When will tomorrow come?

Many of you may remember that at the end of the article I posted on Monday, I said I was going to get into the negative aspects of working at NDC "tomorrow." That was supposed to be Tuesday.

Some stuff has come up recently that I have to deal with and it takes away from the time that I use to write the blog. And I expect this situation to continue for awhile. So what this means is that I am taking an unexpected break from the blog.

In the meantime, I will leave you with a couple of images of spring. Here is a photo I took on the first day of spring, March 20th, five years ago:

This is where I used to work in Redwood City, CA. It's a shopping center in the Redwood Shores area, across the street from Electronic Arts. I have the same employer that I had then, but I transferred to a different location in Sunnyvale, CA. On March 20th of this year, I happened to be at the same location when Facebook showed me a memory from five years earlier. I took the opportunity to run outside and take a new photo:

You never know where your life is going to take you. Sometimes, it takes you forward. Other times, it takes you back. It's nice to go back every once in a while.

NDC: The Good

Despite the rough start working at NDC, I actually got to the point in which I was able to enjoy the work I did after a few months. The most positive aspect was that I no longer had an abusive boss to deal with. I was able to go weeks at a time without having any contact with my supervisor. I also found that the days were going by a lot more quickly and would typically end before I knew it.

I started appreciating the job for what it was. After I started qualifying for the bonuses, I was coming close to the money I was making at my previous job. I wasn't having to make a lot of sacrifices to stay at this job. I also enjoyed having two solid days off to do what I wanted, even if they weren't on the weekend. With my last job, I pretty much had to show up every single day to ensure that the tapes got loaded and were recording. This meant that if I wanted to go up to LA, I could do that without having to worry about getting back in time.

I found there were a lot of other nice things about working at NDC:

1. It could be a fun place to work. They were always planning all sorts of events that the Dispatch Agents could take part in. They had a pie-eating contest, a talent contest, company outings to local sporting events, etc. There was always something to look forward to.

2. Sometimes, they provided free food. They would occasionally come up with special lunches. They would have a pizza day, a taco day, an ice cream sundae bar, etc. They also provided donuts on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays. When I started working there and had Wednesdays and Thursdays off, it appeared that they had free donuts every day. But what I saw was leftovers from Saturday and Monday. I did wonder why the donuts didn't seem so fresh on Sunday and Tuesday.

3. The company provided benefits for full-time employees. This was the main reason I wanted to work here. I knew things were off with my health and wanted to make sure I could be taken care of in the event of another hernia or some other crisis. They provided medical, dental and vision benefits. I was also able to enroll in a retirement savings program. You could also accrue sick pay.

4. Reviews and raises were scheduled on a regular basis. After your first three months with the company, you received a review and an increase in your hourly wage. Another three months later, there was another review and increase. This pattern continued every six months afterward. Except for Inventory Auditors, Inc., I've never worked with any other company that did more than one increase a year.

5. You could volunteer to go home early. If call volume was low, the supervisors would run forecasts to see how many people could be sent home. Because low call volume affected the number of Revenue Units I could generate against the hours I was working, I always volunteered to go home early on Sundays. Working my scheduled hours would not have made up for losing anticipated bonuses.

6. You could clock in a few minutes late. Everyone was given a grace period with regards to clocking in for their shifts. You were not considered tardy unless you clocked in five minutes late or more. This helped me on a couple of occasions in which my alarm didn't go off. It generally took me 15 minutes to drive to work. If I woke up 10 minutes before my shift began and sped down the highway, I was able to make it just in the nick of time.

7. Perfect attendance was rewarded. If you went one calendar month with perfect attendance, you received one extra hour of vacation time. This was special vacation time. It could only be used if you requested it. You could use it to cover any time that you were permitted to leave early due to call volume. You could also accrue it and use it as extra vacation time. It wouldn't be taken away from you if you used up all your sick time (like regular vacation hours could be). Also, if you went three months in a row with perfect attendance, you got to get something for free from the NDC logo store. There was clothing, cups, water bottles, key chains and more. The one time I got this, I chose a blue denim shirt. The Casbah in San Diego used to have a MySpace page that featured a photo of me wearing that shirt. (Although I did look drunk in that photo. I don't know how that was possible because I don't consume alcohol.)

