By some people's standards, I should be celebrating; after eight months of temping in a fast-pace environment, my employer has decided to hire me full-time. Work and meaningful, productive activity have always been important to me, but the changes within so muuch of the workplace over the past twenty years lead me to believe that I'm just "climbing back onto the treadmill".
In the first ten years or so after finishng college, I knew that I had skills to sell. Everyone's strengths are different; mine involved an ability to grasp and retain geographic data. I worked for a trucking line handling all sorts of problems in the field, and soon developed a reputation as "Mr. Rand McNally".
The development of GPS systems took a huge bite out of the demand for that skill.
So I retooled myself and used my problem-solving skils to troubleshoot customer-service issues over the phone for an ISP. I will readily admit to having somwhat more of the personality of a lighthouse-keeper than a kiddie-show host, and the public can resemble a bunch of spoiled children at times, but you swallow your pride and do what you have to do.
At the time, I worked mostly with young men fresh out of school, a lot of them 10 to 20 years my junior. Little by little, most of them got tired of the in-secret eavesdropping, the devaluation of their indivuidual skils, and the constant micromanagement, One by one, they left ... often for construction or industrial service jobs where they could work outdoors, and not as close to constant supervisory meddling.
The requirement to cheapen my skills with a sales pitch on every call was the last straw for me. I spent some of the next summer in a fireproof suit .... spraying weeds at oil refineries and tank farms. Like the fellow in the looney bin who beat his head against the wall, "It felt so good when it stopped" ... with the onset of winter.
When the loss of a couple of great tenants in a house I was renting foced me to move back to my "old neighborhood" last summer, I found work in a local call center; there was very little challenge -- the script was predetermined and easy to understand. But the evaluations of your work (again, of course, in secret), were conducted by Asians -- good, hard-working people, but not familiar with all the nuances and subtleties in some American conversation.
And my boss was just a dumb brute -- interested in nothing more than the management of my time down to the last second. (When I referred to the place as "a scene out of
1984" his reaction was "Wasn't that 27 years ago?
) Every center I'd worked in up to that time at least allowed employees (who were often students) to read and study between calls ... but not here.
So in my early sixties ... I'm back on the front lines again. My job is essentally just data entry ... conducted via a hand-held device rather than a keyboard. And the shop, while managed, thank God, by a supervisory team that is very diverse and quite "hip", is organized in such a manner that the "worker ants" are graded pimarily via raw speed and volume of input; very few functions call for a variety of skills and there is a depressing "sameness" to every day.
Fortunately, I've reached a stage in life close enough to retirement that there are other ways to make ends meet; but a part of my personality still wants to be doing something more productive and/or creative. Is this what it's coming to for most of us?
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