It’s official. I am unemployed, once again.
My part time job at an Answering Service has ended. No, it’s not because I was a “seasonal employee”. No, this company wasn’t being heartless and choosing to fire me right before Christmas. It’s not like that at all.
It turns out that working for an Answering Service is not something everyone is capable of doing. You may have an image in your head that all you have to do is answer the phone, and take down a message. I have learned that this is an extraordinarily simplistic concept of what a person who works at an Answering Service is required to do.
Everything is done through a computer, which means that one must push the correct combination of buttons to disconnect a call after someone hangs up, and a different combination of buttons to call out to someone to give them certain kinds of messages, and yet another entirely different combination of buttons to find out just who you are supposed to call in the first place. One must fill in the boxes on the screen with obvious things like the caller’s name, reason for the call, and a phone number that the client can reach them at to return their call, as you might assume. One must also fill in a multitude of boxes asking entirely different things, specific to the client’s needs. Some of the people whose calls we answer are doctors, who need us to page other doctors. In some cases, this may, potentially be, a life or death matter. I was never able to figure out all the buttons I should press, and in what sequence, to do this part well. It’s a much more stressful and complicated job than you might have thought it was, when you thought the job was about just answering the phones.
Oh, and just to clarify, this job did not involve sales, of any kind, at all. I mean, technically, the Answering Service must be doing some kind of sales in order to have clients sign up with them, of course. What I mean is that I wasn’t working as a “telemarketer” at this job. (I’ve done telemarketing in the past, more than once, absolutely hate doing it, and hope to never have to do it ever again in my life.)
Anyone can answer the phone, after all. Most everyone can take down a message with important details about the call. It turns out that not many people are able to do all the things involved in working for an Answering Service. For this reason, you do not simply show up at work on your first day and immediately get right on the phones. There is an extensive amount of training you receive first. Then, when the trainers feel you are ready, they put you on the phones with a trainer sitting next to you, listening in, and ready to jump in if a particular caller is difficult, or if you become unsure of what to say, to type, or to press. Eventually, you end up on the phones seated nearby one of the trainers, who is there to answer questions you might still have about how to do a particular thing, or for advice if you need a judgement call. Is this situation on the phone considered an emergency, or not? Sometimes that answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. After that, you are “on your own” on the phones (but still sitting right next to trainers, and still able to contact other workers for help right through the computer system itself). You aren’t simply abandoned to fend for yourself until you are truly equipped to handle things.
I heard from most of my coworkers that when they first went through the training they felt overloaded with information, every day, for quite a while. Many of them said that when they were being trained, they hit a point where they thought “I will never be able to do this”, and seriously considered quitting. The talked to me about what one thing made them completely nervous to the point where they were sweating when they first started working there. For some people, it was dealing with rude callers, who yelled at or cussed out the worker on the other end of the phone. Some people had specific combinations of buttons that they had trouble with, and they dreaded the situations where they knew they would have to use those buttons in that order. Lots of people told me, independent of each other, that when they first started answering the phones on their own (without the aide of a trainer) that they were “completely terrified”. But then, one day, everything “clicked”, and they just “got it”.
Many of my (now former) coworkers have been working there for years, and, for the most part, they like what they do. Lots of other people get overwhelmed and frustrated by the nature of the job, and end up quitting before they even get close to finishing training, or, shortly after they are “on their own” answering phones. Answering Services, as a whole, tend to have a high burn out rate, an a correspondingly high turn over rate.
Some of you reading this blog may be unaware that I am dyslexic. It was obvious to me when I applied for this job that I would be dealing with a lot of phone numbers, which tend to give me problems. I had a plan for that, however. I can use the “numberline” of numbers across the keyboard to type in the digits of a phone number, instead of the jumble of buttons on the side of the keyboard. This way, I can teach my hands the proximity of each where each number is, and hit the right one in the right order. It’s something like learning to play the piano, where you hands just have to learn where to find the keys. This company encourages all it’s workers to repeat the phone number back to the caller, which I also found helpful. It was a good way to avoid mistakes. I figured I could find other ways to work around my dyslexia, (to avoid spelling errors, and reading errors), as I learned the job. After all, my entire life is spent “learning” how to translate the world around me into something I can get my dyslexic brain to comprehend. Adapting to this job shouldn’t be that much of a problem, I figured.
What I did not know when I was hired, and what I couldn’t possibly know until I’d gone through at least part of the training was the sheer amount of data that my brain would be bombarded with each and every work shift. Phone numbers I had a plan for, and I can get pretty far figuring out how to spell caller’s names correctly with some other little tricks I use to unscramble words. These tricks, I have learned, do not work after a certain amount of time. My brain just gets too overwhelmed, and it becomes harder and harder to unscramble the gibberish parts of what is on the screen in front of me. I ended up mispronouncing the names of businesses, because it contained words that were new to me (like someone’s last name). I had a hard time finding the pager number of a doctor I was supposed to page, because in order to find it, I needed to be able to spell at least part of the doctor’s name correctly.
