“You
have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate
– the unloved and the unnatural.”
-Charlie Chaplin, The Great
Dictator
Is there anything unnatural about
hate? Is it in humankind’s nature to hate? We all hate something or someone. We
use the term hate in a variety of ways. You can hate sitting too long at a
traffic light. You can hate a type of food. You can hate an entire race or
nationality. You can hate yourself. Hate is anything stronger than dislike,
which itself is a more polite, less emotional hate. Hate though, is not the
absence of love. The absence of both love and hate is indifference, or apathy. Whether
you love or hate, it means you care deeply about something. They are mirror
images. Perhaps we use the word “hate” too freely.
I have struggled with hatred throughout my life. Especially in my teens. I hated school. I hated most of my
teachers. I hated the faculty. I hated homework. I hated the people who bullied
me. I hated the entire prisonlike atmosphere of school. This burning hatred
made me an angry and depressed person. It was making me sick.
Hatred has its place. I believe that
there are things that are okay to hate, and things that aren’t. “Hate the sin,
not the sinner” is a phrase that Christians tend to use, although they don’t
always follow their own advice. To an extent I can agree with the sentiment, even if I may sometimes disagree with what a Christian might consider sinful. It is better to hate behaviors than to hate people. It was a long path to get me to that point. Yet perhaps I’m not even
all the way there yet. I feel that once someone causes enough harm they are beyond forgiveness. And those are the people I hate. The people in positions of power, mainly, who engineer oppression and suffering behind the scenes. Then there are people who personally wronged me somehow. Again, it takes a lot to earn my hatred, more than it used to anyway. But I could name at least a couple people I hate for personal reasons.
When
I was in my teens and first learned about the history of the Armenian genocide,
how it was perpetrated by Turkey and denied to this day, its orchestrators
treated as heroes with streets named after them, Armenia’s historic lands
stolen, yes, I will say I hated the Turks. This was only reinforced by every
Turk I ever met online being just as hateful toward all Armenians. It wasn’t
hatred from a position of power, like white supremacy is for instance. It was
like a Jew hating Germans; that is, if Germany still denied the Holocaust and
had streets named after Hitler. But I did not yet have the means to think
rationally and critically. I was young. Then there’s the Azeris, of Azerbaijan.
Joseph Stalin (another man I hate) gave them control of Armenia’s Artsakh province during the Soviet Union. The province successfully broke away with the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and declared independence. The Azeris deeply
hate Armenians over this. They’re taught from preschool up to hate Armenians,
because they think Armenia “stole” their land. Sore losers. The government has
turned the Armenians into a boogeyman, in order to instill a national unity and
direct people’s ire toward a perceived enemy, rather than where their ire ought
to be directed, at their totalitarian government. One particular episode that
opened my eyes to just how much the citizens of Azerbaijan are taught to blindly hate all Armenians was the
treatment of Ramil Safarov, who murdered an Armenian, Gurgen Margaryan, in his sleep while they
were both at a military academy. He was imprisoned for a few years in Hungary
until Azerbaijan paid to have him transferred back home, where he did not live
out the rest of his prison sentence, no; he was awarded medals and treated like
a hero. For murdering someone in their sleep. Because he was an Armenian. I
hated the Azeris right back at one time.
As I got older, and perhaps wiser, I
learned to let go of this kind of hate. It was gradual, but I awakened to the
fact that nations and races are mere artificial social constructs. And I
awakened to the fact that you cannot defeat hate with hate. You defeat it with
logic, rationality, and yes, love. Or at least indifference. You don’t stoop to their level, you rise
above it. There are plenty of Turks and Azeris who have also reached this
point. You can’t paint them all with the same brush. I don’t hate anyone just
for their nationality or race. I hate Turkish and Azeri nationalism, and the
genocidal tendencies their ideologies lead to. I hate the leaders of their
countries who enforce this ideology. I can say that I hate Erdogan and Aliyev,
just as I hate Talaat Pasha and the rest of the orchestrators of the Armenian
genocide. I don’t feel bad saying that, because again, I feel that they are unforgivable at this point. I can hate people if they give me
enough of a reason. But, I don’t hate the common people. Not anymore. They can’t
help that their government brainwashed them their whole lives. Whatever racist
or hateful thing a Turk or Azeri says online, I no longer reflect that upon
their entire ethnic group. There are a few brave enough to speak out against
their governments and the historical revisionism that their governments try to
teach their citizens. Those who can transcend beyond blind nationalism. People like Taner Akcam and Umit Kurt, the latter of
which came to my university to give presentations many times while I was in Graduate
School, who have studied what happened and don’t deny it. They helped open my eyes, and gradually, I let go of most of my hate. I
became a better person for doing so.
Right now, as I write this Artsakh
and Armenia are under heavy bombardment by Azerbaijan, with an assist from
Turkey. It is war. People are dying on both sides. Their hatred for Armenia is
so vitriolic they wish to wipe it off the map and destroy its people and history.
Although I am on the other side of the planet, the bombardment impacts me too. I’ve
sunk into a deep depression. Yet I am helpless to do anything about it. I can
offer little more than “thoughts and prayers”. I have no power to stop it. To
my regret I’ve had to take a break from social media, because following the
news is just tormenting me. This is madness, madness driven by pride and above
all hatred. I don’t want to give into it. I don’t want to let it consume me.
But it fills me with such rage and sorrow. Although I want more than anything
for Armenia to emerge victorious, I don’t want to start cheering for the death
tolls of Azeri soldiers. They are the victims of government brainwashing. Mere
pawns. I have to work hard not to hate the people, just the ideology. The
ideology of nationalism that drives a man to kill another man who they haven’t
even met, based on lines on a map and what colored cloth they fly. It is a sick
ideology that turns people twisted and demented. Turns people into monsters,
who celebrate carnage and torture. You can still love your own country and
culture without it driving you to want to see other cultures and countries
destroyed. But all too often people can’t seem to do that. You know, there’s no good reason a piece of land has to belong exclusively to one ethnicity. Ethnicity itself is a made up concept. We should just be able to live together, without borders. Humanity would be better off without nation states. It’s all bullshit. People dying over idiotic made up concepts. It makes me sick of living on this planet. The Earth would be better off without humanity.
That sort of hatred has long
infected the United States as well. Racism and white supremacy. It is the same
thing anywhere you look in the world, and it is nothing new. Is hatred as “unnatural”
as Charlie Chaplin claimed? Or was he just naïve?
