Padams posted:

I work for the local utility company in the call center and thankfully it’s a union shop, but holy poo poo it still sucks. The union does a good job at making sure the pay and benefits are decent, and keeping the field guys safe, but it also is really focused on the field workers at the expense of the call center employees. Sure we may not get electrocuted working 50 feet in the air in a snowstorm, but 5 of the 7 deaths at my company over the last 5 years have been from suicide. The company also likes to blame not being able to make changes for the better on being a union location, which is horseshit.

The place is chronically understaffed (which management blames on people calling in instead of building in enough slack) and customers often have been stewing in the queue for 10-15 minutes (at least) if there’s been a storm or if it’s a Monday at the start of/end of a college semester.

Widespread outages are the worst. Just a constant barrage of people screaming about their lights going out “every time it rains” (See tropical storm force winds in a heavily wooded area) and how they deserve priority because they have 90 year old parents and infant children in their home who all have asthma. It’s all very understandable, because it loving sucks to not have power and people can and have died from lack of power, but there’s precious little that I could do about it besides report the outage, which is probably already reported anyway due to a lack of signal from the meter. It just crowds out the people who actually have something useful to report (like the location of a downed tree limb or downed/arcing wires).

I just reached a year on the job recently, so I’m hoping to be able to transfer to something on the back end side of things like QA or an analyst position, but we’ll see. In the meantime, I have to maintain my sanity while being little more than a butt in the chair.