Episode 09 – Mental Health And Customer Service – Transcript
Hey everyone. Welcome to Twisted Thinking, the podcast that helps you keep your thoughts flexible. My name is Kristin and today we’re talking about the job that broke me and how I’ve learned to appreciate both the job and the mental struggles that came from it.
Just a really quick content warning here, nothing in depth or detailed, but I will be discussing, um, my mental health in the form of illness, treatment, and other things that may go along with it, including unhealthy thoughts. So if that will trigger or bother you, you may wanna skip this episode.
First thing, the job that broke me. It wasn’t just one job. It was a job, genre, a grouping of similar jobs in the same career path. And it’s one that all of us are familiar with. That is customer service. Not just any customer service though – call center customer service. Yeah. For 17 years, I was the voice on the other end of the phone, apologizing for any inconvenience and offering you a, I don’t know, $5 credit on your next bill.
There’s a lot of people out there who think that call center work is really easy. You know, it’s just, we’re, we’re just talking on the phone all day, right?
Yeah. Wrong. These people are so wrong. Working customer service, any customer service, but especially off-site where you aren’t face to face with the person you’re talking to… It’s a lot like being in an abusive relationship. And that is not a joke. I am being serious.
You talk to anywhere from I don’t know, 20 to 120 people a day, and all of them have a problem that they all blame you for, even though you had absolutely nothing to do with it.
They constantly treat you as less than human. The majority of them, not all of them, not all of them, but you’re yelled at, you’re called names. You’re threatened. You’re cursed. You’re insulted. I’ve had bomb threats called in to the call centers that I’ve worked at. And we’re talking like cell phones and stuff, not state secrets or anything.
And all of this happens all day, every day that you’re there. You have to ask permission to leave your desk because you’re being paid to take calls and if you aren’t there to take calls, then you are not doing your job, basically. So if it isn’t your break time, um, and you have to go to the bathroom or grab a snack, or if you have an emergency and you need to call home, well, you better hope you have a supervisor who’s gonna cover for you, otherwise you risk getting written up and losing your job, honestly.
And you do all of this for 8to 12 hours a day, 5, 6, sometimes 7days a week. The mental stress of having to meet your metrics while still doing a good job is really high.
Then when you add in the emotional strain of having to just smile and take all of this abuse, because as we say in the industry, “it’s not personal”, that can become absolutely overwhelming.
I can’t think of a single person I have ever known in my entire career that has not been mentally and physically just drained by this. It is brutal.
But you need the job. You need the paycheck; you need the benefits. And so, as happens so often in an abusive relationship, you stay and you go home and you go to bed and then you get up and you do it again every day. Until you can’t.
And that’s what happened to me. One day. I just couldn’t.
My first call center job was with a company called Sallie Mae. And a lot of you who are my age, you’re probably familiar with this name. It’s a – it was the largest student loan company in the eighties, nineties in the early aughts. And they had a huge call center in my hometown.
I had never done that kind of work before. But as it turned out, I was good at it. So good at it. In fact, that soon after training ended, I was promoted to something we called the senior split, and it was basically all of those tricky accounts with special circumstances as well as escalated calls. So if you asked for a supervisor, I was – I or one on my team were who you talked to.
Anyway, I was working there during the attack on the world trade center in 2001. And the reason I mentioned this is because that was the first time that I really understood what kind of good customer service reps could do. So many people were affected by those attacks, of course. And a lot of those people had student loans with Sallie Mae, and all of them needed special assistance.
And being on the escalation team, we dealt with them regularly. And that really allowed me to understand what a kind word or a sympathetic ear can do for a person whose world has just been changed so dramatically. And this experience is why when I left Sallie Mae, instead of going into a different line of work where it wasn’t so bad, I went with another call center job and then another and another, and so on and so forth.
And I just kind of got stuck in the cycle. Fast forward to 2016 and I’m in Boise, Idaho and the previous few years had been, , yeah, really topsy-turvy. And I was dealing with some major stuff mentally, physically, you know, everything. So I was surviving, but I was definitely not thriving.
One morning. I woke up to my alarm and the thought of going to work and facing another 10 hour day filled with screaming customers, a boss who didn’t care and a company that was devoid of any compassion. It just drained me. I wasn’t filled with despair or anger, or sadness. None of that. I was just empty. I had nothing more to give. And I walked over to the window of my second-floor apartment. I looked out, and I just thought, “I should jump”.
And that scared me. Not – not the thought, the thought, unfortunately, wasn’t that out of the ordinary, but that feeling of emptiness, that total lack of emotion inside of me, when I thought about it was what scared me and… that fear saved me.
