Temporary Office Obligation

There’s no worse feeling in the world when you realize that you aren’t special. Not the kind of special that gives you an edge over everyone else, but the kind of special people delude themselves into believing to avoid the reality that they are replaceable. That’s what I figured out I am. Replaceable. There are women (and maybe men) like me who feel insecure, anxious about dealing with a world you were never prepared for, and knowing that survival often means complacency. I’m not shocked by me feeling like I’m replaceable. I’m replaceable in my job (though I hope that isn’t the case) and in my mind. The only way I know I can’t be replaced is with my family and my relationships, but even then I feel like I don’t belong in the world. It’s as if the world wasn’t made for someone like me. It’s continuing and moving on without me.

Growing up, our loved ones are trained to tell us that we are unique, we can be anything you want to be, and the world needs us. This is a truth and a lie. There are aspects about us humans making us appear different from others. Physically, no one is truly identical. Mentally, we all have something “wrong” and “abnormal” in and about us. Emotionally, we all have our own way of handling and dealing with the good and bad in the world; some are better at it than others. As we grow, some people want to become different things and have their own title. There are universal titles we carry: human, complex, and mysterious. We carry these titles without even knowing it, and some try to deny it. But I feel having some form of a title keeps us sane, it’s just a matter of trying to find the title you are willing to keep. Some titles are valuable to our world: doctors, scientists, teachers, truth seekers, people procreating to sustain the population. Overall, some things just can’t measure up.

I am not one of much importance. I’m a woman in her early twenties in a job for mere means of security and survival. I handle those who seek to decipher technology and when they can’t, I’m branded as incompetent and a burden. There are those who seek to help me overcome my feelings of inadequacy, but it feels like their solutions are recycled sayings you can find in the introductions of motivational books. While I can tell they believe in me and want me to succeed, I want to apply what they know and tell me into something I can be truly passionate about. Helping someone figure out their phone is good for some, but not for me. Sitting in a cubicle and wearing a headset is not what I want to do until I reach some unknown age where I’m living on retirement.

Where was the moment when I believed I wasn’t any different from anyone else? I don’t know. I was somewhat different in my life so far; I knew what I wanted to be at a young age, wrote a list of schools offering degrees in the field of study I’d eventually graduate in, once copied a book to know how the writing process was like in elementary or middle school, and preferred books that didn’t necessarily have happy endings. Maybe that prepared me for life, as much as it can prepare an eleven-year-old at the time. All of a sudden, you identify yourself with those opposing figures in the media, and then you become an adult. At least, that’s what I heard. All those teens qualifying that the ages between thirteen and sixteen equates to adulthood become a laughable fallacy. Grand gestures lose their sincerity, half-baked apologies are no longer enough, and flawed characters aren’t beloved. So where does it leave us? Where does it leave me?

Right now, I’m at a point in my life where I don’t have much of a choice than to suck up my negative feelings about my job what I position in life. I need the money to cover my expenses. I need my resume to reflect someone who isn’t flighty post college. I have too much anxiety about how others would read me—figuratively and literally—to leave a job where my drive over on most days is me fighting against the urge to throw up or cry. For now, I’m escaping in my books and time filling videos during my available time and sweating out my frustration in my workouts.

There are “team meetings” every month, but no one ever seems to be honest in them. They say what is on their minds, but they also don’t. “I had a customer that…” “What do I do if a customer…” “Are there anymore classes for…”

One of the few times I’ve been as close to blunt during my one on ones were explaining my frustrations about how some of the customers rub off on me, thus affecting my tone and attitude with upcoming customers and prospects, feeling lost when a situation I have minimal experience with comes up, and the feeling of being useless when customers don’t understand my supposed simplified instructions. I get the pep talk and promise to work on some key aspects to bring my numbers up within the company, and I’m able to complete my shift in a fairly better mood.

The mood elevates further once I am home. My filter is gone and the words swimming in my mind that could cause major injury vanish. My negatively lingers and fades when I have love and the belief I will make something of my life wrap himself around me. We enjoy our young love and our conversations bordering on nonsense to existential.

“I just want to be better for you,” I told him once.

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to be proud of me. I deal with the bullshit of those who don’t know how to turn their phone on or off, let alone how to type in a text message. I thought I’d make more of my life than being a voice on a headset typing something into a computer. They forget my name and mispronounce it to a point where it makes me resent my own name.”

“No matter what I’m proud of you. You’re valuable to them since they promoted you. You’re only twenty-three; this is temporary. You’ve become everyone else—stuck in a job you hate to pay bills.”

Day after day, I feel like my faith in humanity dips and sways like an EKG machine monitoring one’s heartbeat. For every person who thanks me and says that should have a good day, there’s twice as many people who get mad at me for things I “should be able to control” such as how long it would take for an order to arrive and knowing exactly what is on a phone. There are times where I want to firmly remind them how they called me to help and screaming at me doesn’t do anything except prevent me from offering advice and alternatives to the problem. Some understand it’s not my fault. They’re patient and I’m happy for that. Then there are ones that make me want to cry. One screamed at me for not bending the company rules for her and saying she would make sure I got fired. She made it worse by saying I would never work in customer service and that my day would end by telling my husband I’d been essentially blacklisted from working any job. Another customer wouldn’t get off the phone until I got a supervisor despite me saying more than ten times that one was not available and her options would be for me to send the necessary information to a supervisor where they can call her within an hour or try again when one is available.

I wish I understood why our customer base feel as if we have nothing better to do than assist them with hyperbolic grievances. “Why is my camera stuck in selfie mode? The world doesn’t need to see that!!”… “Why doesn’t my phone ring?” … “I can’t find the dial pad on my iPhone. Where is it?” … “I don’t why I have to give you my information. Don’t you already have it on your computer?”

There are days where I come home and all I want to do is close my eyes and forget the world. I try to regain some semblance of what I was a few hours prior, maybe enough to have the desire to create new life and new words on print. More often than not, it feels exhausting to dive into my desires. I just pray I don’t lose my heart, my soul, or myself. For now, I am programmed to survive, but I must leave before my mechanical face becomes my identity.