Aunt Tillie's schedule

Aunt Tillie's schedule

fiction
edward w pritchard

People still work in the salt mines but now it's called medical billing or insurance sales or telemarketer/customer service. Aunt Tille from when she was 58 to nearly seventy worked for the cable company and was in the last job category mentioned above. For four 10 hour shifts with two 15 minute breaks [ not a second more], one 30 minute for lunch and two 3 minute bathroom breaks she worked over at Canton for the cable company.

Aunt Tille did customer service with a "sales quota" and all her calls were recorded, monitored and dissected over and over. She wasn't to be on any one call over 8 minutes, but was supposed to handle each problem expeditiously and to the customers total satisfaction. In fact she was not just to make the initially irate customer not only happy but to make them in less than 8 minutes into a raving fan or boosters for life. She wore a headset for a phone and each call would be immediately followed by another and after a quick beep a customer would be rapidly talking in the middle of a story for the customers would be transferred on a phone tree several times and the customer service was the last place to send them. Although she was allowed up to 8 minutes on a call routinely she handled up to 20 calls an hour, one every three minutes.

After she was forced to retire because of her health, Aunt Tillie exhibited a strange behavior perhaps developed in her years at the cable call center down there in Canton.

Aunt Tille would get up about 6AM and she would immediately set an expensive clock radio and another expensive alarm clock to buzz every 3 minutes. She would then go about her day at her house until three minutes were up and the alarm or the clock radio would buzz and she would race to reset it. Aunt Tillie did this for four 10 hour shifts a week but not on the others three days or on the "4" work days after her 10 hours were up.