I recently reread the classic Batman
comic The Killing Joke. To summarize, the comic gives us a possible
backstory for the Joker in flashback sequences in which he was a down-and-out
comedian with a pregnant wife who agrees to do one job for a crime gang, only
for her to die in a supposed “freak accident” and for him to end up disfigured at
a chemical plant; while in the present he concocts a horrible scheme that
involves shooting and paralyzing Commissioner Gordon’s daughter Barbara (also
Batgirl), taking lewd pictures of her, and kidnapping Commissioner Gordon to
torment him with said pictures in an over-the-top carnival ride in an attempt
to drive him insane. The comic has been deeply criticized for its treatment of
Barbara Gordon, most vocally by feminists. I don’t blame them for having a
problem with it, and its really one aspect the comic could have done without.
She did come back from it under the alias Oracle, giving crippled comic fans a
superhero to look up to, but that doesn’t excuse it. There was an animated
adaptation which made matters even worse by adding a plotline about an affair
between Batgirl and Batman as well, which I found to be mostly disappointing,
also for its pacing issues when it got to covering the actual comic. But, in
any case, while acknowledging its problematic elements, I read it chiefly for
the compelling philosophical thesis behind it. In doing these heinous acts, the
Joker hopes to convey to the world that anyone could become as insane as he is
if given enough of a push. “All it takes is one bad day.” He also believes, in
classic nihilism, that the world is a joke, and the things that people value
and strive for don’t really matter; it’s all part of a monstrous gag. He
conveys this through a monologue he gives over a speaker system at the carnival
he’s hijacked, while Batman makes his way to find him. You can read the
monologue on TV Tropes here.
The Joker makes the argument that
anyone can lose their sanity, and that everything’s meaningless and a joke when
you look at the bigger picture. He brings up the example of the real cause of
World War II being over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt
collectors; this is just one of an infinite such examples he could have used,
really. His solution to this is to let go of your cares and worries and laugh;
to go insane. And furthermore any other response to the revelation of the world’s
true nature is itself insane. He tries to make Batman see his point by deducing
that Batman himself is as insane as Joker is, only he’s in denial about it. I
suppose when instead of redistributing some of his billionaire wealth to
fund social programs and eliminate poverty he elects
to dress as a bat and beat people up with hi-tech gadgets in order to reduce crime in Gotham, Joker may have a
point there (and as an aside, I find the most unrealistic aspect of the Batman
franchise not to be the psychopathic killer clown, nor the mutant crocodile
man, nor the mutant penguin man, nor the man made out of clay, but a
billionaire who actually seems to care about the world and anyone besides
themselves; but then again, his reluctance to use his wealth to actually make
Gotham a better place is pretty in-line with billionaire logic). And what
counterargument does the comic present? Commissioner Gordon retains his sanity,
and Batman says to Joker’s argument “I’ve heard it all before, and it wasn’t funny
the first time.” Oh okay, so a clever one-liner followed by a punch means he’s
debunked nihilism, I guess. “Strong man in bat costume punch clown, now clown
is wrong and life have meaning.” Maybe Joker just didn’t strike the right nerve
to push Gordon over the edge, or maybe Gordon just has a stubborn apathy about
him that anchors him to sanity. In short, the comic acts like it has disproven
the Joker because he ends up defeated, when really it hasn’t.
I do not approve of the Joker’s
methods, of causing unnecessary suffering to prove his point. But I wonder if
he was right. I mean you could try to prove that 2-1=1 by finding two people
and killing one of them. You’ll have done something awful but it doesn’t mean
the equation is wrong. Humans cling to such abstractions as if they hold any
real meaning on a grand cosmic scale; money, nations, flags, borders, race, the
list goes on. People go to war, kill and die over borders and nations; lines on a map, nothing more. People starve and die
because they don’t have enough of this “money”, which is nothing but abstract
numbers. What really makes a physical US dollar worth more than a paper dollar
from a Monopoly board game? Nations commit genocide against people because their
skin color is different, or they have different religions. But it’s all made-up.
It’s a fantasy. It’s all things that the powerful use to control the rest of
us. I’ve seen and heard about enough injustice now, both throughout all of
human history and in the present day, that justice itself seems like a naïve fairy
tale. Just as fake as any of humanity’s other abstract creations that it takes
so very seriously. If karma even exists, I think it only happens to people who
feel enough guilt over what they’ve done. So you see, Batman punching Joker and
sending him back to the insane asylum doesn’t suddenly make him wrong.
As for everyone being one bad day
away from insanity, I think that it is certainly possible for anyone to have a
permanent mental breakdown that they never recover from because of a single
terrible incident. Everyone has different limits though. Not everyone’s insanity
looks like a psychotic cackling clown either. People can look and act normal on
the outside but be broken on the inside. In fact, perhaps that is what happened
to Commissioner Gordon. He keeps his inner turmoil locked up. As for myself,
well, I have dysthymia; long-term depression. I’ll admit I’ve been pushed to
the brink several times over the course of my life. I’ve had plenty of “bad
days”. Some I might even say I never fully lived down or got over. But I’ve
always ended up pulling myself together and carrying on, eventually. I hope I
never have a day so bad that I never recover (knock on wood). But could it
happen to me? Perhaps. I’m not going to say it couldn’t. The comic makes you
think about what it is that keeps you holding it together. What is that fragile
thing that, if removed, will cause you to crumble? It’s not a pleasant thing to
think about, but it’s an important thing to think about.
I don't really want to keep going on about how much I hated working at call centers, but I found this list I wrote last year about all the things, big and small, that irritated me about working at a particular call center I was at. I added to the list every time something annoyed me, part of a coping mechanism I guess. I saved the list to Grammarly, where we kept our email templates, and after I left the job I logged back into Grammarly to retrieve the list. I thought it was worth saving on this blog. I actually want to use it as material for a novel I plan on writing down the line where my character, a vampire, is forced to work at a call center to pay their rent. This call center was the customer service for a makeup company. I don't know if I could get in trouble for saying which company or not; not that I ever plan on getting back into the call center business if I can help it. But we basically handled customer complaints, questions, and whatever else they called about. Most of the time we reshipped damaged items or helped correct their "bonus points" on their accounts that earned them free stuff when they purchased enough. I worked there for about seven months or so before we moved to the other side of Florida last year. They had both a phone team and an email team. Newcomers were automatically put on the phone team. I am a much better writer than a speaker so I worked hard to get to the email team, and when I finally made it I was still put on the phones roughly half the time. Anyway, I'll let the list tell the whole story. This was only the third worst call center I've ever worked at, by the way, and I've worked at four. If you'll remember that mix tape I made a while back which I posted a blog about, that one was about the worst call center I ever worked at, which I was trapped working for because I needed health insurance for my pregnant wife. This one I just kinda worked at for some extra money, and if it had been as bad as that other call center I would have definitely quit at that point; we already had health insurance after my son was born, you see. Anyway, here it is.
