Notes from the Ground Zero at Corporate Hell (Part II)
(This post is dedicated to workmate John Wall. Not because of any particular debt of gratitude but because he managed to read this entire blog in one sitting and still managed to maintain enough brain matter to be able to show up for work the next day.)
My workplace aside for a moment, there is an old workingman’s adage that says, “This job would be great if it wasn’t for the idiot customers”. Never has a sentiment held truer than it does at my current place of employment. Dealing with the common public in the unpopular capacity that I do on a regular basis is like part teaching Trigonometry to the mentally handicapped, and part wrestling werewolves with nasty cases of scabies. Basically, I would have more success communicating with syphilitic donkeys than I do now dealing with your average blue collar boob whose biggest contribution to his community has been ripping tickets at the ‘Tilt o’ Whirl’ during the Labor Day weekend carnival. The only real fun I have at work anymore is standing directly in front of the microwave in the cafeteria during lunchtime as I heat up my Lean Cuisine's so that my genitals are in perfect allignment with the emitted radiation, ensuring that I will be unable to produce any future generations of near-minimum wage zombies to further suffer in this stagnant corporate call center hell.
The majority of my day working as a “Negotiations Expert”, is spent arguing with people who have the basic financial aptitudes of Minute Rice, and for whom the mere mention of ‘Past Due Balance’ has their brains spiraling out of control within the vacuum existing between their ears, and you can actually hear the beads on their abacuses clinking back and forth with lightning speed in the background so fast that it threatens to set the very phone lines ablaze. Now, how someone can neglect to read their utilities bill and make the mandatory payments towards the services necessary to maintain any level of comfort and convenience is beyond me. Even more insane, is that they expect me to feel guilty for their own negligence. One would think that normally capable people would understand that to continue enjoying their corn pone and NASCAR broadcasts, it would be necessary to pay their gas and electric bills…but such is not to be the norm. It’s like trying to successfully explain how to complete a Rubik’s Cube to a blind man.
Working in a collections environment, stupidity has become the Bain of my very existence. I swear sometimes that the combined IQ levels of my callers wouldn’t amount to that a single Nerf Football. I’ve had premature ejaculations that had more common sense than some of my clients. How am I supposed to wrangle payments from people who are as broke as a $2 wristwatch, and were probably raised in the same loft and suckled off the teat of the same family cow? In most cases, if I were to combine all their managed monthly payments in the last year, I may be able to put together a nice fruit basket. As it is, I would like to be able to suggest to them to disconnect their gas and electric altogether and power their homes instead by lighting methane cow farts. It’s amazing to me that the indigenous livestock haven’t united and overthrown their human captors, and assumed complete and unrelenting control by now. I fully expect one day to find myself contacting a Bossy Milksalot in Bedford, IN about the overdue status of her electricity bills. Certainly the barnyard chickens, goats, cows, ducks, pigs, etc would have a better grasp of their own personal finances.
It is my wish, to aid my heated negotiations over the phone with these deadbeats regarding their delinquent utility bills, that I had access to an all-powerful flip switch on my computer keyboard. It would be directly connected to their homes utilities, so I could make furnaces suddenly flare up like an angered Tiki god, or have kitchen lights flash on and off like strobe lights at an Amsterdam Rave, to demonstrate my supreme control over their fate. It may be the only way to maintain discipline among these rural bumpkins who more than likely can’t even accurately read the menu at the local ‘Kenny Rogers Roasters’, much less their utilities bills which must look to them like the lesson plan for ‘Advanced Macro-Physics 101’.
