this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
722 points (98.8% liked)
memes
21943 readers
1924 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No sales job ever paid per time spent on phone
Anon is trying to be wholesome but has to forge reality in this fucked up world
Spent nearly 10 years working call center jobs, every single one of them had QA people listening to random calls and grading them. If you didn't stick to the script or try to sell the thing or whatever it was, you'd get a failing grade on the call. Enough of those and you're gone.
You're also graded on how long each call takes based on a metric called "Average Handle Time" or AHT which was set by the client based on whatever fucking fantasy they had about how long each call should take.
Fun fact, some contracts I worked on had an AHT requirement that was lower than the amount of time it would take to go through all of their required scripted sales pitches without even addressing the reason for the call. It was literally impossible to get full marks because you either had to skip most of their required scripts, not help the customer, or have the call run long.
what the panopticon hell batman. that would destroy my mental health so fucking fast.
Yeah, most of your job isn't what it looks like on paper, it's meeting SLAs. Your customer is your boss, or really the company that subcontracted you
I worked at three call centers over two years. It was the longest two years of my life and it took years to recover. I was once written up for "lying to a customer" because I confirmed something I knew personally to be true but my employer hadn't included in our scripts. It's like being in a cult.
Yes, it absolutely does.
Same (but only 6 months). Min wage + commission. But, during election season, because the company didn't get commission, they just had the computers run through the lists and have us immediately hang up instead of going through the campaign scripts.
They do if they are salaried. And have time trackers where they had to call for that long per work day
Having participated in the marketplace for a while, I am positive this is not true. Have you ever met a sales guy? They love executing on nonsensical strategies.
There's a lot of dumb money still out there. The term "dumb money" doesn't do it justice. We should call it "braindead money" instead.
Have you ever worked in a call center?
I have a long time ago and frequently had very long off-script calls without issues
Off script doesn't mean not trying to make a sale at all. And you gotta realise "a long time ago" makes anything you know invalid? It's the same thing as old people thinking young people are bad with money because they can't afford a house, car, kids etc. on a single income, like they could.
I used to do graphic design about 15 years ago but don't anymore, I'm not gonna tell someone who does it now that I know anything about how it currently is. Very weird to not be aware of something like that without having to be told about it.
This greentext is also 5 years old, and there’s no way to know what year the greentext itself is referencing. One anecdote that doesn’t fit an absolutism is enough to disprove it. Very weird to not be aware of something like that without having to be told about it.
Medicare Part D was or is a program to outsource prescription insurance for Medicare recipients under Bush 2. It created an absurd Matroska nest of contracts. I worked for a staffing agency to be call center agent at a company that ran pop-up call centers for various insurance companies operating under this program.
I was told my calls were monitored but never got any feedback whatsoever
so many wholesome posts and communities attract comments like this, pointing out why it is fake or not actually this wholesome. and I wonder where the healthy balance is between "facts and truth is important, actually; and so is not letting people wholesomewash awful experiences" and "party-pooping on an already-negative, very-happy-to-get-angry-about-politics platform in one of the few positive places doesn't feel great"
If there's not enough good or wholesome things that actually exist to create posts about then that's a big fucking problem with the world. But making shit up just to make yourself or other people feel better is absolutely not the answer. Your comment basically asks "is it bad to gaslight people about the state of the world, or is it actually okay because things are really so bad, and so we should get mad at the people pointing out the gaslighting?"
Okay, I just realized that I posted my comment in !memes@lemmy.world. I screwed up and made a false assumption the person I replied to was posting in !wholesome@reddthat.com. I'm on PieFed, where crossposts are shown together, along with comments from each community it was posted in. Must have missed the giant header preceding the comments from !memes@lemmy.world explicitly telling me I am looking at lemmy.world comments. Sorry!
I do want to reply, too, though, because I do feel defensive about the more-roughly/unflatteringly-worded interpretation of my comment or its implications.
If it makes you feel better, I haven't made anything up myself personally, though I admit I have posted things without fact-checking unless it seemed fishy. I do think a lot of wholesome posts tend to be personal anecdotes, and people tend to project their own experiences on the rest of the world, which can lead to a lot of "this could never happen. It is unthinkable in my experience with the world, or this particular corner of the world" (in this case sales) even if the anecdote is real. But I have thankfully never worked sales or customer service, so I don't know for sure. I do have a tendency towards believing people instead of calling "fake, r/thathappened". I do have huge concern over misinformation when it comes to facts. But I am not quite as concerned with falsely believing wholesome story anecdotes, though I know they too can lead to harms (though probably not as dangerous in this case. Maybe if this story is as fake as a commenter claimed, someone thinks sales can be chiller and more compassionate than it truly is, and apply or recommend someone else apply and then they burn out and waste time applying for and working a job they hate, and now they have to do the hiring process again? Or that people are friendlier to the lonely elderly than they truly are? This is far less damaging than an anecdote that casts aspersions on other groups. I can imagine one that talks about helping someone out, but also falsely attributes the reason they needed help to misdeeds of a marginalized group).
I think I am not so mad as you because I really don't believe anyone's gaslighting here, and even if they are I do not think the harms with false wholesome anecdotes are quite as bad as the harms when saying untruths during discussion of
$hotButtonTopic.I also frankly grow tired of someone always always having something negative to say in a Big Serious Real Life Issue Plaguing Society way, even when I aggressively try to curate my Fediverse feed to avoid the hot button topics and big life issues (I only look at Subscribed, for one). I already deal with it enough irl and am doing my part with trying to participate in Big Political Actions to make life better, I want to just have fun online and relax after real life, hopefully help and contribute to a FOSS place and feel good about that instead of using one of the big tech platforms, and always end up getting assblasted by someone having to bring up the life issues anyways, even if only as a throwaway joke. I really have to learn to stop going in comments at all. Just post, never comment. Unfortunately I seem to never learn my lesson on that front, and should probably think about how to actually make that behavioral change. I mean, just look at the paragraphs I just typed to you! I hate that it is true about anger producing more engagement than good feelings, and wish I wasn't vulnerable to that too.
When I worked at a call center, we were hiring specialists. That's pretty much all we did. As long as we filled the jobs, it didn't matter how long we took. We rarely took more time than we had budgeted