience checks" without customer request in an attempt to get the customer to wrack up debt on such a line, and that said "convenience checks" are often used for fraud once they are stolen from someone's mail or garbage. Not to mention the fact that we attempt at every turn to shove another unnecessary and often harmful credit product down America's swollen debt gullet to pad our shareholder's profit margins. What's more, while drowning our customers in unnecessary debt, our overly departmentalized customer service system ensures that there is no one he can speak to with a gestalt understanding of his accounts or the problems occurring therein, which leads to levels of misinformation reminiscent of Cold War counterintelligence.

Now all of this I already know. This customer's non-linear ravings were no great revelation. I have been making these very points in my off-time for years, often in even less linear ravings. However, when you are attempting to get an issue resolved and someone is berating you with the ugly truths of your day-to-day sins, it can have a tendency to make one a little more on edge than they might otherwise be.

Eventually, I managed to convince the customer that my department was unable to assist him further at that point in the investigation, (which, in retrospect, is what I should have simply insisted on in the first place). I had missed the scheduled time for my first break and it was now time for our team "Daily Line Up", which is a time when my team meets to discuss any matters of importance. On that day, we were discussing the dress code (for the fifteenth time since I had started there, despite the fact that it had never changed) and the fact that new carpet is being put in, (meaning that eating will subsequently no longer be allowed in the call center).

Now, I don't give a shit about the dress code or our ability to eat in the call center, except that the management's focus on such petty and insignificant issues over matters of actual importance disgusts me to no end. At a recent meeting with the site's three Operations Managers, I made a major point of mentioning a simple change to our policy that would likely eliminate approximately 1000 to 3000 calls a day, drastically increasing productivity by eliminating the use of company resources (employee time) on an issue that could be preventively handled by simply adding one line of text to a mailer that we send out constantly. I had brought the same issue up at last years meeting, and I brought up the fact that I had brought it up at last years meeting at this years meeting. Their response was in the form of a jest, "Well, with any luck, maybe we'll have that implemented by your fifth year! Ha ha." That is the kind of leadership that is in charge of everything from major corporations to the governments of world powers. They care whether or not my shirt has a collar, but if you literally smack them on the nose with a rolled up bit of corporate inefficiency that can be easily rectified, they stare at you like a dog watching someone recite "Paradise Lost".

The thing that really irked me about the "no food in the call center" rule is simple. It's a perfectly reasonable rule and there is no reason from a business stand-point that it shouldn't have been implemented earlier. The fact that it had not been implemented prior to now, offered some dim sliver of hope that the management of this company had some modicum of capacity to operate outside the rigid parameters of "bottom line" dogma and conceptualize a non-quantifiable value in making their employees lives easier. But this, of course, was a fantasy. The "no food in the call center" was yet another demonstration that given a constant pressure to expand an unfettered organic system will naturally expend all resources available until it collapses or is replaced by a more efficient system.

That bummed me out.

A few days prior I had taken a break from reading "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson to read the graphic novel "Say You Want A Revolution" which is a collection of issues of a comic book called "The Invisibles". I was unaware before Chandler introduced me to it, but apparently "The Invisibles" is what "the Matrix" was unofficially inspired by. It is basically the story of a secret group of underground freedom fighters who combat the malicious forces of conformity using magic, time travel and cross dressing. It is AMAZING. However, it contains dialogue the likes of,

"Look at it, Dane. Look at the city and the world in its proud array, like a cask of jewels laid open for you. It'll offer you everything you ever wanted but it's just pictures on billboards; dream cars, dream women, dream houses. Time to wake up now and say goodbye."

So, perhaps it's not the best thing to read while answering customer service calls for a bank. At least, not if your desired outcome is maintaining said employment.

So when I finally took my break, thirty minutes late, I went and sat in the outdoor smoking alcove to catch a little fresh air while I stewed. Stepping outside only reminded me of what an amazing day it was, and the fact that I was trapped in an office for another six hours while one of the most beautiful days we'd seen this year passed me by. I sat in the sunlight like some Grecian Titan released from Tartarus only long enough to remember the sky, in order to make eternity underground seem that much longer. I held my head in my hands and I thought "What the FUCK am I doing?" The day after was to be my two year anniversary with the bank. I had spent two years answering the exact same questions, listening to the exact same feeble excuses, hearing the exact same corporate propaganda about how we were the good guys fighting to ensure that our customers are constantly serviced as hard and as thoroughly as possible.