100 Call Center Pet Peeves
1. When everyone is being noisy; laughing, singing,
clapping, doing whatever, when I'm in the middle of a call and trying to listen
to a quiet customer!It's all the email
team's doing. Pesky email team (let me join you please)
2: Logging into the 20 systems at the beginning of each
shift and ending up punching in late even when I arrived 15 minutes early! This
is worse when my computer gets stolen.
3. Reward points in general. Too much math, too much hassle.
Life would be easier without them. Especially hate when they go into pending
after an order fails; and how management claims to have "fixed" the
issue and refuses to lend points out anymore, and yet it still happens
constantly and we get to hear the complaining.
4. How utterly sub-par the training was, leaving me
completely unprepared for the job.
5. Being ordered around by someone who isn't even your team
leader.
6. Customers who try to take advantage of an online BOGO
sale but don't put the "free" item in their shopping cart, and then
wonder where it went when it arrives. Imagine doing this in a physical store.
Would you not put the free item in your shopping cart and then wonder why it's
not magically in your bag when you get home?
7. When a call comes in the second you go into
"ready" on the call system they have.
8. When a call comes in before you're finished with the
notes on the last call. This is preventable (although the method to prevent
this, After Call Work, is heavily frowned upon), but sucks when it happens.
9. When the email team plays crappy music.
10. That feeling when you check a customer's account and
they've been flagged with (no refund) or (no reship) next to their name. Oh
this will be fun.
11. Having to play computer roulette when I get in after
someone steals my usual computer, to find a computer to sit at that will
actually work. Yeahhhh...that was the nice thing about having your own cubicle
at my last job.
12. When you put forth the effort to get to work early, but
the systems actually boot up quickly leaving you with nothing to do; these same
systems that take 20 minutes to boot up when you get here on time.
13. When you ask for a phone number and the customer gives
it to you at the speed of light. Maybe you'll have better luck with their name
and email, but probably not.
14. Accidentally opening a call saying “Welcome to (previous
company I worked at)” at the beginning of the call. Arrrg! Months of
brainwashing hasn't quite worn off.
15. Anything to do with gift cards, especially when I don't
have access to the systems we use to handle them.
16. Not being allowed to go into AUX for IT issues even
though my programs actually are on the fritz. Why does the option even exist
then if we can't use it?
17. When normally quiet Sundays get bizarrely busy, probably
due to under-staffing, co-workers not putting Sunday in their availability, or
other weird factors. Bah. Do something better with your Sunday nights,
customers. There's just something worse about it happening on Sundays, because
you expect an easy day.
18. The "you might be using illegitimate software"
popups. Because they're too cheap to give us legit software without stupid
popups. I especially hate it when they trick me into thinking a call is coming
in for a second.
19. Back to back calls out of nowhere, after 11pm on a
Sunday. Like why? (Also, any day that starts slow and suddenly gets busy out of
nowhere for some reason. Night shifts are supposed to start faster and then
slow down! It's the natural order of things!)
20. Calls that come in right before your shift ends.
Especially 40-minute-long ones. Those make me want to break things.
21. When people are given VTO because we're apparently
"over-staffed", and then there's a deluge of calls with only like 5
people to take them, so they make the email team handle the incoming phone
calls because they got rid of everyone else who would normally take them. WHAT
WERE THEY THINKING?? Gods, the idiocy! Only give VTO out if someone comes up
and asks for it! Greedy bastards, they'd rather be short-staffed than pay
people.
22. Day after holiday call volume levels. Ughh. Also holiday
sales, coupons, and anything that drives up sales and leads to high call
volume. Hate them. Hate them all.
23. Hearing the team leaders butcher my name for the 100th
time while trying to nag me for being in Aux or leaving a customer on hold too
long.
24. The fact that a call placed on hold can disconnect when
you're away from your desk asking a team leader for help, and you could come
back on an entirely different call. There's an obscure safeguard against this;
of course I wasn't trained in this and had to figure it out myself. Imagine
that!
25. That nobody is in any hurry to get me access to various
computer systems that I’m locked out of. It's ridiculous at this point.
"Oh I'll send in a ticket". Sure.
26. How heavily-enforced the hold time is here. It was a lot
more lax at my last workplace. Here they get right on your ass about it after 2
minutes. (The grass really is always greener on the other side of the fence).
27. How hyper-vigilant the team leaders are about every
single thing you do when we're understaffed, since they have fewer people to
focus on, making me a bigger target.
28. The fact that nothing tells you what time you clocked
out for break. It's like they want you to lose track.
29. How a call never fails to come in the moment you start
to think "huh, been a while since a call came in". It's a jinx.
30. The system we use for taking notes on a call and email. Would
it be too much to ask to have a big button saying "Create New
Incident"? Do we really have to go through so many stupid tabs for
something we need to do every single call? Would it cost too much to get us a
system where we don't have to fill out every little bit of info manually and in
two seconds? It's the most user-unfriendly computer program I've had to use on
a job, and is the sole reason I'm in After Call Work so much. Yet I get blamed.
31. Coding out calls. A lot of the time no code fits the
call. And you have to dig through dozens of categories to find the right one if
it is there. And we're expected to do this in like two seconds.
32. Being expected to listen to a customer, and start a new
incident (because starting them ahead of time isn't allowed), and fill out the
categories, and notate EVERYWHERE, and navigate dozens of systems, all at the
same time, as fast as possible. For 9 dollars an hour! I'm going into After
Call Work, fire me if you don't like it, I don't care. Let's see the rich
bastards who made up these rules do all that without After Call Work when the
calls are back-to-back.
33. When the customer can't hear you for some reason, so you
have to practically put the headset speaker inside your mouth for them to hear.
34. The way the whip-crackers prowl up and down the aisles
like hawks, waiting for an excuse to nag us for being in After Call Work for 20
seconds. like they're correction officers and we're in jail or something. (I
know I've already complained about this sort of thing, but the prowling; Gods I
hate it.)
35. The mixed bag when you enter a customer's email into the
system and the name comes right up. Sure it means you don't have to fill in the
rest, but it also means they have a history of calling, probably about the
exact issue they're about to dump on you which a previous agent was unable to
solve. How exciting...
36. Digging for email templates in Standard Text. Half the
time the template you need doesn't exist. The other maybe one third of the time
it takes forever to find unless you get lucky. Searching it almost never brings
up the right one. We wouldn't need Grammarly and have to write our own if
Standard Text didn't suck so bad.
