I had gotten fed up with my job at News Monitoring Services. The verbal abuse I suffered on a daily basis was no longer worth making a living watching TV. I felt like a comic book store employee (but with better pay). I was aware of the National Dispatch Center because Thoz had worked there.
One of the hot products in the latter years of the 1990s was the alpha-numeric pager. Users could receive short written messages on the devices. If someone wanted to send a message to someone with one of these pagers, they had to call NDC, speak to a Dispatch Agent, recite the message and have it sent out. Thoz told me exciting stories of messages that she sent out to celebrities who used them. She said that the pagers were mostly used by professional basketball players for their hookups. And every once in awhile, the celebrities who had the pagers would call in themselves to get their messages.
I got mad at Mr. N in 1998 and decided to try my luck there. Thoz said it was a decent place to work, but I ran the risk of getting carpal tunnel syndrome. I showed up at one of their job fairs, filled out an application and took their spelling and typing test. I passed both. They called me back for an interview. However, they paid significantly less than my current job and I didn't have a car to get to work. I would have had to take the bus, which took about 90 minutes to get there and 90 minutes to get back. It wasn't the right time for me.
(Additionally, Wiz and several of my friends had worked there at one point or another. None of them had nice things to say about it.)
A little background: NDC began as a startup in someone's garage. The demand for the alpha-numeric pagers quickly grew and the company had to expand into a facility in the Kearny Mesa area of San Diego. They set up a full-scale operations and call center on Chesapeake Drive. There were hundreds of cubicles spread across several rooms on the ground floor. After a couple more years, that still was not enough space for all the Dispatch Agents, so the company built a new building from the ground up to house an additional call center and administrative offices. This was located about a mile away. They incorporated other services, like voice mail transcriptions that would be sent out to the pagers. The company was one of San Diego's success stories.
After I was hired, they began a new product called Servistream, which provided operators who could help customers navigate their way through corporate websites. The Internet economy was booming and NDC was keeping on top of it. They were banking on Servistream being the main future of the company.
In 2001, the company changed its name from National Dispatch Center to Aradiant in an effort to increase its marketability as an all-encompassing company, not just one that sent out messages to pagers.
However, you're likely aware of the fate of alpha-numeric pagers and the Internet in 2001. As the popularity of texting through Blackberries and cell phones began to rise, business went downhill more swiftly than it went up. Aradiant never did recover.
I'll be sharing more of my experience with the company in posts to come.
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