8. There were plenty of opportunities for advancement. NDC prided itself on promoting from within. Many of the people in executive positions in the company started out as Dispatch Agents. If there was an area you felt you would be good at, like supervising, managing, marketing, sales, Human Resources, etc., you could probably find what you were looking for and move up quickly.

For most of the time I was there, working at NDC was a positive experience. But there were a few things I didn't care much for, some of which is related to the list above. I'll cover that tomorrow.

So many bottles, so few pills

Sometimes, you wonder why over-the-counter medicine manufacturers bother with multi-packs.



I never did find a use for those other two bottles.

NDC: So many messages

As with any job, there's weird stuff that goes on. It wasn't supposed to be weird, but it was a bit of a challenge at NDC to send messages that clearly weren't intended for the expected purpose.

I had mentioned earlier how the pagers were used by a lot of well-known people in the entertainment and sports industries. By the time I started working there, it didn't happen so often. Or if it did, I was rarely aware I was sending a message to someone well-known. Every once in awhile, the caller would mention the name of the recipient. I recall the message was about the subscriber being behind on her account and her car was about to be repossessed. She mentioned the person's name in the message and then said, "Oh, wait. I shouldn't have said her name." I told her it didn't really matter. I assume that the celebrities started telling people who had their pager numbers not to mention who the messages were going to. This should have served as evidence that the alpha-numeric pager industry was starting to go into decline.

I was responsible for dispatching a lot of messages that pertained to many other industries, including financial, medical, maintenance, retail, delivery, oil, etc. Many were run of mill routine issues, but more often than not, callers would leave very personal messages intended for the recipients.

More often than you would believe, I would get callers leaving the following message: "Boo, this is Boo. I love you, Boo. Call me back. Love, Boo." That was SUCH a waste of Revenue Units. And I'll be the subscribers complained when their bills came back so high. And if these were pagers paid for by a company, administration did have access to the messages.

Every once in awhile, I would get a caller wanting to leave a very long-winded message for the subscriber. These messages were very personal and very long and generally detailed the ending of a relationship. They were so long, I would run out of room for all the words. I would inform the caller of this and they would say to send the message, but they wanted another message sent because they hadn't said all they wanted to. This would usually go on two more times. The maximum amount of messages we could send to a single recipient was four. If the caller still wanted to continue, we had to make them call back and get another Dispatch Agent. While I was taking these messages, all I could do was wonder why the caller couldn't just contact the recipient by phone and say all this. Did the subscriber decide they weren't going to talk on the phone anymore and this was going to be their primary means of communication for the rest of their lives? Did the subscriber feel the extra revenue units were worth making the caller mad at them? I never got answers to these questions, but I do know they probably did not have their pagers forever.

We would also get phone calls of a harassing nature. There was a Kaiser doctor's group in Florida. We would often get calls from a gang I call the "Kaiser Kids." It sounded like teenagers calling and pranking us. Someone would come on the line and ask if we had anyone who spoke a foreign language, like Italian or French. (We only had Spanish Dispatch Agents.) If no one spoke the language, they would offer to send a message in English. The message usually contained a profanity. Another agent once told me they had managed to get an Italian speaker on the line and it turned out the kids didn't really speak Italian. But this went on for the almost two years that I worked there. I tended to think of the Kaiser Kids as being like Beavis and Butthead. If you remember the episode in which they prank call a stranger named "Harry Butts," they keep calling him up for months. For them, the joke never got old. That was how it was for these kids.

Of course, there were the calls that were sexually harassing. For the most part, it was women who received them. I noticed that on a couple of accounts, after I read the greeting, whoever it was on the line would hang up. On Sundays, it would happen over and over again with the same account. I found out later that when the caller got a female, he would say perverted things. Since the subscriber's name was included in the greeting, we always knew when the harasser was calling. And we suspected that the caller was the subscriber himself.

Then there was the "Roadkill Caller." Some man would call up a specific account and start leaving the message if a female was on the line. The message said that he had a good time with the recipient. He recalled how they laughed when they had run over a squirrel and when she farted, it smelled good. I knew about the message because many of the female Dispatch Agents actually sent that message out. The subscriber was livid that she was receiving these messages. (However, I noticed she never changed her pager number.)

I myself did once receive a sexually harassing call from a male caller. It was a pager for a chiropractor's office. The caller started, "I have a bone. It goes up, but it won't go down. It's a boner!" GRRRR! I hung up on that guy.