37. Whenever you get assigned an email that has a long back
and forth history that another agent was working on, but they went home or
something so now the ball is in your court, and most of the time by this point
the customer is pissed and/or has a really long convoluted problem beyond your
expertise.
38. Biting off more than you can chew on the email right
before your shift ends, taking on an email that's going to take 20 minutes to
do. Roughly the equivalent of getting a complicated call at 11:58.
39. Entitled Karens who want to speak to your manager over
some minor, first world grievance. That's a given at any call center.
40. As overall better as it is to be on emails, you have to
constantly work. You don't get long idle periods like on phone calls. There are
no slow days. But it's still better.
41. Being thrown back onto the phones out of email,
particularly if I was only on emails for like 15 minutes or less, and
particularly if I'm being bounced back and forth. I HATE THAT. Make up your
mind, and keep me in one place. It's worse to give me false hope by putting me
on email for 3 minutes than to just be kept on the phones. The words "Can
I have you go live?" make me want to punch my monitor.
42. When you just cannot understand a single thing a
customer says; either they have a weird accent, talk too fast, loudness in the
background, or the sound gets all distorted and inaudible. So awkward.
43. How tight-fisted this company is with money. Almost
never allowed to give appeasements. Can't just throw money at customers to get
them to go away like I could at my last job.
44. I know I already mentioned gift cards, and I do hate
everything about them, but a special shout-out to third-party gift cards which
we cannot do a single thing with and have to tell the customer to go back to
where it was purchased. They should be banned.
45. When everyone goes on break at the same time but me,
leaving me to take ALL the calls. They do it on purpose. It's a conspiracy.
46. The fun times when our systems are down, and we get to
tell customers to call back later. They so love hearing that. And even the
email team gets put on phones so there's no escape. Lovely. Good time to take
your break.
47. When you find the correct email template AFTER you've
already sent a response and are looking through the templates for another email
response. You never find it when you're looking for it.
48. The stupid "duplicate email" error message in the
note taking system. Another example of how user-unfriendly it is. And of course,
no one tells you the work-around, you have to figure it out yourself.
49. Whip-cracking on a Sunday when the call volume is low.
That doesn't even make sense! It's going to be 10+ minutes before my next call
anyway, let me finish my notes. Or put me on emails if you really want me to be
productive.
50. Why does every other customer have two rewards profiles?
It makes things so confusing! What incompetence led to this epidemic? And then
everything has to be to exact specifications to merge them! But only sometimes!
It makes no sense at all. And you've gotta love those extra special customers
with three or even four profiles.
51. When the systems get sluggishly slow. Makes for awkward
waiting with potentially impatient customers. They almost always kick the email
team onto the phones when it happens too.
52. Incoming transfers. Just don't take them. Don't. It's
always going to be some extremely pissed off customer that you can't even help,
because 9 times out of 10 they're being transferred to the wrong department
anyway. The other agent just wants to dump them off. Even worse when it's a
blind transfer, can't refuse those. Remember: it's going to be a lot easier to
say no to the agent than it will be to deal with a customer screaming at you
because they've been on the phone for two hours and have spoken to three
different representatives.
53. Related to 52: super-irate transfer customers who whine
about having been on the phone for two hours, refuse to give you their info
because they gave it to the last five people they spoke to, and scream at you.
Maybe it's time for a break. Put the phone down, take a few deep breaths, go
for a walk, hug a puppy, and call back later once you've cheered up. And
remember, if you keep getting passed around, maybe it's you. Bad customers get
bad customer service. It costs zero dollars to not be a jerk. 'Kay? *smile,
eye-twitch*
54. The fact that being in After Call Work is such a big
no-no anyway. I'm never in after call work out of laziness. I'm in after call
work because I'm wrestling with your stupid, counter-intuitive user-unfriendly
systems that you have to enter absolutely everything into manually. I'm in
after call work because the customer hung up before I was done with the notes.
I'm in after call work because it's impossible to do 50 things at once during a
call. I'm working, leave me alone. "Notate EVERYTHING, but don't take time
to notate. Just magically have it done!"
55. Customers who can't do simple things on the website so
you have to walk them through it. They should require everyone over 50 to pass
a computer training course before they're allowed to spend money on the
internet. But, that'd be bad for business so it'll never happen.
56. "But by the time you fix my problem the items won't
be on sale anymore whaaaaa!"
57. The times when there's nothing you can do to help a
customer. When there are no solutions. Those times are just great.
58. The "I can't log into my account" calls.
There's literally nothing we can do to help them that they haven't already
tried 50 times (ie send out change password/username emails). Why does the
website tell them to contact us when this happens? Have them contact the IT
department! We just reship and refund stuff!
59. The stupid vacuum cleaners when I'm on a call. It
usually happens on Sunday evening. Can't you do it after midnight or something?
Of course, no one else cares about the poor fools on phones when everyone else
is being as loud as possible, see item #1.
60. Gift with purchases. I hate them. Can't refund or
reship, can't do anything with them. And customers get so pissed over them for
some reason. It was free, boo hoo, shut up. Just get rid of them.
61. Getting nagged about being in bathroom break aux for too
long. Yeah, my 3-minute bathroom break was too long for you? Got it, I'll wear
a catheter from now on and just sit here doing my job like the mindless robot
you just wish you could replace me with, thanks. "You can be in Unscheduled
Break aux longer than 10 minutes if you show us a doctor's note." Sure,
I'll get right on that with the excellent health insurance I'm getting through
this part-time, barely above minimum wage job...oh, wait.
62. If you have something important and work-related to take
care of that doesn't involve taking a call or an email, have fun waiting for a
chance to do it. You have to work every single solitary second of your shift.
Doesn't matter if you have a follow-up to do, if you have to give your team
leader an absence code, trying to get your direct deposit situated, trying to
gain access to a system you've been locked out of, etc. You're screwed.
63. Customers who place an order two days before they're
moving or going out of the country, and then complain when their package isn't
coming before they leave and expect you to magically get UPS/USPS to send it
faster, as if this is just some secret option we have for customers who yell
loudly enough. You know you could have ordered this like two weeks ago,
right?It's called an estimated delivery
date for a reason.
64. Being forced to go on the phones even though the call
volume is low and everyone else is on emails, and even though it should be
pretty clear by now I'm objectively better at emails.
65. The shipping companies dumping angry customers on us
whenever anything that went wrong with shipping is their fault by misinforming
them and telling them to call us.
