It's over

So, I resigned my position today. Yep, I did it. After complaining about my job for the past two months, I finally got to the point where I felt I could not go on.

The caller who took me down -- that is, the caller who became the proverbial Last Straw -- was a white woman (of course), and while I was talking to her (read: being screamed at by her), I really thought she might be from Oklahoma. But she turned out to be from New York. Didn't sound like a New Yorker, though. Maybe a recent transplant.

She was my last call of the day (yesterday, that is). My manager had approved a half hour of leave for me, so that I could get home in plenty of time for this week's 1-2-3 class, and I was just about to click off my phone, but then I thought, oh, take one more call. Do it for the U.S. Government. I was on Operator duty that day, and most of the calls lasted less than a minute before I transferred them. So I took one more call. And it was from a very angry person.

Thing is, I think she had a right to be angry. There are certain things that my agency does that don't truly HARM people, but they sure make them crazy. From her description, it sounded as though she had been given the runaround for about 9 months, in a way that I know can happen. And so she decided to take it out on me, the Operator.

When I am the Operator, I am not allowed to answer questions. I can only ask questions, figure out what the caller wants, and then transfer them to the appropriate area. So I could not even attempt to help this woman. She knew that -- she'd obviously had plenty of experience calling us. But she was in the mood to yell, and yell she did. I think she knew that if a caller uses profanity, we can disconnect the call, so she kept her language clean. If the caller's not swearing at us, we're not supposed to disconnect.

She decided she wanted to talk to my manager, so I offered to take down her contact information and my manager would call her tomorrow (that's how we do it at my agency -- you can't be transferred). Then I had to listen to her scream about managers who never call back. Which may well have been a valid complaint, though I do think my manager calls people back. Eventually she let me transfer her, and I went home, about 20 minutes later than planned, but who's counting? And as I walked from my building to the bus I thought: that's it. I'm done. It's over.

So this morning I rode the bus to work one more time and told my manager I was resigning. He expressed shock and disappointment, told me I was one of the best new hires, etc., etc. That was nice to hear. But as I explained to him, what really made me walk away from this job was that I know it is not right for me, that it will never make me happy. I like to work with people and I like to help people, or help them help themselves, that kind of thing. But in this job I was required to keep my distance from the callers, not get involved. No relationships could be formed. Helping people is not the purpose of my agency.

And so, even though the job was starting to get easier -- though I still felt like I didn't know what I was doing -- I was getting very little satisfaction from it. I didn't like the fact that the entire U.S. population was turning into a list of stereotypes for me. I know we're not all as unique as we think we are. I know we all fit into various categories and stereotypes. But I don't want to spend my days with the stereotypes. I want to work with real people. And if someone is screaming at me, I want to be able to either help them or hang up.

So now we move on, or rather back, to our family being completely unemployed again. Rocket Boy is starting to talk about applying for jobs in other cities, maybe even other states. And I need to return to serious job-hunting. But I've learned some things about myself and what I'm looking for in a job. I don't want a long commute -- I want to be close to my babies. And Customer Service Representative is no longer on my list of possible jobs.

I've deleted all my old blog posts about my job, except for a few small mentions here and there. I don't want to stew about this job too long, though I know I'll never forget it. I'm moving on to whatever comes next.

I had to surrender my bus pass, so I paid $5 to ride the bus home. It was about 9:30 am and the express buses weren't running as often, so I took the meandering BV bus. It takes a different route, visiting every possible stop between Denver and Boulder, dropping off and picking up all sorts of people. At every stop I looked down at the people waiting to get on, and imagined them calling me -- how stereotypical they would have seemed to me on the phone and how interesting and unusual they are in real life.