Mixtape Reflections: Work For Love

            So I’ve talked about the job I enjoyed having in my last post. Now I’m afraid it is time to discuss the worst job I’ve ever had; working at a call center for a furniture and bedding department, which I stayed doing for the health insurance for my pregnant wife. It was a little over a year ago that I was finally fired from this job for using too many sick days; not that they cared that my wife had just given birth and needed extra help, nor that what pushed me over the limit was actually coming down with the flu. I guess they wanted me to come to work and get everyone else sick! To them, I was a defective cog in their machine and had to be removed. But being fired was one of the best days of my life anyway. Fortunately, it’s all behind me now. I’ve talked about it on here before, in my post about how the Oz books became my main coping mechanism at a job where I was belittled, berated, dehumanized and yelled at 40 hours a week. Another thing I did between calls was keep a journal. This was allowed because we weren’t handling any confidential personal information. This journal chronicles my downward spiral into madness, but more importantly for this blog post, an entry in it chronicles my decision to make a mix tape out of the whole experience. Songs that popped in my head a lot on the job, songs that were relevant to my experiences. This is an example of how I use mixes and playlists as a form of memoir.

One of the saner couple of pages, trust me.

            Why make mixtapes about bad times in my life? Is it strictly healthy to go back to tapes like this and mope over things that happened years ago? It’s not as if I go back and listen to tapes like this that often, mind you. I guess I just don’t like forgetting eras of my life, bad or good. Like all human beings who don’t have unusually strong photographic memories, I have a mild case of amnesia. I have only the vaguest sense of what I was doing more than two days ago on any given day. Let alone five, ten, fifteen years ago. And I don’t know if my memory has been getting worse as the years go on. It’s a little scary. But I retain memories in songs. It’s important to remember the past so you can learn from it. Those who don’t are doomed to repeat it, as the cliché goes. I also think a part of me feels triumph in overcoming past hardships. I survived working this horrible job. Never again.

            Included on the tape are samples of songs from the hold music I was tormented with, day in day out. How I grew to despise these songs. They’re on here as a reminder, lest I ever forget. Of course, it’s not the full songs. I would be on hold often, either to speak to a team leader for help, escalate Karen the Furious Soccer Mom to a supervisor, call in for NPT (non-phone time, I think is what it stood for; basically permission to be off the phone so I could finish processing a refund or whatever else). The songs were “Stockholm Syndrome” by One Direction, “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac, “That’s the Way it Is” by Celine Dion, “Chariot” by Gavin DeGraw, and “Everlasting Love” by Howard Jones. These are my least favorite songs in the world, and to this day if I hear them somewhere, I get horrible flashbacks. The people who made these songs and sold them to a call center company to be used as hold music deserve to be strapped to a chair and forced to listen to the song they created on loop for 40 hours a week.  I remade this tape as a Spotify playlist, but did not include these songs, not only to spare the ears of whoever reads this blog and wants to listen to my mix, but because I heard the artists make a tiny bit of money when their song is played on Spotify, and I wouldn’t want that.

Work For Love - Spotify Playlist

Ministry – Work For Love

            The mix starts with some hold music before transitioning into “Work For Love” by Ministry, the tape’s namesake. Love was the only reason I kept working at this call center, so it is fitting in that sense. It makes me think back to my early days starting the job, before I became traumatized by it.

Type O Negative - I Don’t Wanna be Me

Next is a song that often pops into my head when I’m trapped in some horrible situation I don’t want to be in. This job really did make me not want to be me anymore.

Brotherhood - Damned

This a song that often came to my mind on the job. The chorus “I’m damned if I do, I’m damned if I don’t, there is no hope” spoke to me at the time. Being at the call center did make me feel like I was damned. Surrounded by broken souls, in Hell.

Weird Al Yankovic - “Callin’ in Sick”

This is a little break from the doom and gloom on the tape, a triumphant ode to faking sick to take the day off from work, sticking it to the man. There were days where I could call in sick in order to get a three-day weekend. Other times, I just mentally couldn’t handle being there that day. Yes, this probably contributed to my being fired for taking too many sick days, ultimately. I guess I’m just not as good of a worker as a soulless robot.

Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence

            The next song on the mix is “Enjoy the Silence”, which lyrically reminded me of the silence between phone calls. On Sundays I could go a good twenty minutes in between phone calls sometimes, so I would purposely try to work on Sundays. On holidays, there could be even longer between calls. But more normally the calls were back to back all day. Eventually, the silence would end with a horrible beep in my headset. ”Words like violence, break the silence”. You’d never know when that beep would come and words would break the silence. You never knew if you were about to get someone fairly nice, or someone who was about to scream at you. The anxiety builds and builds. It’s like Chinese water torture.

Mortiis - Marshland

            I’ve discussed in length Mortiis’ song “Marshland” before. It's kind of strange how often he comes up on this blog. I suppose he is one of my favorite musicians, as well as a bit of a role model for me. The next few songs follow the theme of “the machine”. That is what the corporation is like. Cold, unfeeling, only caring about profit, not people. “Nothing that I say or do, matters to the big machine. Nothing that I think or feel, matters to the big machine. And if I’m dead when tomorrow’s gone, the big machine will just move on.”

Kraftwerk – The Robots

The next song, Kraftwerk’s “The Robots”, continues the theme. The Russian lyric in the song translates to “I’m your slave, I’m your worker”. I think this song is about capitalism. When you work at a call center, you are just a number. A statistic. Completely replaceable. They're listening in on your calls, they can check what's going on your computer screen, your bathroom breaks are strictly timed, and you will be lectured and derided by your team leader in coaching when none of their statistics are satisfactory. They own you. No privacy, no freedom. Paid the barest minimum the company can get away with paying you. The only reason there’s health insurance is so that you’re so terrified of getting fired and losing that insurance you’ll be their completely loyal robot. Why do you think there’s no universal healthcare in the United States? Because then no one would be stuck doing these shitty jobs, that’s why.

The Cure – Cold

This song is here mainly because I listened to it a lot at the time I was working at the call center. It conveys the depression I felt. I felt dehumanized and hopeless. Its here more for the energy of the music than the lyrical content.

Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine

This song came to me again one day as I was writing in my journal and waiting for the next terrible call to come in. I was here because my wife was pregnant. Here in this Hell. Is this the world I was bringing my son into? Where people are raised from the cradle up to be brainwashed and exploited? Turned into obedient workers? That’s the whole point of school in this country after all. And am I supposed to lie to him for his whole childhood about how horrible the world really is? This song is about doing just that I think. It’s about giving your son a sheltered childhood, and then introducing him to the soulless real world when he reaches adulthood. I still struggle with these questions, even if I’m in a somewhat better place now.

Sadie Killer – The Working Dead

This is where Side B starts, Side A ending with a sample of crappy hold music. So yes, I’ve watched the cartoon Steven Universe, and that’s where this song is from. An anthem to those who hate their dead end jobs, it is all too appropriate for this mix, and a song I came to listen to a lot during my short breaks. Steven Universe is an unexpected source for music that speaks to me, but here we are I guess. And Spotify even had it. 

The Kovenant - Mannequin

This song reminded me of my poor, broken co-workers, drowning in a sea of cubicles, especially the ones who had been there for years, for whom any hope of a better life had dissolved, any dreams they once had, pulverized to dust. “You’re just another faceless mannequin, you’re just another fallen star.” You lose your identity, your very sense of being, working in a call center. You are merely the face of the company. Merely a recording. A robot. I could have become one of them. I almost did. The journal entry I posted up above shows you the moment I realized it should be on this mix.

Gwar – Sick of You

And the next few songs are dedicated to those horrible customers. Oh, how sick I was of them. Their entitlement. Their first world problems. The ones who just would not shut up. I would sing this song to myself sometimes after putting them on hold and transferring them somewhere.

Twiztid – Kill Somebody

I would get this mad sometimes. There’s only so much abuse I can take. Some people forget they’re talking to human beings. I’ve been yelled at, called a retard among other things, treated like shit. Working at a call center is like being a urinal. You’re just there to be pissed on by random people. You’re not a person, you’re an object, there to serve the purpose of being pissed on. Sometimes people will throw a wad of gum in there or something even worse. They’re not supposed to, but who’s really going to stop them? When I reached my limit, I would sometimes hit the phone or the computer screen. One time I tore my stress ball into tiny little pieces. And that’s what this song is there to illustrate.