66. When a customer emails you an attached image of a
damaged item or something and explains little to nothing, expecting you to be
Sherlock Holmes and figure everything out yourself by downloading the image and
examining it, leading to it being a 10+ minute email. It is especially annoying
when you ask them for item numbers and they just send you pictures instead.
67. Sitting next to nagging, snooping know-it-alls who will
eavesdrop on you and tell you when you're doing something against the rules,
which are all-too-vague and were never brought up in training. If I want your
advice I'll ask for it. Am I in coaching? Are you my new team leader? No? Then
shut up.
68. When you get an email and the customer wasn't the last
one to reply, but another agent. Soooo....what do I do here?
69. The struggle to make it to the email team, being teased week
after week with the team leader saying she’s "thinking" about moving
me as long as I keep my emails per hour above average, which was hard to do
since I was thrown all the phones all the time. Were they just stringing me
along with empty promises to get more work out of me?
70. Getting hassled by a team leader for being in After Call
Work when I've actually been live for the last 30+ seconds. Especially when I'm
literally in the middle of a call. Think I'm talking to myself here? (To be
fair I might be, but still!)
71. Whenever some coworker or team leader tries to make
small talk with me while I'm on a phone call. Gods shut up! I can't talk to you
right now! Especially when it's a team leader who should really know better by
now. It's hard enough doing 50 things at once on your stupid systems without
you distracting me.
72. The blue screen of death! Oh, what fun! Most likely to
occur when all my usual computers have been stolen and I happened to be unlucky
enough to pick one that barely works.
73. Related to 67; secret and obscure rules that we weren't
taught in training and nobody ever brings up until you break them.
74. Guests who threaten to never shop at our store again if
you don't accomplish some impossible feat for them that they've already been
told we can't do, like reship an order to a different address or speed up the
shipping. Oh, we only do that for special customers.
75. Whenever someone has an actual question about the
product we sell, which I know nothing about.
76. Expired incidents when a customer replies to an email
like two weeks later. Why do they have to expire? It just makes us have to do
archaeology to figure out what's going on.
77. When a customer starts a whole new email instead of
replying to the one they were sent, throwing you into a situation you know nothing
about and necessitating you to go digging for the previous incident.
78. Why are we unable to cancel or alter orders and update
addresses, exactly? The customers want it, clearly, and it sucks having to be
the bearer of bad news for every other call/email and gets screamed/ALL CAPPED
at. My last job had a computer system that was older than the hills and looked
like it was on a 1980's computer, and we were still able to alter and cancel
orders.
79. Points issues whenever they have to do with the stupid
Credit Card. Gaaah. Stop hurting my brain. Can't some other department handle
those?
80. People who misspell my name even though it is plainly
spelled out for them in the email! You could just copy and paste it if you're
too lazy to spell it! Now mispronouncing it I can sort of understand (I have a
very foreign-sounding name by the way although it is short), but come on! I
also get misgendered a lot, which is always fun.
81. Those heartless bastards who at the end of their shift
leave their computer locked without logging off and restarting it so no one
else can use their actual working computer when they come in for work,
lengthening the amount of time the rest of us have to play computer roulette
looking for a computer that works and making us late.
82. When a guest posts a gigantic image in their email that
you have to zoom out to even begin to tell what it is; worse when it keeps
getting reposted with each reply making the chain of emails you inherit seem
200 miles long.
83. The sluggish Return to Sender process which takes 30
days and just pisses everyone off. Especially sucks when it takes longer than
30 days and then you get to be the one to explain why that happened.
84. How the products in the order system have different
names from what's on the website so when the customer says one is missing it
takes 10 minutes to figure out which one they're talking about.
85. The stupid red text in the standard text templates that
we have to change the color to black on every time, costing us precious seconds
and lowering our Emails Per Hour. You're supposed to be saving us time!
86. Having to take over an email from another agent who's a
newbie and did a shit job on it for me to clean up. I mean okay I was a newbie
not long ago and I didn't know what I was doing until like two months into the
job, but still. Annoying.
87. Sales on a Sunday when we're understaffed and
ill-equipped to handle the call volume! Thanks, marketing team!! Way to kick us
when we're down!
89. Being on the "email team" but still being forced
to take calls, because the volumes are high and we only have five people
working here. I guess being on the email team is really meaningless. (A special
way to incur my wrath is to make me take a call right before my shift ends!)
90. Still getting nagged and coached over petty bullcrap
when the team leader already knows I'm quitting because I put my two weeks'
notice in days ago. Like I'm pretty sure my stats aren't going to matter in the
slightest by the end of the month.
91. The attendance system and its smug "we noticed you
were late so we're deducting an attendance point" emails, particularly
since whenever I have clocked in late it's been because of bullshit computer
issues and no fault of my own.
92. Survey callbacks, where someone contacts a customer who
left a negative survey after their call or email. I am unsure what contacting
guests who had unsatisfactory experiences only because of policies which we
can't change is supposed to achieve, we'll just be upsetting them all over
again because we can't edit orders, cancel orders after two hours or resend
gifts with purchase or what have you. Why pick at a scab? Why open a can of
worms that doesn't need to be opened? Why poke an angry sleeping bear? It's
utterly stupid. All it does is throw whoever ends up with that email in their
inbox under the bus automatically.
93. Having to go through all this red tape just to use the
gift card system. Particularly having to download and install Google
Authenticator every time I'm on a computer I haven't used before. Couldn't you
just already have it downloaded on every computer? Is that too much damn
trouble for you?
94. When a customer emails twice or emails and then calls
about the same problem, and I go through all this hassle to try to solve their
problem only to find another agent already helped them. It wouldn't bother me
if I found out right away, but I hate it when it's after I did a bunch of
investigating for nothing.
95. When I get thrown onto the phones because we apparently
have "calls in queue", but I sit there for two minutes and don't get
a single call! I'm not annoyed that there were no calls, but why was I put on
phones in the first place if there's no calls coming in?! Nevermind that I'm on
the EMAIL TEAM, as if that means anything around here.
96. They're always having like a million promotions and they
never tell us about any of them. The customers always know more about these
promotions than we do. So the customers bombard us with "Why didn't I get
6x the bonus points for buying this obscure product?" And it'll be the
first we've ever heard of this promotion. Then we get to dig through their
account and try to match up the one promotion they're talking about out of
dozens and see if they activated it, then we get to sift through their dozens of
purchases and see if they bought the one product that qualifies it. Would it be
so bad to do one promotion at a time? Or at least send us an email informing us
about them? I've already mentioned how much I hate reward points but this is a
big reason why.
97. Related to the previous one: Store transactions where
the customer never got the correct amount of bonus points from their promotion.