I guess the worst thing about the harassers is that we couldn't do anything about them. We couldn't track them. We couldn't have them arrested. We couldn't make it impossible for them to call us up. We were at their mercy. But I can't tell you how much I would have loved to locate those Kaiser Kids and teach them a lesson, Harry Butts-style.

NDC: How it worked

So, how did NDC make money from messages being sent to alpha-numeric pagers? Enough money to pay around 1,500 Dispatch Agents and a hundred administrators? It's relatively simple. Subscribers had to pay a monthly rate for their pagers. Subscribers also had to pay extra for the pages they received.

I don't know for a fact, but I think each monthly subscription included a certain number of what were referred to as "Revenue Units." If you exceeded your allotment of Revenue Units for the month, you had to pay about 10 cents for each unit you went over your allotment. (Akin to going over on your data plan on your mobile phone.) On most pagers, each Revenue Unit was comprised of 20 characters. Since most pagers could hold 100 characters, it was possible for one message to take up five Revenue Units. If a page only contained 20 characters, that would be one Revenue Unit. If the page contained 21 characters, that was two Revenue Units. Since the bonuses were tied to the number of Revenue Units the agents produced each month, many would do what they could to pop the message into an extra Revenue Unit. Sometimes, this included double-spacing at the end of a sentence. Sometimes, it was fully spelling out words that could be abbreviated (like "meeting" instead of "MTG").

I mentioned in an earlier post that the service was notably used by people in the sports and entertainment industries. There were a lot of other businesses that used the pagers on a regular basis, like Wall Street firms, sanitation companies, delivery services, medical offices, maid services, etc. We served a variety of users.

But some pagers were clearly being used strictly for personal needs, many of them VERY personal needs (but there were certain words and phrases we were forbidden from using). As long as they were paying for those Revenue Units, it really didn't matter what the caller wanted sent out as long as we could rack up the fees.

Every once in a while, I would get a request to send out a message to an entire group of pagers. This meant I could really rack up the revenue units on just one call. It was nice to do something that would get me closer to making bonus each month.

If there were any complaints about people or companies feeling they were being overbilled for Revenue Units, we never heard about it. No one ever issued any memos about sticking to the mandatory abbreviations or anything. The company just seemed to be happy letting us run up those charges on the clients as we wished.

This is how we earned bonuses: Each Dispatch Agent had to generate a certain number of Revenue Units as compared to the number of hours that were worked each month. In addition, the Average Handle Time (AHT) had to be less than 40 seconds and Quality Assurance scores had to average above 90%. Also, you couldn't have any active written warnings on your record.

My AHT was less than 60 seconds per call during my first week. However, I found I improved to the expectation by the end of the month. It really didn't take long to adjust my speed. After awhile, I was handling close to 500 calls a day when I worked my Monday, Tuesday and Friday shifts. Saturdays were a little slower and Sundays were WAY slower.

I did not qualify for the bonus at first because one needs to have been working the full month. I didn't begin my shift until January 10th. But even if I did qualify, I wouldn't have had enough Revenue Units. I had to consider that first month a wash. But just as my onsite trainer predicted, I was able to meet all the goals for February and I continued to do so for the next six months. I never did make the "Top 10%" bonus. The main reason why was because I wasn't producing enough Revenue Units on Sundays. If I didn't work Sundays, I probably would have been able to make that extra bonus. But as I found out later, the "Top 10%" was not out of all the Dispatch Agents, it was only out of those who made bonus. So if only 150 agents made bonus, there were only 15 who got that extra bonus.

And I guess I should visit how the ladder for promotions was set up. The call center was broken up into various teams. Each team could have anywhere from 30 to 60 Dispatch Agents. Each team had a Supervisor. Each Supervisor had an assistant, referred to as a Lead Dispatch Agent, or LDA. Since most teams at the Chesapeake location had employees working all seven days a week, there would be a couple of days that the Supervisor wasn't there, but the LDA was, and vice versa. Usually, the Supervisor had the weekend off and the LDA had to work then. Above the Supervisors were the Call Center Managers. When I started work, there were three of them. Above the manager was the Director of Operations. After that, you get into Chief Operations Officer and Vice President territory.

So this serves as a breakdown of what kept NDC running. Tomorrow, I'll look at some of the more interesting aspects of the job.