The Sweeney Todd Soundtrack – Epiphany

“There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit, and the vermin of the world inhabit it. But not for long. They all deserve to die…” This song illustrates well the darkest depths that this job pushed me to. This job made me hate humanity. It made me long for an asteroid to just smack into the Earth and wipe everyone out.

Faderhead – This is Your World

The second song that bashes the world which led me to be trapped in this job, at least until I was finally fired. “This is your world, I don’t wanna live here.” And I really didn’t, when I worked here. I wanted to go live in Oz. Or at least Armenia.

White Ring – IXC99

This song is kind of a calm down song after the previous two. A song I liked while I was working at the call center. It’s still dark, but a little calmer. Save for the shotgun blast in the background.

Audiotherapie – Devil’s Mind

“Consumption, is that enough to satisfy your needs? All the things you learned, he is going to earn. Money is your religion, money rules your world.” This is a song about the kind of world we live in, where corporations and the rich rule, all that matters is money, and we’ve all been brainwashed into consumerism. The kind of world where, even though I wanted to be an author and artist and got a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, I was still trapped in a job I hated, stripped of my dignity and pride, berated, and nearly destroyed. The artist has no place in this world, where everything has to be quantified, and if it is not useful to the billionaire class it is discarded and treated as if it has no worth. Money is a religion, especially in the United States. Money is God. Money is how the powerful stay powerful. I hate money. I hate, to my very core, whoever it was in history that came up with the idea of money. Hate them. Let's go back to bartering. 

This one isn’t on Spotify or YouTube as far as I can tell. I first heard it on the Communion After Dark podcast. So, I’ll just link to their Bandcamp page.

https://audiotherapie.bandcamp.com/track/devils-mind

Switchblade Symphony – Sweet

This, like “Cold” by The Cure, is kind of only here for the energy of it. But lyrics like “Broken people, hollow and feeble” describe the people who worked at this call center. So it fits. The song reminds me of when I would just give in to the despair. I would lose the energy and will to be angry or sad. I would stop feeling anything, and just accept my fate. Become the robot. A faceless mask. A bard no more.

Voltaire – Underground

“Six walls of wood, to keep them out. The smart remarks, the screams the shouts. They scream, they shout. There’s only one way to drown them out.” Yes. There were days, when the job pushed me to these depths of sorrow. Days where sleep was my only escape from the nightmare that my waking hours had become. Days where…I wished I could have stayed asleep. Just to drown out the smart remarks, screams and shouts.

David Bowie – I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday

This song to me represents the dreams that I had and still have, which kept me alive for those months I worked at this call center. I wasn’t going to be one of those people stuck working there for ten years. I couldn’t give up. I didn’t know when I was going to get out of there, but I knew it would happen eventually. Just like I don’t know when I’ll be a successful author and cartoonist, but I know it’ll happen one day.

So there’s a takeaway from this mixtape, even though it chronicles a very bleak, hopeless time in my life. Nothing bad lasts forever. Every storm runs out of rain. Your present situation isn’t your final destination. All those feel-good slogans you can think of that mean that the torture will eventually end.

Now the day I got fired, I knew I’d used up my attendance credits. I wasn’t going to say anything; I was going to make as much money as I could before I was canned. My team leader wasn’t there for a couple days, so I actually worked a couple more days before she arrived; forty-five minutes into my shift, she called me up, let me know I’d overused my credits, and told me to clean out my desk. I grabbed my stuff, and left. It took a while to sink in that I was finally free. I went home, laid in bed, and just tried to come to grips with it. I checked my subscriptions on YouTube, and the synthwave channel New Retro Wave had just uploaded the song “Let Go” by Kalax. It seemed to fit the moment. This tape had already been made and is only 90 minutes long, but if it were possible to add to it without recording over another song, I’d have had this as a bonus track. The song signaling the final end of my time at this awful call center. It was time to let go of all of that negativity and move on with my life. I worked in two other call centers after this unfortunately, but neither of them were as bad. I’m still haunted by the experience but I am in a much better place now.