Call Centre Chickens

After seeing an advert with chickens wearing headsets and from my experience of working within horrible call centres here are a few ideas that may warrant attention. Firstly, I hate the strictness of the places and the sweatshop mentality. It would be nice to have a relaxed call centre with flexitime and 5 minute VDU breaks each hour plus 20 minute breaks every 3 hours and one hour lunch. Workers could take as long as they like on the phone and do not have to worry about average handling time or high sales targets. Instead they would be expected to please the customer and feel relaxed on the phone. It is worrying that more and more of these places are popping up at the expense of face to face customer contact. One day the whole planet will be nothing but chickens clucking down the phone...

On a much lighter note maybe I should really give stand up comedy a try. There are enough things about call centres to keep me going for half an hour let alone new technologies and our destruction of the environment. Um...maybe for Vauderville or the fashion show in April. Then there is the animation video set in a call centre where a conversation is followed down the line from the call centre to the annoyed customer. Words are translated to streams of liquid colour down the optical lines and sounds get intermixed. The conversation forms the narrative.

Also, why is there not a series on TV based on call centres and the staff that work in them. We have one based on lawyers and another on IT staff. So how would we have a call centre series. There is a lot of scope from the training to the stressed out worker, the parties, breaks and disciplinary hearings. In fact there is as much as any other occupation if home life and characters of different job roles are taken into account. Then there are methods to defeat call centre blues ranging from music to chain smoking to laughing it off.