I swear the store cashiers must be too lazy to do the math so they make our
department do it. It's hardly ever online transactions that have this problem,
because those points are added automatically.
98. Customers who argue with you over points adjustments you
gave them and suddenly become math professors, demanding you share with them
every single step of the complex calculus equation you had to do to arrive upon
the correct number of bonus points they should have gotten. They can't just be
happy I did the adjustment at all. Bonus points are apparently serious
business. Please, do something better with your life, Karen the Soccer Mom.
99. Ungrateful
customers. You generously bend the rules for them, give them an appeasement,
maybe even do something for them that could raise the ire of your team leader,
and sometimes it's still not enough. They'll make increasingly impossible
demands and then get pissed at you when you can't do it. What a thankless job.
Makes you wish you'd just sent the generic apology email template and moved on.
Generosity is pointless in the end.
100. Everyone tells you something different, and when rules
and procedures change, no one tells you. One team leader says "Yes, we can
cancel an order as long as its less than two hours old". And the other
team leader says "No! No cancellations ever! How dare you tell a customer
there's even a glimmer of hope their order will be canceled! You're getting a
warning!" And of course, it's YOUR fault you were misinformed by someone
else, or never told the procedure had changed. They never change or update
their email templates either, so why have email templates with inaccurate
information? This place is an absolute shitshow, no one knows what they're
doing. Too many cooks spoil the soup and all that.
It’s September 2020 and I’m still
around. The seasons are changing, Florida is finally starting to cool down a bit, and I can actually
venture outside again without melting. California isn’t so lucky, sadly. My old home state is
consumed by flames. It is the burning times; seems to happen every year now. I
think I’ll take yearly hurricane scares over yearly fires. But maybe I only say that because I've still never been in a really bad hurricane before. People act like the
year 2020 is at fault for all this, like it’s some weird curse. Same thing
people said about 2016. But the truth is everything led up to this point. The
fires, the hurricanes, the pandemic. It’s all been in the works for a long
time, and it's all interconnected. People put way too much stock in their calendars; as if their
abstract weeks, months and years have any real significance on a universal
scale. They divide time up so it’s easier to pretend the past is separate from
the present. But the present is the culmination of the past, they are part of a whole. It’s not just some
unlucky year. What we’re seeing right now are consequences. Do people really
think this is all going to end in 2021, that the curse will be broken at
midnight on December 31st? I don't think so. And it definitely isn't going to magically go away if the right candidate wins the US presidential elections either.
Well, enough about current events.
My plans for the blog for the coming month are a little scant, as it’s going to
have to take a back seat to higher priorities once again. I even think that I’ll debut my webcomic next month. I’m really trying to push to the
finish with that, and soon, because I could use some extra money. I'm going to post it up somewhere on a webcomic site and start a Patreon. I finished one page today, took a break to write this very blog while my son was asleep, and once the blog is up I'm going back to working on the comic. That's how invested I am in it right now. But with
Halloween on the way I want to do a few spooky entries on the blog. I have a fun one
planned about what particular moments in movies and shows creeped me out as a
kid. Either this month or next month I think I’ll make public an essay I wrote
about Vlad the Impaler years ago too, just to help get in the Halloween spirit.
It would be fun to talk about my Halloween mix CD too, but I’m getting ahead of
myself, that’s for next month.
But anyway, it’s time once again to list my
top 3 songs of the month, because it’s little personal traditions like this
that keep me sane, even if I’m the only one it holds any significance to. Each
year I put as many of my top songs of the month as I can on a mixtape, and it
helps me remember my past later on. It's a real trip down memory lane marathoning those yearly mixtapes. It’s like uploading my consciousness into a
computer program. The blog gives me a chance to share it with people. But in
practice, I suppose the blog is just a chance for me to mumble to myself online
to a real or imagined audience. My music tastes haven’t changed since last
month. I’ve been getting my new music from YouTube lately, particularly from
the uploader Sound in the Distance. This is the music that’s been getting me
through these times.
Slow
Danse With the Dead – I Look Like Death
Slow Danse With the Dead (STWTD) released their
second album on September 1st, and this is the title track from
it. And so soon after their debut album! That only came out last July. I don’t
know how many bands just release two albums within a couple months of each
other, or even two in the same year. Perhaps we owe it to the quarantine. As
soon as it was announced on Facebook, I paid $5 for it on Bandcamp. No cassette
version, yet at least, just an MP3 download; which of course I burned onto a
CD. The new album is characteristic of STWTD’s “misery goth” style. The song
itself is about dressing in goth attire while living the ideal lifestyle of a
goth, “sipping wine in an abandoned tomb” and such. The Spanish lyrics in the
chorus “Parezco la muerte, te ves coma la muerte” just sound really catchy,
contributing to this song becoming stuck in my head as of late.
Blogger's new YouTube search thing that lets you embed videos is not turning up the video for this song, even though I know an individual video for this song exists on YouTube! In fact, here it is. I could go find the video and embed it the hard way and deal with all the html, but I don't feel like it. So, here's the full album I guess. Bah. Don't make me switch to Wordpress, Blogger.
The illusive goth sax makes an
appearance in this and a few other songs by Selofan, a darkwave band out of
Greece. I get excited when I find a Greek goth band (such as Grey Gallows),
because it’s almost like finding an Armenian goth band (as far as I can tell
they don’t really exist, although the band The Deenjes almost sounds goth). What's super interesting is that this band has collaborated in the past with Turkish goth band
She Past Away. Greece was subject to much the same mistreatment from Turkey as
Armenia was. Were they able to look past their national differences and bond over
their shared appreciation of the genre they both work in? I myself have also been
trying to divorce politics from my appreciation of art and move beyond
nationalism.
But
yes, back to the goth sax. Not everyone thinks saxophones belong in goth music,
(one of the DJs I follow, DJ Maus, has voiced her opposition to it, although I find
that our musical tastes usually align in every other way), but I must not be
alone in thinking that for some strange reason they go really well together.
Like how some people like peanut butter and chocolate together and some don’t
(I don’t, actually, but still). I want to make a CD mix of just goth sax songs, but I
don’t know if I’d be able to fill an 80 minute CD with it, because it is a
relatively rare phenomenon. The only other bands I can think of that have
dabbled in it are Lebanon Hanover and Night Nail. A couple of Ministry's early songs have it too, if you consider that under the goth umbrella. Perhaps if I also included
synthwave sax I could get the job done. Throw a few tracks from The Midnight on there or something.