NDC:The first day

I showed up for my first shift at NDC before 3:30am on January 10th, 2000. I was about 10 minutes early. I hadn't received my badge yet, but was able to get in by tailgating another employee. However, once I got in, I realized I left a lot of stuff I needed in the car. I went back out, but I wasn't lucky enough to catch an employee to tailgate with. There was a doorbell I was supposed to ring. It took about five minutes for someone to show up and let me in. I almost clocked in late.

I found a supervisor and told him it was my first day. His name was Mr. M. Even though he started his shift about the same time as me, he was not going to be my supervisor. My supervisor was Mr. O, who wouldn't be in until 7am. (And honestly, that did not make sense to me at the time. Why would they assign me to a supervisor I wouldn't see for nearly half my shift?).

Mr. M gave me my password so I could log in and start taking calls. He also gave me my break and lunch schedule. I was told I could sit at any open cubicle. I looked around for one with an ergonomic keyboard since Thoz had warned me about getting carpal tunnel syndrome. This was the first time I had worked with such a keyboard. It took a little getting used to. I logged in and the first thing I knew, I had a call on my screen. I quickly forgot everything I had learned in the previous week. It took me a moment to regain myself and figure out what to do. I was able to take the message and dispatch it. As soon as that call was over, I got another call and dispatched another message. They had a lot of people start their shifts at 3:30am because that's when calls from the East Coast started to roll in.

I basically did my job without interacting with anyone else there at the call center. It was so strange to be somewhere with about 200 people and no one to talk to. Looking at my break and lunch schedule, I found I didn't like how it was set up. I took my first break at 5:15am, my 30 minute lunch at 7:15am and my last break at 10:45am. This meant I had to work more than four hours after my lunch and two hours after my last break. I decided to skirt this a bit by taking those about seven minutes later than I was assigned. They'd already screwed me out of a decent shift, I wasn't going to let them do it to me with my break schedule. (However, having worked in supervisory positions in which I was in charge of overseeing breaks and lunches, I do understand why my schedule was set up like that. If everyone coming in at 3:30am takes their breaks and lunches at the same time, it messes up the call volume.)

One of the things I noticed later on during the day was that no lunch truck appeared here like it did at the Balboa Ave. location. There wasn't any room in the parking lot. At any rate, this wasn't going to do me any good since my lunch was scheduled for 7:15am. I doubt any food trucks would show up that early.

Sometime after my lunch, a man came to my cubicle. He was Filipino and appeared to be around 25 years old. He introduced himself as Mr. O, my supervisor. (I was 35 at the time.) He asked me to go with him. We went around the call center and he got two other agents in the same manner, a man and a woman. We went into a conference room. He brought us all together to present us with our new hire packets. The packets went into detail about the company policies, including attendance. Included in the packet was a special offer to join 24 Hr. Fitness. NDC would pay the initiation fee. I just had to pay the $19 a month membership fee. And if we stopped working for NDC, the membership would continue as long as we paid the monthly fee.

One of the bad things about NDC was that you had to be employed there full time for six months before you could start receiving benefits. You also had to work at least 1,000 hours before you could start having money taken out for a 401(k) retirement plan. I didn't like that I was going to have to wait so long for health insurance, but I figured it would be worth sticking it out.

Mr. O was my first real exposure to one particular aspect Filipino culture. Anytime we were talking about work-related issues, he would call me "sir." This was rather startling to me. (Even though I was 35, I still rarely had anyone address me like that.) I figured this was how they address all those they presumed were older than them. (In my future dealings with Filipinos, this actually turned out to be the case.) But I wasn't the only employee put off by it. A co-worker about my age complained about it. "I want to say, 'Quit calling me Sir! You're MY boss!'"

At 12pm, it was time for me to go home. I clocked out, left work, drove home and crashed. I didn't know if I would get used to this.

It turns out I would. The best thing about this is that after 18 years, I am still a member of 24 Hr. Fitness. And I still only pay $19 a month.

NDC: The Interview and Training Process

In December of 1999, Mr. N announced that News Monitoring Services was going to switch to a new monitoring software after the beginning of the new year. I didn't like the direction this was going and seriously contemplated going back to apply at NDC. When Mr. N yelled at me for not recording something after he had posted a notice on our intranet (which did not appear on my computer), I walked out the door and drove straight to NDC. They were in the middle of another job fair. There were about 30 people applying for jobs. I filled out the application and took the spelling test. When they announced the results, I was the only one who scored 100%. There were 10 people who didn't score the desired minimum of 80%, so they had to leave. I passed the typing test with 50 wpm. The minimal requirement was 20 wpm. There were about 5 people who didn't pass that. I always wondered what those people thought when they didn't pass. Did they get mad at themselves for not trying harder in school, or did they blame NDC for being too picky about who they hired?