It’s always MY fault that they are in the situation that they are. That’s just a given. These regular professional debtors are becoming as shallow to me as the plotline to the latest Steven Segal movie. They always have the usual gamut of excuses to explain why they haven’t made adequate payments. Just the other day, I had a woman who over the course of a two minute phone call had listed an entire cornucopia of ailments that she was currently suffering from rendering her unable to pay for any services that she was currently enjoying. This poor woman’s future wasn’t exactly as bright as the Summer Solstice sunrise reflecting off Yul Brenner’s forehead, that’s for sure! She listed: Type 2 Diabetes, Chronic Depression, Anxiety Panic Disorder, Peptic Ulcer, Chronic Sinusitis, High Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol, Chronic Migraines, Benign Positional Vertigo, Irritable Bowel Syndrome * , Fibromyalgia, Chronic Back Problems, and Chronic Lung Problems. Shit, instead of arguing with me about overdue bill payments she should be begging me to send her a shotgun in order to put herself out of her misery.
I think it’s high time we begin to teach these bimsters real hard lessons in financial responsibility. Instead of calculating monetary reconnection fees, and conducting background credit history searches, we should be determining their worthiness for their gas and electric services through the 'ol tried-and-true centuries old Burgundian Code methods…namely, Medieval ordeals of physical duress. If Billy-Bob Hicknuts from Muncie, IN can successfully manage to grab a heated stone submerged in a cauldron of scalding hot water, we will gratefully restore his delinquent gas service. Conversely, if Sally-Jo Corncooch can successfully have her nipples clamped with alligator clips to the battery of a John Deer tractor and withstand being shocked for two whole minutes with 15,000 volts of pure electrical current, we will rehook up her electricity at her farmhouse and even forget about another security deposit. Likewise, for every month a disconnect notice is sent out for non-payment of utilities, we’ll send out Lars and Ingmar in 10-gallon hats to chop off a finger until they manage to bring their account back to a current status one again. Or perhaps, we can send out Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie to live with them at their homesteads and fist their dairy cattle until their lingering delinquency can be properly rectified.
* I’m not sure what Irritable Bowel Syndrome has to do with one’s inability to pay their bills, but I’m sure I would instantly shit myself too if I had to open my monthly utility bills to see an owed dollar amount higher than the Gross National Product of Switzerland.
My workplace aside for a moment, there is an old workingman’s adage that says, “This job would be great if it wasn’t for the idiot customers”. Never has a sentiment held truer than it does at my current place of employment. Dealing with the common public in the unpopular capacity that I do on a regular basis is like part teaching Trigonometry to the mentally handicapped, and part wrestling werewolves with nasty cases of scabies. Basically, I would have more success communicating with syphilitic donkeys than I do now dealing with your average blue collar boob whose biggest contribution to his community has been ripping tickets at the ‘Tilt o’ Whirl’ during the Labor Day weekend carnival. The only real fun I have at work anymore is standing directly in front of the microwave in the cafeteria during lunchtime as I heat up my Lean Cuisine's so that my genitals are in perfect allignment with the emitted radiation, ensuring that I will be unable to produce any future generations of near-minimum wage zombies to further suffer in this stagnant corporate call center hell.
The majority of my day working as a “Negotiations Expert”, is spent arguing with people who have the basic financial aptitudes of Minute Rice, and for whom the mere mention of ‘Past Due Balance’ has their brains spiraling out of control within the vacuum existing between their ears, and you can actually hear the beads on their abacuses clinking back and forth with lightning speed in the background so fast that it threatens to set the very phone lines ablaze. Now, how someone can neglect to read their utilities bill and make the mandatory payments towards the services necessary to maintain any level of comfort and convenience is beyond me. Even more insane, is that they expect me to feel guilty for their own negligence. One would think that normally capable people would understand that to continue enjoying their corn pone and NASCAR broadcasts, it would be necessary to pay their gas and electric bills…but such is not to be the norm. It’s like trying to successfully explain how to complete a Rubik’s Cube to a blind man.