There was a certain combination of buttons to use to bring up a “directory” I could search through to find a doctor, or to find a list of people who worked for a certain company, and their corresponding contact numbers. One of those same buttons, and some new ones were used to bring up the “dial list”, which visually, looked a whole lot like the directory. One of the buttons from that combination brings up the “dialer”, which allows you call somebody outside of the office. It was too many D’s for my dyslexic brain to sort out, in the heat of the moment, while trying to get through a call.
Another problem I have as a dyslexic is learning new words. Sure, I sound educated and intelligent when you talk to me, or possibly when you read my writing. Show me a word that is new to me, such as somebody’s last name, however, and I become a first grader once again, slowing down to a crawl, concentrating, and attempting to “sound it out”, hoping that I am seeing the letters in the right order as I make my attempt. I thought at first that eventually, I would have learned all these new words, as I learned the last names of all the doctors, lawyers, and other clients that this answering service, well, serves, and that particular dyslexic problem would be a thing of the past. I also believed that even though I was having difficulty deciphering each new “script” for each individual client now, that eventually, I would have a mental picture in my head of each one, and this would all become easier.
This proved to be impossible, because it turns out that an answering service is not a static thing. It’s dynamic, and ever changing. New doctors are added to the lists of particular hospitals daily. Doctors are constantly changing who is on call, and who will take what other doctor’s patients. There wasn’t a way to generate a list of all their names for me to take home and study like a kid with a list of Spelling Words, the night before the Spelling Test.
All of the offices, be they for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, or anything else you can think of, were continually asking the company to change things. Could your operators ask the caller this? Make sure the operators are getting this specific piece of information now, that I didn’t ask you to have them get before. This meant the script for that client would change, and when you make a change to something visual, it makes me, the unfortunate dyslexic, start all over again, learning it from the beginning.
I was learning how to do this job right through the holiday season, which meant that all the offices were closing and opening at different times, and on different days than normal. I was constantly re-learning what to say when callers asked something as simple as “are they closed today?” Just when I managed to learn how to do calls for a particular client, it would change, an I’d end up making the same mistakes again that I had previously learned to stop making, as I tried to teach my brain what to do with this new script that looks different, and therefore, for a dyslexic brain, must be something entirely new.
It became obvious to my trainers, and the managers, that I was not doing well with this job. I wasn’t anywhere near where they wanted me to be, and no one knew why. I was open about the fact that I was dyslexic, but, this doesn’t do much good in an office full of people who barely recognize the word, who aren’t learning disabled in any way themselves, and who think that dyslexics look at a page of writing an the numbers jump up and run around like cartoon characters. I didn’t expect any of them to be skilled at training a dyslexic worker, but I did expect that I would be able to somehow find my own way to comprehend the data I was given. It didn’t work. I continued to make stupid mistakes that I should have outgrown, I continued to bombard my trainers with question after question about things I should have already learned how to do well, I was constantly having things sent back to me that I had done incorrectly. My husband works for this same company, and he was also noticing things I had screwed up in some way. One of the managers recently resorted to asking him if he could figure out what might work to train me. They had exhausted all their ideas at this point.
Eventually, I had to realize that despite my best efforts, and despite the best efforts of the entire training team at this answering service, I was simply not going to be able to do this job. I was beyond frustrated. It’s hard to give something your best effort, and still fail. It’s not easy to be slower at learning things than everyone around you, and expected to keep up with them. Being unable to do this job because my dyslexia was getting in the way made me feel like the one stupid kid in school who can’t get the math right, no matter how many times the teacher shows her how to work the problem. I had started to feel like the “slow kid” in class, once again. It’s frustrating and depressing to feel like this.
After much thought, and discussion with Shawn, I decided the best thing to do would be to go to the manager who was so perplexed by my lack of improvement, and explain things to her. It gets tiring to constantly have to educate the world around me about what dyslexia is, and how it affects my ability to process the world around me. Sometimes, people simply do not believe me when I tell them I am dyslexic. “But, you are so intelligent!” they exclaim, as if having high intelligence and having dyslexia are two concepts that are incapable of occurring in one human being at the same time. I think they mean this as a compliment, but it never feels like one. It feels like a nicer way to say “I don’t believe you are dyslexic”.
Fortunately, the manager was incredibly understanding about this. Like I said, it was obvious to her, (and the entire office, I’m sure), that I wasn’t doing well. Now, the mystery of why this was happening was solved. What could have been an extraordinarily uncomfortable conversation was rather pleasant. Well, as pleasant as a conversation where the boss and the employee openly come to the mutual conclusion that this employment relationship needs to end. I didn’t “quit”, and I didn’t “get fired”. I simply could not make it through the training, and that was that.
Fortunately, I started getting checks from the EDD for Unemployment Insurance days before I started working at this part time job at the answering service. I continued to get them, because I wasn’t getting enough hours to live on, and so, the Unemployment Insurance basically has you report how many hours you worked, and supplements it with an equally reduced check. In other words, I am not as screwed because I lost my job this time around as I was when the school district unceremoniously dumped me in September.