I got called back for an interview. I was told that the job paid about $8 an hour. (That was $2.50 an hour less than I was currently making.) If I worked an early morning shift that started before 5am, I would get a $1 an hour differential The interviewer said there was also a bonus program for hitting certain performance goals. If I qualified for the bonus, I would get an extra $100 a month. And there was an additional bonus if you ranked among the top 10% of the agents, another $50 a month. And if you were the #1 productive agent for the month, you got a $500 bonus. This made the job more desirable.

They called me back to let me know they wanted to hire me. The woman I talked to said they had a shift working 4:30am to 1pm and I would get Fridays and Saturdays off. THAT SOUNDED GREAT! Then she said, "Wait, that shift's already filled up. I have a shift from 3:30am to 12pm with Wednesday and Thursday off. How about that?" That was a less desirable shift, but since it meant getting the extra $1 an hour, I took it.

I was told that my training would begin on Tuesday, January 4th, 2000. I would train for four hours a day for four days. At the end of the training, I would have to pass a test. If I passed, I would go through an evaluation on site before officially starting my shift. I felt good about starting the new year with a new job.

There were about 15 people in my training class. The instructor was a rather attractive woman a couple of years younger than me and made learning everything fun. The interesting part was when she had us each take live phone calls from actual callers who wanted to send out messages. Everyone who did this appeared to grasp the concept of what to do. She instructed us very well.

The training took place at the newer location on Balboa Ave. The call center was large and there was plenty of space for all the cubicles. They also had a nice lunch room with a ping-pong table. There were food trucks that came by on a regular basis. This looked like a really nice atmosphere in which to work.

After completing the class and passing the test, I was given a time to show up on Saturday to go through the final evaluation and the name of the person I was supposed to work with. This would be a four-hour session. I had to complete this in order to start working. If I didn't go through this, I would have to wait a few days for my next opportunity for onsite training. I wouldn't be able to start earning money until this final step was completed.

I showed up the next morning at NDC's original Chesapeake Drive location. (The Balboa Ave. call center was only open Monday through Friday.) I was completely unprepared for what I was about to see. It was all these cubicles in cramped spaces. With everyone talking at the same time, it was also very noisy. The lunch room was significantly smaller and just as cramped as the call center. Even worse was that it also had a ping-pong table that took up a lot of space. It was as if the agents who worked there complained that the new call center had a ping-pong table, so those in charge brought one over and stuck it there just to make them happy. If my friends were forced to work at this location, I suddenly understood their discontent.

After getting over the shock of the egregious bait and switch that had been pulled, I tried to find a supervisor to locate the woman I was supposed to complete my onsite training with. There was a woman at what appeared to be a supervisor station. (There were several such stations scattered throughout the call center among the cubicles.) She said she would try to locate the trainer. After about 15 minutes, she came back and said she didn't know where the agent was. However, she knew of another person who should be able to do the training with me.

She took me over to this man and asked if he could do the training. He seemed hesitant at first, but agreed to go ahead and do it. (As it turned out, my trainer called in sick. The man had a training scheduled for that afternoon, but I showed up 45 minutes after he started his shift. If he did two trainings, that would put him into overtime and NDC did not think much of overtime.) He started my training.

He had me take a few live calls and run through a few drills. He gave me a few tips on things I could improve. He said he was impressed with my performance and predicted that I would be making bonus during my first month of eligibility. He then took me over to the supervisor to report I had passed. The supervisor told me to show up for my first shift on Monday. I said I thought I would start Sunday, the next day. She said they don't start people on Sunday. That meant one less day I was going to be earning money. I wasn't too pleased about that. (We also found out that the person the trainer was supposed to work with that afternoon didn't pass the class, so he didn't have to worry about overtime or having to rush the training. If he had declined to train me, I would have had no way of making money for at least a couple of days.)

While I dreaded the idea that I had just committed to working here, it was definitely going to be better than going back to work for Mr. N.