When I started I thought, there is only one way that I will get to see the world. This is it. This is my only chance. If I blow it, I am a failure, and I will never get another. Being that I have only experience and no education I thought that getting a travel discount on the tours that GCT offered was my only ticket to see the world.
The company feeds off of this fear/hope just like the army- for people that have wonder-lust and no means to fund it. Do you want to see the world? Are you giving up hope on any other form of a future? Sign here. We'll show you the way,
I have often referred to my relationship with this job as an "abusive relationship" like that of one with a boyfriend, I hated it and felt abused by the "CULTure" but the benefits far outweighed the personal detriment. I stayed every time I wanted to leave becacause: health insurance, security, TRAVEL.
The fact of the matter however was that I worked in A CALL CENTER. Not just any call center, but one that forced you to subscribe to a culture that many veterans of the company would refer to as "cult like". They would always warn against "drinking the cool-aid".
This was very much akin to "the rope yard" as Tom Robbins put it.
“If you lack the iron and the fuzz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.” - Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
The tours did in fact bring you places you may never go- but you went as a tourist. Your days and nights were planned for you. Mostly you stayed in cozy, comfy, safe hotels. The tour guides reminded me of baby-sitters. Rounding up the oldies and us few young employees on and off of tour buses, "whispers" (hand held wireless audio guide systems) in hand.
All of the people that DO drink the coolaid will say the same things. It's not that bad. Work hard and you can move up. The travel benefits make it all worth while...blah blah blah. What exactly are they talking about?
You answer phones all day long, one after the other until you practically lose your voice and feel you might possibly go blind from staring so pain-stakingly at your computer screen. The entitled ass-holes you talk to all day are impatient, mean, domineering, rude, or worse- lonely and sad. It would take me about an hour every day after work to feel half-way sane enough to have a normal conversation with a friend.
You make exactly the amount that it takes to be just over the poverty line. Hooray.
You have not made it in any sense of the word. Your daily life sucks. You tuck away all that frustration while looking forward to a few weeks out of the year when you get to go on vacation only to come back still feeling empty, and getting back to the grind to do it all over again until next year.
I couldn't do it anymore. I needed to build a life that was worth living instead of one in which all I did was wait longingly for my vacation from it.
I couldn't do it anymore. I needed to build a life that was worth living instead of one in which all I did was wait longingly for my vacation from it.
