Honesty is no policy

Just listening to Definitely Not the Opera on CBC Radio right now, and today's topic was Lying, Faking it, Bamboozling, and all that implications, benefits and techniques. First topic was lying in the workplace and how recruiters are now expecting resumes to be padded so they'll automatically downgrade your resume. Which of course sucks for those of us who aren't that good at lying. I'm a fairly good writer, though not as well as when I was in university, but when I stare at my resume...it's hard enough to keep the sarcasm out when I'm describing my previous/current employment. Trying to pump it up is tantamount to torture. Of course w/ the recent changes @ my workplace, and state of the job market, it's time to start fluffing up the resumes.

Then there was the topic of fake working in the workplace. And I've seen most of those techniques a lot where I am. And it's true that a lot of those who get promoted or are OM favourites aren't the most competent. But they can get away w/ it b/c they know how to schmooze. For those of us who are too embittered to fake caring about the crappy job; or even if we did care, aren't skilled enough at faking to emulate the cheese, get passed over. And if we point out the other's inadequencies we get labelled. So it really sucks. Case in point, one of the supervisors complained about the lack of floor support and wanted me to forestall my break. When my break was already an hour past. So I flatout told him "well that's when the supervisors are supposed to fill in." And he just gave me an incredulous look, when I was actually quoting policy. But a lot of the supervisors don't help their agents w/ questions or escalations. One of the agents who was just helping w/ questions had a list of customers who had escalated, and I guess she expected us to call them back even though we were all busy. All of those customers should have gone to the supervisors, even if it did skip Tier I(floor support) and went to Tier II(supervisor). When I was a supervisor and there was no Floor Support, I just took the escalation b/c 1) allowed your agent to go back to taking other calls and hence generating revenue 2) kept the customer from waitng longer and hence pissing them off 3) demonstrated to rep that you wanted to help them and hence improving relationship 4) was usually just repeating what the agent told them and let you do your paperwork 5) fulfilled contractual obligation to have "phone time". And I'll tell that to any supervisor. And they might not like it, b/c I save my candy-coating for the customers. But you know, I've been told by my supervisor that I'm really direct and to the point, but never that I'm wrong.

Anyways on Thursday, finally got to tour the new worksite. We'll all be over there by mid-May. And the place totally blows. It's a 30+ min bus ride from my place. There is only 1 clothing store in their dumpy little strip mall. And the clothing store is very low-end. There is no bookstore, a used bookstore, but that doesn't count. Only 2 major chain stores. I told my friend that it's the place where stores go to die. It's a horrid little wretched place, and prone to vandalism when it's dark. About an hour after the tour ended, I was in a complete daze b/c it was so abysmal. I'll have nowhere to go on my breaks. They have X-Men vs. Street Fighter in their lunchroom but it's $1 to play. An 8 year old game! They only have 2 refrigerators, 2 microwaves. For 700 employees. That's ridiculous. And their washrooms are quite far away from where our project is so if we actually go there during our breaks like we're supposed to, we'll lose 5 min from our 15 min break. Yeah, so it's definitely time to ...inflate the resume. But I'd taken 40 hrs of vacation earlier in the year, and I haven't earned back the deficit yet, so I don't want clawback when I quit. Yeargh.

On a more happy note, I got my Luva-sama and Marcel-san CDs. I still haven't gotten my Pokemon DS Lite accessories even though they were sent earlier. Anyways, Luva-sama is sooooooooo kawaii. Marcel-san just makes you want to hug and pet him. I was stifling my squeals b/c I didn't want to miss anything. It was very short CD b/c there was only a character song, a monologue, and then a chapter in a continuing story. I don't have the first 2 CDs (featuring different characters) so I'm not sure why Marcel, Zephel and Randy were in Luva's room and how they broke one of his cups. But it was sooooo funny. Yup, that's Japanese seiyuus for ya, even if you only recognize 1 out of 20 words, you can still figure out what's going on and/or just enjoy their performance.