[patio11]

As a counterpoint: I had a lot of book smarts and street stupid during my later years in high school. There was an $N,000 gap between my scholarships and my family's ability to pay and the cost of the expensive private university that changed my life.

I made a few hundred dollars in off-the-books employment for a borderline psychopath who nearly killed me with a pipe to the head. Following poorly planned unemployment brought on by the pipe incident, I got a job at a call center for an office supply company (the kind that sells things like, I don't know, staples). I remember those years pretty fondly: they paid me what I was owed in a timely fashion, no pipes were thrown at my head, I touched no toxic chemicals in a hot warehouse, and it was a value-creating job which I was good at for a wee bit of time prior to going to bigger and better things.

[sp4rki]

By any chance was this call-center servicing the same country (or a country with similarities in culture and language) and where you properly trained by the company? I should have added to my comment that I meant most outsourced call-centers in which employees are nothing more than people to fill seats that either commit mischievous actions or make stupid mistakes. I have no quarrel with a call-center servicing people in the same language or high end call-centers in which people are either highly trained or only hired if they have the skill set required for a specific job.

There is also a call-center in my country that is dedicated to translation services. They are of course exempt of my contempt as they only hire translators with the capacity to translate from x language to english in a timely and concise manner. They offer pay that is considerably a lot higher than regular call-centers and they vet and test their employees before hiring. Once again I was targeting call-centers in India, Central America, and Africa that are full of thieves and morons. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they are surely the minority. By a long shot.