Anyway, I’ve been listening the more
and more Selofan as of late. I first heard their song “Give Me a Reason” a year
or two ago but for whatever reason I didn’t start listening to their other
songs until recently. They’ve been around a while too, and have built up a nice
discography for me to gradually get through.
The
album this song is from, Vitrioli, can be found here: https://selofan.bandcamp.com/album/vitrioli
Molchat
Doma – Kletka
Molchat Doma is a band out of
Belarus. Their name translates to “Houses are Silent”. I discovered this band
fairly recently, but I like the feel of it. Someone in the comments on YouTube described
it best; even if you can’t understand the lyrics, you can feel the depression
that went into the song. Why am I so attracted to depressing music? I don’t
know. Dysthymia, I guess. Happy music usually annoys me, unless it’s
particularly good or can appeal to my nostalgia somehow.
I’m going to have to explore more of
Molchat Doma’s discography, but I definitely like them. I wouldn’t mind
learning to read Russian so I could know what their song titles mean.
I could go on about the dark music I’ve
been listening to, such as the bands Tearful Moon and Winter Severity Index,
but I like to branch out to other genres when I get to the honorable mentions.
My young son doesn’t yet share my tastes in music, so we try to introduce him
to whatever he will not automatically reject. He seems to like electro swing,
interestingly, which is a genre I’m kind of into. So we discovered the YouTuber
OR30 (I don’t know if it’s pronounced like “or-thirty” or ”oreo”), a singer and
animator who has produced an electro swing concept album called Clover. The
story of the album involves a young kid who’s depressed that her grandfather
died, and she gets visited by three spirits who try to cheer her up. The songs
are accompanied by animated music videos done in a black and white, Fleischer-esque
1930’s animation style. The songs haven’t all been released yet, we’re still
waiting on the last song from the three spirits. I like all the songs I’ve heard from this
album. “Help Me”, the introduction, is a really catchy one, and the song “100
Years” sounds like it could have been sung by Frank Sinatra. Right now, my
favorite is “Still Dancing”. It’s the tragic story of a dancer from the 1920’s
who was struck with a paralyzing disease. When she lost the use of her legs,
her daughter told her she could still dance with her hands, so she “danced” by
clapping her hands for a while until she lost the use of her arms. Her daughter
encouraged her to sing instead, which she did for a while. At last she is shown
in a hospital bed completely paralyzed, and her daughter tells her she can
still dance in her head. It’s so sad! But I like stories that tug on my heart
strings, and I appreciate the message. The dancer wouldn’t let anything stop
her from doing what she wanted to do. She never gave up dancing. I admire that.
I’m not going to let anything stop me from writing and drawing either.
Here’s
Or30’s YouTube channel if you want to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTAyRNwgMv_vvM8Z9UvKKEg
I threatened to do this post earlier, and here it is, for all five of you who like looking at other people's collections of things! These are the "official" cassettes I own (plus one bootleg tape). Now I have literally hundreds of formerly blank mixtapes, but these are the comparatively few tapes that are actual albums. Some of them came from my parents, a couple actually came from my grandmother, the newest ones were purchased straight from the artist either at a concert or online, and the rest were lucky thrift store finds (and that's rarer than you think; almost every thrift shop I've been to either has country music, religious music, or Christmas music in their cassette section, hardly ever is there anything I would like). I mostly tried to group the tapes that were similar to one another, but I wasn't always able to do that for each picture.
Kraftwerk - Autobahn (bootleg)
I'll get this one down first. This isn't an official cassette. Now a long time ago in my early teens, when I was in the Boy Scouts (which I largely loathed but that's another story), the father of one of the other kids in my troop found out I liked Kraftwerk after I wore my Kraftwerk t-shirt on one of our camping trips, so he actually made this for me. He somehow printed out a very convincing cover, but the cassette itself is one of those TDK D90 tapes that I have a bunch of. It was nice of him; I suppose it's thrilling when you're middle-aged and you find out a kid is into the music you liked when you were younger. I'm closer to being middle-aged myself now so I kind of get it. I'd heard the remixed version of "Autobahn" on Kraftwerk's The Mixalbum before, but the first time I heard the full version (over twenty minutes long) was from this tape. There was a lot of blank space on the tape since the actual album isn't that long, which I filled with more Kraftwerk songs.
My German Polka Tapes
Every now and then, I like to put one of these tapes on as background music. It's very happy and relaxing music. The top two tapes were both lucky thrift store finds, but the bottom two, titled Es Singt und Klingt im Ganzen Land ("it sings and clings in the whole land") were two of the only things I inherited when my grandma Olga died in 2003 (I also got my own copy of my grandfather's memoir). She grew up in Austria and lived there until after World War II, so this was her type of music. I don't have a whole lot to remember her by, but I do have these cassettes. So I have a lot of sentimentality wrapped up in these tapes.
My Big Band Jazz and Swing Tapes
These were all thrift store finds. The top two are part of a set of music from the 1930's and 40's called "This Was Our Music". It's the soundtrack of a generation that by and large is gone now. This was their music. Jukebox Requests of the 1940's is the same kind of music for the most part. And we have The Hits of Judy Garland. My favorite Judy Garland song, "Never Been Blue", isn't on it unfortunately. But I snatched it anyway for like 25 cents.
Paula Abdul - Forever Your Girl
Yes, one of my sort-of guilty pleasures. I was into Paula Abdul during my early childhood. This has all her best songs; "Opposites Attract", Cold-Hearted Snake", "Straight Up", and some other lesser-known good ones.
Some Good 80's Bands from Thrift Stores
Here we have The B-52's with Cosmic Thing, an impulse buy at a thrift store for dirt cheap. It has "Love Shack", "Roam" and "Channel Z". some old favorites of mine from that band (which I was into when I was younger). Please was the 1986 debut album from the Pet Shop Boys, with their hit "West End Girls". This tape is in great shape, sounds as clear as a CD too. Journey's Greatest Hits was something I grew up listening to on a CD my mom owned, so it was good to find that again. And Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark is another good New Wave band which I had to snatch up when I saw the tape among all the bland country music tapes.
Lesser-Known Guns n'Roses and Pink Floyd Albums
The Guns n' Roses tapes belonged to my parents. I grew up listening to that band. These are the albums Use Your Illusion and Lies. The Pink Floyd tape is of their album Animals. It says it was copyrighted 1977, and if the tape is actually that old it's amazing it still works.I wish I had Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall. These three tapes are linked by the fact that they're not the more famous albums of either band.
