ThePhanastasio

I seriously almost quit today at work. It's been a little rough these past few weeks, what with switching teams and not knowing ANYONE on the team I've switched to. Doesn't help that the way our cubicles are right now with the new system, I have to sit NEAR my new team, but a row over. I basically converse with people from two other teams, but we don't share breaks, so that sucks. Since I'm not sitting quite with them and haven't had an opportunity to develop any rapport, I've taken to going to break and sitting in my car.

Muy depressing. I do try to act completely indifferent to the whole thing, but my coach (manager) was all, "Are you just shy and need me to introduce you to people, or do you just, you know, come to work, do your job, go home?" She's a sweet woman, but I didn't want to have to deal with the humiliation of my manager taking me around and trying to force me into the social circle. I'm by far the least tenured rep on the team, which is super hard to get on because it's a crazy-awesome shift. Most of these people have been on the team at least a year, and it's kind of hard to insert oneself into those groups, especially when I'm not quite with them on the floor.

I opted instead to say, "Ah, I'm good. Just acclimating to working ten hour shifts," but my coach looked skeptical. I fear our next conference will have an icebreaker thrown in there, and I hate being put on the spot like that. I miss my old team, but not my old shift. This shift is so much better, and having Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays off means I'm actually getting things accomplished outside of work.

Anyway, that has been kind of stressing me, and then today happens. I kept getting call after call of people calling me a retarded c*nt because I can't cater to their every whim and give them the day they want for an arrangement. I get those every single day, but today, it was every single call.

I also got my absolute least favorite type of call, ten calls in a row. That is the call in which I am trying my damnedest to be sweet and do my job, and a redneck man, replete with double negatives and horrid diction tells me, "I want yer ****in' supervisor, 'cause you clearly can't speak no English. I wanted 'til the 15th. The 12th is not the ****in' fifteenth."

I really have no idea why people accusing me of not speaking English on the phone pisses me off so much, but it really, really does. I speak proper English with perfect diction so that I'm not misunderstood on the phone, but apparently that makes people decide that I'm pissing them off, so they're going to take a dig at my impeccable English (which is my first and only language) because they innately sense it's going to get to me. And, you know what? They're absolutely correct.

It was during this string of calls, accompanied with my thinking about my alienation from my team and what I could, at this point, do to infiltrate their tight-knit group without having to go crying to my coach like a little bitch, that I just completely lost all will to work there.

I've had bad days, and I've had bad calls. I've had customers saying they were going to track me down and slit my throat. Death threats. A woman who told me she hoped I got raped. Horrible things. But today was worse. Ten hours on the floor of complete torture, coupled with lonely breaks, including an hour and a half lunch which I took to avoid overtime and get time off the ****ing phones.

I actually ended up putting in downtime so that I could do deep breathing and calm myself, so that I wouldn't cry and/or have an anxiety attack, which was coming slowly but surely. My coach said when I got on her team that if I was having a bad day or a string of bad calls, to just go to her and she'd get me off the phones for a little while and I could write it off as "coaching."

I was afraid that if I did get off the phones, I was going to publicly weep, so I decided to try to calm myself, to little avail. I guess at least I didn't cry. I did know, though, that if I got off the phones and walked over to my coach, I was going to be all, "You said that if I was having a bad day to come to you and you'd get me off the phones..." and then anything after that sentence would be unintelligible blubbering.

I'm just going to start taking my breaks late so I can take break with my old team, I guess. When this stupid new billing system is in effect, I'll be able to sit with the team and work it out from there, but I'm just completely stressed out. I have tomorrow off, so I can calm down...but I've been off work for four hours, and still feel miserable.

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