I found that my ability to believe the validity of anything I was saying had been completely compromised. I still managed to eek out the words, but my arguments were choked and my explanations were a struggle. For a while, I was certain that I would have to walk out and never return. My heart began to pound, I became slightly dizzy, yet oddly enough my panic gave me an extreme sense of clarity in dealing with the incoming calls. Interestingly, I found that the more I needed to get out of there, the more focussed, concise and surgical I was able to make myself on the phone. It was perverse.

I rationalized that I couldn't quit. Quitting outright always seems like the way to go when you are extremely fed up with your job, however as Sun tzu would argue, decisions made at the whim of emotions are often foolhardy and rarely to your advantage. I had neither the liquid assets nor the benefit of alternatives that would have made quitting a reasonable, let alone profitable, decision. I determined that the only acceptable way to go was to take a half-day for "mental health" to recuperate and reassess.

I left a note for my manager, who was at lunch, and I walked out. As I passed through the exterior doors into the early evening sunlight, I instantly began to feel better. I walked to the back of the parking lot, where my truck waits patiently for me each day, saddled up and made my way for the highway. At first, my interior voice insisted that I ride the great river of the road eastbound until I received a message from the gods. But it was 6pm and I knew that eastbound traffic out of the city would be murder. So I decided that if the gods wanted to reach me, they could try me at home.

On the way home, the DevPod's shuffle mode made good on my earlier request and played my preferred version of "Money (That's What I Want)" by (I shit you not) Barrett Strong. "The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees. Now give me money, that's what I want."

I got home, explained the situation to Drew, and relaxed. I ate a large bowl of chocolate ice cream and watched whatever Drew and Kim were watching. I tried to think as little as possible about what I was going to do regarding work.

Eventually, once I had sufficiently chillaxed, I began surfing Craigslist for potential jobs. This reminded me of exactly why it is important not to quit in a moment of passion. Even if your job is terrible, the likelihood is that there are plenty of other jobs that are even worse.

I divided the next morning between relaxing and searching Craigslist. I decided that I had sufficiently calmed myself so as to be able to make it through work that day. Finding a new job would have to wait until the weekend. I arrived in the parking lot early enough to read a little of "Quicksilver" before I made it inside. The section I was up to, the section I read before walking into work that morning, read as follows,

"Jack rode between Paris and Lyons several times in the early part of 1685, ferrying news. Paris: the King of England is dead! Lyons: some Spanish governorships in America are up for sale. Paris: King Looie has secretly married Mademoiselle de Maintenon, and the Jesuits have his ear now. Lyons: yellow fever is slaying mine-slaves by the thousands in Brazil - the price of gold ought to rise.
It was disconcertingly like working for someone - just the sort of arrangement he'd given up, long ago, as being beneath his dignity. It was, to put it more simply, too much like what Bob did. So, Jack had to keep reminding himself that he was not actually doing it, but pretending to do it, so that he could get his horse ready to sell - then he would tell those bankers to fuck themselves."

As I read that I smiled at the subtle hint that I should remind myself that I am not actually doing it, but pretending to do it, so that I can get my horse ready to sell, and that I should keep my attention focussed on the day that I can tell those bankers to fuck themselves.

I made it through the day with no incident. As I clocked out, I said to myself "well, I have officially wasted two years of my life as a banker." I couldn't help but think of "Mother Night" and the exchange between Adolf Eichman and Howard W. Campbell in which Eichman informs Campbell that all the things that made him proud to be a Nazi came not from Hitler but from Campbell, and that no matter how valuable he may have been to the Allies as a spy, it would never outweigh his value to the Nazi party. I thought about that on my way out the door. In the end, you are who you pretend to be. But yet, you are also more than that as well.

It was good to be heading home for the weekend. Sometimes the time is right to wake up. Sometimes the time is right to hit the snooze.