How My Worst Job Became One of the Best Experiences of My Life

It all started with a psychic and ended with people who pluck chickens, butcher cows, and clean toilets for a living.

Photo o by Yan Krukau via Pexels

Frankly, I don’t believe fortune tellers. But I’m always curious about what they have to say. That’s why I listened with a dash of skepticism when a psychic in Palo Alto, California, made the following prediction:

“Sometime in the future, you’re going to find a different kind of job than what you’re used to. You won’t want to take it, but it’s going to be very good for you.”

The kind of work I was used to involved sitting in front of TV cameras, speaking into a microphone, or writing stories for a great metropolitan newspaper. Glamour jobs. The psychic was a beautiful young woman, but I was sure her prediction was full of Shredded Wheat.

Fast forward to a suburban community about 40 miles outside Atlanta, Georgia, many years later. I had just been told by an A-list literary agent in New York that she’d been unable to find a publisher for the short-story collection I had written.

Having hit rock bottom

in the available-funds department, I applied for a humble job as an interviewer at a contact center that specialized in two things: insurance claims and ethics-and-compliance complaints.

Fortunately, I passed the required spelling, writing, and grammar tests, which qualified me for the ethics-and-compliance gig. Surely, it would take only a few weeks to turn the short-story collection into the novel several publishers said they might consider instead.

I was there 12 years. And even though that evokes the movie 12 Years a Slave—working there really was very, very good for me.

For one thing, that’s where I learned what the average American worker has to put up with every single day. People who do not work in so-called glamour jobs but in abattoirs, chicken farms, and cafeterias. Hotel maids, janitors, maintenance workers, cooks, nurses, garbage collectors, bank tellers, IT workers, restaurant servers, bartenders, receptionists, secretaries, and other office-bound employees who populate places like the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company— but without the funny parts.

My job was simple

I put on a headset and clocked-in via the telephone on my desk. Then I hit a button on the phone marked Available. Which meant that I was the agent you’d get if you wanted to file an anonymous report alleging fraud, theft, embezzlement, workplace violence, sexual harassment, discrimination, unfair termination, cooking-the-books, insider-trading, and a dozen or so other compliance categories.

All of these things happen in the modern workplace to an astonishing degree every day. My telephone-queue was proof of it—though it was always understood that a report was merely an allegation that would need to be investigated. That’s why it was important for companies to get a jump on potential wrongdoing before things got legal.

My company sold its services to more than half of the Fortune 500 and scores of smaller businesses all over the world. It billed itself as the step before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, reminding executives that the cost of settling a sexual harassment lawsuit could run into the millions—even if you did nothing wrong. Businesses were happy to sign up for the services that paid my salary.

On the surface, the job sounded easy enough

But you had to sit at your cubicle for eight hours, tethered to the headset, and remain available the whole while. You got a 15-minute break in the morning, another in the afternoon, and a 30-minute break for lunch. If you failed to return from any of those on time, your pay was docked. This was definitely not a glamour job. But compared to what our callers reported, it could have been worse. Several types of complaints stand out to me this very day.

Discrimination

I took a huge number of calls from employees in low-level housekeeping jobs whose first language was not English. Their immediate supervisors were often white women who told them they were not allowed to speak their native language at work. Or who piled work on them, threatening to write them up if they didn’t get it all done in time.

In these situations, the write-up is a weapon of discrimination. Because after three write-ups, you can be fired. If a supervisor wants to get rid of you, they know the reason can’t have anything to do with race, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, or any of the other federally protected categories.

But they can use the write-up. In the modern workplace, the immediate supervisor can be a villain with the power to do things that are completely at odds with a company’s mission and values. Nor are these tactics limited to housekeeping staff. The reports I took revealed similar tactics in financial institutions, offices, and elsewhere.

Sexual harassment

The most common form is called quid pro quo (this for that). “I’ll give you the promotion you want if you go to bed with me.” But it can also be the supervisor who rubs your back or strokes your arm when he passes your desk. Or the manager who makes a sexual advance, then fires you or writes you up for some “error” in your work, if you refuse his advances. These can be hard to prove because sexual predators rarely prey before witnesses. So it comes down to he said/she said. A very difficult case to prove.

A tricky aspect of sexual harassment involves the pretty young account executive who attends an offsite event with clients. Even though other clients and employees are around, a boozed-up male client sometimes gets frisky and wants to put his hands all over your body or slobber in your mouth. How does your manager handle that without risking the bottom line? Sometimes he handles it by firing you.

Harassment (nonsexual)

This is a kind of bullying, like the guy in the photograph at the top of this article. A manager who wants you gone because he wants to hire someone else or doesn’t like your looks will resort to this. But others are just mean SOBs, who enjoy lording it over others. Sometimes the goal is to make you so uncomfortable that you’ll quit. Or blow up and do something that will get you fired. Think of it as psychological torture. There are other examples, but you get the idea.

Discrimination—older women

Talk to any woman over 50, and she will tell you what invisibility in the workplace feels like. It doesn’t matter if she knows more and is better at her job than she was 20 years ago. She no longer gets the same attention during meetings or anywhere else.

Male managers are sometimes threatened by an older woman. An older woman is often a stronger and wiser one. She doesn’t flatter the boss or think his jokes are funny. And for those offenses, she gets passed over for the promotion she’s definitely earned. Or she gets that desk in the drafty corner, the one nobody else wants. Or a good chunk of her accounts are given to a man or a younger woman for “business reasons” that supposedly have nothing to do with her age but negatively impact her income.

Here’s why that awful job was actually good for me

For one thing, I had a boss who looked out for his people. During much of this time, I was the go-to sibling for my mother’s eldercare. And he let me work a flexible schedule, which meant all the world to me. Through him, I learned things they don’t teach in school. Like how to manage other people and get the job done without creating a stressful workplace. Or making you feel bad in the process.

My co-workers were also really terrific. I was fortunate to find good friends there who became family to me.

After a while, I was promoted a couple of times and given the opportunity to teach new employees how to conduct an interview and write an actionable report. Sometimes, I’d write a report that made a difference in someone’s life. Fired workers who got their jobs back. Discriminators and harassers who were disciplined or fired.

One million bad words

But working there was especially good for my one million bad words. According to one famous writer, that’s how many terrible words a writer needs to write before his good words can be released. And although nothing I wrote at the contact center would ever rise to the level of literature, I really appreciate that working there helped me get a lot of those bad words out of the way.

Thanks to my work in that unglamorous contact center, I no longer pay lip service to Labor Day. I don’t look forward to it for the cookout it will bring. Nor do I think of it as the best time of year to buy a new mattress or cash in on some other sale.

For me, Labor Day is about all those people I spoke to every day. The ones who cried because they felt trapped by a sexual quid pro quo. The ones who threatened suicide because only one more writeup separated them from homelessness. The ones forced to work mandatory overtime when they were already exhausted or forced to drive a truck longer than the law says it’s safe to do so.

These are the people I think of when Labor Day rolls around. For me, they’re not just another story to talk about in the abstract on the evening news. They are mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters. People who go home at night and take off their shoes. Because they’re stressed out and their feet hurt. People who are often mistreated at work but who are loved by someone somewhere—just like you and me.

This is the future that beautiful young psychic in Palo Alto was able to see all those years ago. Isn’t that amazing?

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Thanks for reading/listening.