So instead of jumping, I got dressed, and I went to the hospital and I was admitted into a psychiatric facility for a couple of weeks. And during that time, I was able to take short-term disability. And for those of you outside of the US, this is something that a company can provide as a benefit. So if you are, um, medically unable to work, you can still receive a portion of your paycheck.I think for like up to six months or something, I don’t remember. It’s something sort of like Krankengeld here in Germany, if you’re familiar with that.
So I was off work for a few months, and soon I was feeling better. I had made some positive changes. Moved out of my old apartment. I was renting a room from a really supportive friend who was just wonderful and I had started a relationship with my now wife.
Things were really looking up. And so I went back to work, and I was back for a few weeks, I think. And my review came.
And the review was bad. It basically said something like, I don’t know, my performance was lacking. My numbers were falling. I missed too much work, and it ended with my supervisor warning me that I was on probation and that if I continued to miss my metrics, or if I missed any more time, I would be fired.
As you can imagine. It didn’t sit very well with me. My barely healed brain just couldn’t take it. I, I couldn’t understand. And it broke… it completely broke. I went into what was diagnosed at the time as psychotic depression. And basically that was all the symptoms of major depressive disorder and, um, auditory and tactile hallucinations.
So I had another hospital stay. And when I was released, I had to attend a day program where I was able to go home at night, but I had to go to special classes every day for like six days a week. I think it was. Several hours a day. And I think it was for like a month. I, I don’t know, things are still a little fuzzy, but these classes, they were designed to help you figure out what your triggers were and to learn about things like unhealthy environments and coping mechanisms and these sorts of things.
And what I discovered while I was going through this class was that basically, my job was just one huge unhealthy trigger for me. And so I was left with what? You know, uh – I, I didn’t know what to do with my life because suddenly I knew that if I went back to work I wasn’t gonna make it much longer, but at the same time, that’s all I was qualified to do.
So I talked with my partner, and she lived in Germany. And she said, look, why don’t you come and stay with me for a couple of months, three months specifically, because that’s how long you have on a US passport without a visa. Um, why don’t you come and stay with me for a few months and, uh , we’ll figure it out.
You know, you can start writing again and you can try and build a whole new career so that when you go back, you won’t have to go back to customer service. You can figure out what to do.
And I had literally nothing left to lose at that point. So I said yes. I rode out my short-term disability. And while I waited for that, I got all of my US affairs in order. I bought a round-trip ticket to Berlin. I sold everything. I didn’t need stored or threw away what I couldn’t sell and I packed a couple suitcases and got on a plane.
I had no plan, but at that point, it made no difference. Uh, the last few years of my life had been so awful, and I owed a healthy portion of that to my job.
The fact that I thought death was preferable to going to work illustrates that point very well, I think.
And so that is the job that broke me. And you might think that I would hate it. You might think I would curse it and wish I had never walked into the building the first day, but you would definitely be wrong.
This is actually one of the easiest things in my life that I have ever been able to twist around and make a positive. And all I have to do to do that is to look at the skill set that I learned, the ability to talk to strangers, learning how to empathize, how to show compassion, how to quickly form rapport with someone I’ve never met deescalation techniques diction, you know, learning how to speak to people.
Like I can’t even list all the things that I walked away with. And without them, I wouldn’t have had any idea of how to start this podcast. And right now, this podcast is one of the biggest blessings in my life.
As for the two breakdowns, 0/10 would not recommend. I, I even hesitate to say, you know, that they made me stronger or anything like that because trauma is trauma and it sucked.
But what those experiences did do is they stripped away everything so that when I was presented with the otherwise terrifying opportunity to change my life, I had no reason to say no. My fear of change was overwhelmed by my fear of things staying the same. And as a reward for taking that step, those three months have into six years, almost. They’ve turned into a marriage, a new culture, a new language, extended family, new friends, and a whole list of amazing experiences. Not to mention the fact that I was able to escape the career that was killing me.
Just for these few reasons are why I will never regret my call center work or my psychiatric struggles, no matter how bad they’ve been.
So this is usually the place in the show that I put a pretty bow on whatever we’ve been talking about and wrap it up nice and neat. But today I admit I don’t have that and so now I’d like to know.
How can you, how do you think you can take this story and use it to twist your experiences around? Do you have any experience that’s similar? I would really like to know. So get in touch and let’s talk about it.
That’s all for today. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, head over to podchaser.com/twisted thinking and leave a review. If something I said caught your attention and you wanna continue the conversation, I invite you to join my discord server. It’s free and easy to use. Just click on the link in the show notes. You can also find me on Facebook or Instagram @twistedthinking22. That’s at twistedthinking22. Big thanks to my patrons, without them none of this would be possible. Thank you so much for listening until next time, be blessed and stay twisted