Good for you. I've spent my working life half lifting/pushing, half phone and driving. Inquiring minds want to know.

I worked for a catalog order company for about a year. I was an order taker for a while, then moved to special services (I found sizes that we didn't offer in the catalogs, located buttons for stuff we'd carried 10 years ago, took measurements, etc). I was NOT customer service, and if someone ever asked to speak to a manager, they got one.

Now I'm IT, and very few people call me and I don't call anyone. Part of that is because up until 2 weeks ago, my phone didn't work. We're on an electronic computer phone system. First number I was assigned was also assigned to someone else. The second number was all mine, but it had this nasty habit of switching to speaker phone and dialing a number that was never answered. They got that fixed, and it ceased delivering all the calls. Called that in and it started with the speaker phone calls again...But this time it had a live number. They finally gave up and assigned me a VOIP number. I think my phone has rang twice since then, both times my husband calling me about something. :)

You have my dream job!

Supporter, obviously.

I don't like my job and I do appreciate people who make it better. I am who you call when you can't pay your student loan, or when you have a question about your loan, etc..

I hate it when people call and start yelling at me. I can fix all your loan-related problems; don't be a d**k.

I also get lots of calls from moms who kids just died and they need to get the loans discharged, I talk to people with terminal diseases who want to know what happens to their loans when they die...

Be nice to me. I have your social security number, full name, birthdate, address and phone numbers. I can put you in default, I can flood your mailbox with confusingly conflicting notices, I can make your $1,563.72 of accrued interest capitalize and increase your monthly bill and I can change all your demographic information and take you off automatic debiting and make it so that you don't get notices when your bills start going late and you get your credit screwed up. Keep not in contact with us long enough without paying and we'll start garnishing your wages and taking your taxes.

On the other hand, I do get to help people. We have four branches of people who do the same job as me in four states and the two largest branches are paid per call and my branch is paid by the hour. I'm often told that no one else has taken the time to go through all their options and actually help make their debt more manageable.

I'd still like to not be chained with a phone and placed under a fluorescent light and being forced to stare at a computer screen all day.

Having a phone that makes mystery call is a dream job? LMAO!

Ok, maybe not the possessed demon phone part, but I do like the part where no one can call you. I started my first IT job a couple of months ago and it would be really great if I didn't get so many calls for stupid things.

Ah...I'm an applications developer, so very seldom does anyone want to talk to me. 50% of what I do is make more work for other people, and the other 50% the users don't really see.

I have loads of sales/telemarketing calls and I normally just mess with them until they hang up.

I had one guy who called during dinner and I asked him if he'd mind me "putting him on hold" he said he could wait a minute and I put the phone on the side and went and ate dinner, three-quarters of an hour later I went back to the phone and the guy was still there!

Another rang and started telling me he could reduce my debts, by which time I'd made my way outside, it was a windy day, and told him I was just about to do a Bungee jump so if he could wait until I'd done it I'd talk to him. Then followed some pretty decent acting on my part, a lot of screaming, whooping ect. When my "Bungee jump" finished and I was safety back on the ground I told him I was too excited to discuss it and he asked how the jump went, said it sounded like I'd enjoyed it, apologized and said he'd ring back another time.

Something else I do a fair bit is, when I've established that it's just another sales call, I tell them I'm very busy and ask if I could have their home telephone number so I can ring them back to chat about it at another time. One guy actually gave me his home number and then realized what he'd done and asked me if I could not call him at home :D

I've only been rude to one guy who rang from Australia and asked me if I dabbled in stocks and shares. I told him politely I wasn't interested and didn't want to discuss my personal business on the phone and he said, and I can quote as it only happen a few weeks ago "Well you're obviously too much of a thick c**t to realize a good opportunity when you hear one so why don't you just f**k off and die!!"
He then hung up. I found the companies telephone number and details on the internet and found out he was basically a one man operation.

Since then he's had a few hundred telemarketing calls and emails from me and a bunch of my friends trying to "sell" him everything from blow-up dolls to Elephant dung fertilizer that should have kept him busy and from abusing anyone else for a while.

I had some fun with one young man who called trying to get me to switch my phone service. I determined early on that this was his first call ever, so I decided to coach him (I used to do sales training). We were on the phone for about 20 minutes and I had him doing role plays and I would critique him. He thanked me profusely at the end.

And no, I didn't switch.

I wish you had been my first call. My first caller made fun of me and laughed at me. My second caller could definitely tell that I was new so he asked some random questions and you could tell he didn't really need to know, but he was just trying to give me some more experience. Of course, now I'm really good at what I do and am very relaxed.

The other day, I got a call from a woman and we talked for 30 minutes. We're not paid per call (the other branch is) and we weren't being monitored (you can tell) and it was awesome. We had the whole kindred spirit thing and instantly had a wonderful connection. We would have kept talking, but it was the end of the day and my car pool buddy wanted to get going. We exchanged e-mails and when I got home, I e-mailed her and she quickly e-mailed me back. It was cool :)

I also get a lot of calls from guys who try to hit on me and say that I sound pretty. I respond to that with "Well, I am pretty, but I can't talk about that at work. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

I have worked in 2 call centers, one was for a travel agent answering calls from their tv channel adverts and the other with a credit card company trying to sell insurance to people activating new cards.

The jobs themselves were horrible. The travel agent TV channel told people to "call up and get a quote" whereas we were targeted on how many holidays we sold, when all most of the people wanted was a quote.

I don't have many stories to tell apart from one time when I got the giggles really bad when I was trying to sell this woman a holiday which was based on a train. It was some sort of cross europe/asia holiday where she travelled through the night onboard the train and had a new stop every day. The woman in question was all set to go for it but had a question that she needed answering before she would book.

She asked me if the train had a pool onboard. This struck me as possibly the most stupid thing that anyone has ever said to me and I started sn****ring, then chuckling, then I started to giggle uncontrollably and copuldn't talk or breathe. My manager took over the call and I got a severe bollocking for it. I left not long after it.


The credit card company was worse no-one with any sense would ever buy insurance to cover credit cards as nearly all of them come with some kind of cover anyway. As for payment protection insurance the terms and conditions are so harsh that it is almost impossible to claim. I have been in sales for about 15 years and I have never found selling something so difficult in my life.

Put bluntly I hate call centers but they can be useful I managed to get AOL free for 3 years by calling up the call center and telling them I was cancelling due to poor service and getting given another free month.

Having been on both sides of the fence I don't abuse the staff but also having been in sales for so long I know when I'm being sold to and all the tricks and bulls**t they try. Needless to say I never buy anything from anyone over the Phone.

One thing I like about my job is that I know insider secrets.

I work at a call center for Federal Direct Student Loans.

Here's two facts, do as you wish with this info:

1. A forbearance is a suspension of payments which can be applied over the phone for up to 12 months at a time with no maximum.

2. When you die, your loans aren't passed on to your children, instead, they are forgiven.

Credit card debts are passed to everyone when you die and all cards have a shadow limit, just bover the actual limit which you can go up to without being penalised.