Working in a collections environment, stupidity has become the Bain of my very existence. I swear sometimes that the combined IQ levels of my callers wouldn’t amount to that a single Nerf Football. I’ve had premature ejaculations that had more common sense than some of my clients. How am I supposed to wrangle payments from people who are as broke as a $2 wristwatch, and were probably raised in the same loft and suckled off the teat of the same family cow? In most cases, if I were to combine all their managed monthly payments in the last year, I may be able to put together a nice fruit basket. As it is, I would like to be able to suggest to them to disconnect their gas and electric altogether and power their homes instead by lighting methane cow farts. It’s amazing to me that the indigenous livestock haven’t united and overthrown their human captors, and assumed complete and unrelenting control by now. I fully expect one day to find myself contacting a Bossy Milksalot in Bedford, IN about the overdue status of her electricity bills. Certainly the barnyard chickens, goats, cows, ducks, pigs, etc would have a better grasp of their own personal finances.
It is my wish, to aid my heated negotiations over the phone with these deadbeats regarding their delinquent utility bills, that I had access to an all-powerful flip switch on my computer keyboard. It would be directly connected to their homes utilities, so I could make furnaces suddenly flare up like an angered Tiki god, or have kitchen lights flash on and off like strobe lights at an Amsterdam Rave, to demonstrate my supreme control over their fate. It may be the only way to maintain discipline among these rural bumpkins who more than likely can’t even accurately read the menu at the local ‘Kenny Rogers Roasters’, much less their utilities bills which must look to them like the lesson plan for ‘Advanced Macro-Physics 101’.
It’s always MY fault that they are in the situation that they are. That’s just a given. These regular professional debtors are becoming as shallow to me as the plotline to the latest Steven Segal movie. They always have the usual gamut of excuses to explain why they haven’t made adequate payments. Just the other day, I had a woman who over the course of a two minute phone call had listed an entire cornucopia of ailments that she was currently suffering from rendering her unable to pay for any services that she was currently enjoying. This poor woman’s future wasn’t exactly as bright as the Summer Solstice sunrise reflecting off Yul Brenner’s forehead, that’s for sure! She listed: Type 2 Diabetes, Chronic Depression, Anxiety Panic Disorder, Peptic Ulcer, Chronic Sinusitis, High Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol, Chronic Migraines, Benign Positional Vertigo, Irritable Bowel Syndrome * , Fibromyalgia, Chronic Back Problems, and Chronic Lung Problems. Shit, instead of arguing with me about overdue bill payments she should be begging me to send her a shotgun in order to put herself out of her misery.
I think it’s high time we begin to teach these bimsters real hard lessons in financial responsibility. Instead of calculating monetary reconnection fees, and conducting background credit history searches, we should be determining their worthiness for their gas and electric services through the 'ol tried-and-true centuries old Burgundian Code methods…namely, Medieval ordeals of physical duress. If Billy-Bob Hicknuts from Muncie, IN can successfully manage to grab a heated stone submerged in a cauldron of scalding hot water, we will gratefully restore his delinquent gas service. Conversely, if Sally-Jo Corncooch can successfully have her nipples clamped with alligator clips to the battery of a John Deer tractor and withstand being shocked for two whole minutes with 15,000 volts of pure electrical current, we will rehook up her electricity at her farmhouse and even forget about another security deposit. Likewise, for every month a disconnect notice is sent out for non-payment of utilities, we’ll send out Lars and Ingmar in 10-gallon hats to chop off a finger until they manage to bring their account back to a current status one again. Or perhaps, we can send out Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie to live with them at their homesteads and fist their dairy cattle until their lingering delinquency can be properly rectified.
* I’m not sure what Irritable Bowel Syndrome has to do with one’s inability to pay their bills, but I’m sure I would instantly shit myself too if I had to open my monthly utility bills to see an owed dollar amount higher than the Gross National Product of Switzerland.
3 Comments:
Too much Terry!!! You could not describe it better!!!
chocolate_thunderrr
an ex-employee who loves the motomixer on new cell phones would love to hear what you have to say in part three about that place now....
an ex-employee who loves the motomixer on new cell phones would love to hear what you have to say in part three about that place now....
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