Hello, and welcome back for another chapter of Back Office. As always thank you so much for your patience during the break. I hope you will enjoy the upcoming chapter 🙂
But what is going on here? An ominous control room with our usual heros up on the screen? Check back next week for more 🙂
Welcome back, Mike and Karen.
I’m guessing they’re both temps working for a very strict and powerful temp agency. But why not let them go? I mean other than the reason that they probably make a good amount of money from them.
@Farren: Pretty much correct on everything there Farren 🙂 From my own experience in call-centres, I know that most people who come in are in-directly employed by a 3rd party who take a fairly large chunk of the advertised pay for themselves. I had often found myself going for work advertised with very good pay, only to end up with minimum wage once the hiring firm had taken their cut.
The goal for many in this situation is to cut out the middle man and get hired directly by the actual company they are working for (thus keeping all of their pay). For many who do a good job, this is (or at least *was*) fairly straightforward to do. However some hiring firms would intentionally sabotage your efforts in order to keep earning from you.
This chapter of Back Office has this particular theme 🙂
I worked for a high-level telephone support company, providing helpdesk support for Fortune 100 corporations. I made about 40K a year for Tier 2 support, and was on track for Tier III engineer, or maybe management track as a team leader within another year, except I broke my neck in a freak accident out in the company parking lot.
They kept me on the books on paid leave for the better part of a year, until it was clear I wasn’t able to come back. They they took me off the books with no hard feelings, with plenty of well-wishes. It was one of the best jobs I’d ever had, and could have stayed there for decades, except I STILL am not able to work after 10 years of disability.
This company really went out of their way to get good people, and to avoid losing them if they possibly could.
I also worked for one division of an “executive search” company (that translates to “headhunters”, btw) who matched high-level people with really high-level positions. THOSE guys could be downright mercenary. They placed me with a division of their own company that was doing consulting, very high-paid computer consulting. I wrote the registration and psychosocial research system for Northwest Memorial Hospital in Chicago, about a block from the Miracle Mile. I still miss that job…I ate lunch at Gino’s East Pizza most days, and Perry’s Deli a lot of the rest of the time. Chicago still has some of the BEST food.
Considering how badly they are treated now, wouldn’t working directly for CALL2HOME be even worse? O.o
Also, YAY, COMIC! ^^
@Quarktime: That sounded like a pretty sweet firm to be with 🙂 I hope there are more like that out there. I’m not saying that all hiring firms are bad, it’s just that quite a few I’ve dealt with through call-centers have been…well, less good 😛
@Delta: Oh…possibly 🙂 But at least they get most of their pay back for their efforts (Saving the World from Q-Matic, and freeing the company from enslavement to Laura should count for *something*)