Member-only story
When I Said No
I want to tell you about a time, very recently, when I finally felt comfortable about saying no. It doesn’t happen very often, so when it does, it’s memorable.
I work for a rather large company. You’d recognize the name. Recently, they became a contractor for a massive health care operation. You would also recognize that name. If I were to tell you the name of this company, your immediate reaction to my saying that they were entirely unprepared for setting up this operation would be one of utter disbelief. And yet, here we are.
I have worked in call centers for over thirty years, never seeing such a clusterfuck. The day we were supposed to ‘go live,’ they found out the phone system wasn’t set up correctly. We took no calls that day. The training was sub-standard and incomplete because we did not have access to the applications we would be using. The standards documents that told us HOW to do the job were poorly written and formatted. Later, we found out they were dead wrong. When we asked for a correct copy of the standards in a meeting with the client, a representative told us that the procedures exist ‘in her head.’ There isn’t a true copy of the proper procedure.
We are now on the 4th new way of doing things by my count, and because we started behind the eight ball, the cases have been piling up. In addition, we are now in Open Enrollment season, which is a time we should have been prepared for. And so it was with some amusement that I was recently asked to volunteer for a minimum of eight hours of Overtime on Saturday and Sunday.
Because of my experience in call centers, I have been a trusted voice on the floor and behind the scenes. I always show up at least an hour early to help with the backlog. I have filled in for my supervisor on many occasions to deal with chronic illness. I have been a team player from day one. I have made many suggestions on how to better deal with our problems and offer to take this on as a project. They reject each one. Every person I deal with has time management issues. I now believe that the phrase “one second’ is a unit of time within this company that equates to at least a half-hour.
Lest you think I’m the pushy type, I’m not. I communicate, wait, and then move on if I don’t hear from people. This has been happening a lot in the last two to three weeks…
