Great Falls

            The call center where I work is called Great Falls Marketing, though you wouldn’t know it unless you knew someone who presently worked there or worked there yourself. Even former employees lose track of the names on account of them changing all the time. There are alotta outside things that change about the place, like the lower-level salesfolk (the turnover rate’s higher than most fast food places), the managers who either get busted for doing drugs on the job or moving out of the city to find other work, and the many products. Like most places that base employee’s pay on commission, some products are considered more important than others. The importance of selling a certain product depends on how much money they pump into the call center. 

I guess that’s sorta obvious. Sorry.

You know those TV advertisements for products that seem to always cost just ‘one low payment of 19.95’? The butt-wipers, potted plant litter boxes, cure-all supplements, and specialty pancake grills? All those products meant to make some aspect of life significantly easier—those are the ones we sell at Great Falls. The highest call volumes occur early in the morning for the old fogies and stay-at-home mothers or late at night for the drunken prank-callers or unemployed fathers. Surprisingly, most of the people who invest their money in, well, what I’d consider mostly useless products are not the rich housewives of fat-cats with disposable incomes, but rather the poor folks, the working class, the very people that work at Great Falls. 

Anyhow, I’ve been working here for three years, which you’d think would give some kinda sense of job stability. That’s not the way it works here though, or, from what I understand, at alotta call centers. Even though the longer you’ve been there means you’ve had more time to work on your sales pitch and the more comfortable you become trying to desperately sell relatively useless products to old cranks who are hard of hearing and don’t have money, the fact is that the company has to pay you more for each sales you make the longer you’ve been there, and companies hate spending money when they don’t have to. What I’ve noticed is that callers already got their minds made up when they make the call anyway, so inexperienced youngsters who are grateful to make more than the minimum wage and can type faster and use the computer with more ease than us old folks make the best employees. It’s a real shame how that works. 

On the sales floor there’s not much community. Great Falls Marketing’s building is the shell of what used to be an Ames department store which went under like so many other stores did when the last of the factories moved out of Lewiston and there were no jobs, which meant no income coming in and therefore no money, gas, or motivation to visit different stores for all the family essentials. That’s when Wal-Mart came in, but that’s a story for another time. Like all department stores, the inside is huge—much bigger than you’d think on account of the aisles and department signs and tall shelves that are now absent. If you could take the roof off and have an aerial view of Great Falls’ insides, you’d see a labyrinth of desks with computers and swivel chairs placed in circles with gray cubicle walls only tall and wide enough to keep in each sales rep’s voice from bothering their neighbor. 

(unfinished)