Weird Al and MC Hammer
These are both tapes I've had since childhood. Don't ask why I have an MC Hammer tape. It's been following me around for decades now and I can't seem to get rid of it. I'm really not a fan of hip hop, but if I'm going to listen to it, I like the stuff from the 80's better than anything later. That Weird Al Greatest Hits tape accompanied many a road trip when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of it. I need to get it a new plastic case, as you can tell. I could always switch the case with a crappy country music tape from the thrift stores.
Faith No More and Korn
The Faith No More tape was definitely my mom's, she loved that band. It's my only tape with a Parental Advisory label on it. I'm a parent now and I will always think those labels are stupid. The album is Angel Dust, it doesn't really have any of my favorite Faith No More songs on it like "Epic" or "Last Cup of Sorrow", but it is what it is. Korn's Follow the Leaderwas an interesting find at this record store in the San Francisco Bay Area I liked to frequent when I lived there, Rasputin Records. It seems rare to find rock music from the late 1990's on cassette, as that was solidly the CD era.
Classic Rock. And The Church.
These were tapes I remembered at the last minute when I was digging through my collection. The Black Sabbath and AC/DC tapes were from my dad. They might just be the oldest tapes in my collection (along with the Pink Floyd one), actually from the late 1970's. I only rarely listen to them, but that keeps them in good shape I suppose. I'm really not that into classic rock. Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne are some of the better ones that still hold up today, got to give them credit for their contribution to the metal genre. To me though almost all of AC/DC's songs sound the same. The Church is a misfit here, another New Wave band. Alas, it isn't the album with "Under the Milky Way" or "Reptile" on it, my favorite songs from them.
Mortiis
I did a blog about the concert where I purchased these cassettes, two of Mortiis' dungeon synth albums. See I actually attended a concert in 2020! It was right before the coronavirus, of course.
Online and Concert Purchases
These are probably my favorites, along with maybe the Kraftwerk one. The top left one is The Midnight's album Nocturnal. The Midnight is one of the best synthwave bands out there, a revival of 80's music. To the top right is from the band Glaare, the album To Deaf and a Day. Glaare's music is amazing, I have to say. They are out of these tapes on Bandcamp page but you can still get the mp3's. I recently acquired Slow Danse With the Dead's debut album, as I mentioned in my Top 3 Songs of the Month for August. And finally I have Boy Harsher's album Careful, which I purchased at a concert last year in Tampa.
Not Pictured
I wasn't able to dig them up, but somewhere I have the soundtrack to the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on cassette (missing the booklet sadly), as well as the soundtrack to Jurassic Park. I'm sure they're around somewhere, in a box in my closet. The Ninja Turtle soundtrack in particular has a couple good songs on it, and is a relic of my childhood.The Jurassic Park one is just instrumental, but there was a time I would buy anything with a Jurassic Park logo on it.
Anyway, that's the collection! Thanks for being bored enough to read about it.
In
August of 2015, I finished teaching my Creative Writing class at the teen summer
program at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan. From
there, I was sent to volunteer in the city of Vanadzor to the northeast, where
I would be teaching English courses. I was there for two months, but it was the
best two months of my whole stay in Armenia. They set me up with a host family
and I stayed in a room in an apartment with a terrific view of the city. Everything I needed was within walking distance, and of course the cost of
living in Armenia is much cheaper than the US so I could afford to eat at a
restaurant nearly every day. By this time, I finally qualified for Birthright
Armenia’s stipend, so my financial issues were solved too and I could finally
do things. My students in Vanadzor were of varying ages, but they attended my classes because they really wanted to learn English, and that made it a much better experience than I'd had in Yerevan with a captive teen audience that didn't want to be there (and the less said about that experience the better).
In August,
I was accompanied by many other volunteers with the Birthright Armenia program,
but most of them left in September, either back to Yerevan or to their home
countries, leaving me the only Birthright Armenia volunteer in the whole town. This
left me feeling a bit neglected at times; at one point someone from the Peace
Corps had their English class scheduled at the same time as mine because
everyone forgot I was still around, another time I got locked out of the NGO
office I volunteered at and everyone in charge was gone. Birthright Armenia
does excursions each weekend, but I often missed them when I was in Vanadzor
because I needed some way to get myself to Yerevan. So I was pretty much
stranded there. I was set to leave Armenia on October the 1st so
there was little point in me volunteering anywhere else for those few weeks, so
I just sort of lingered in Vanadzor. But I did fall in love with that city
while I was there, touring the city on my time off, walking from one end to another, encountering a lot of post-Soviet urban decay. It definitely wasn’t all bad, and I was having a better time
there than I did in Yerevan. Just before I left some of my students took me
with them to Surp Hovhanness church near the village of Medz Parni, a very tiny
building situated atop a hill and hosting a strangely huge collection of
khatchkars, with a new one being installed the very day I was there. That was a
fun trip.
I
thought I’d share a partial article I wrote up on the experience at the time. I
never really finished writing it, for a few reasons (I fell into kind of a
depression upon my return to the US and didn’t write anything for a few months,
as is normal I think, and once I came out of it I wanted to focus on self-publishing
my first novel, which I did the following May). I even interviewed a couple
fellow volunteers too. I don’t think I’m ever going to finish the article at
this point, five years later, so I’ll just post it on the blog.
Volunteering in
Vanadzor
By
Suren Oganessian
Crossing over into the Lori
province, the environment changes almost instantly; the land is blanketed in
clouds that don’t seem to make it past the borders, temperatures drop to a
soothing coolness, the mountainous landscape becomes ever more dramatic, and
trees gradually become more abundant. As my driver drove me and my luggage from
Yerevan, where I had just spent four months volunteering, to the city of
Vanadzor, which I had only barely visited a couple times on excursions as we
were passing through on our way to somewhere else, I was both nervous and
excited. I was excited because the hustle and bustle of Yerevan’s vibrant city
life had become a little bit exhausting and the boiling hot summer temperatures
were only getting hotter, so I was eager for a change of scenery. But I was
also nervous because I had little idea what to expect, when it came to my
homestay and my jobsites, and the city in general. In many ways, the experience
of moving to Vanadzor was like coming to Yerevan from the United States all
over again; once more I was being taken away from all that had become familiar
to me and placed in a new, very different environment.
Suffice it to say though, I adapted
quickly. Vanadzor is quieter than Yerevan, but more relaxing. The people are
friendly. The air is fresh and clean. And for those like me who can’t stand
heat, it’s like a small pocket of Armenia that summer never quite reaches, a
sanctuary from the punishing summer sun. I volunteered as an English teacher at
the NGO Center and at the Vanadzor Library’s American Corner, facilitating
English clubs, film viewings and a Creative Writing class. The students in
Vanadzor sincerely want to learn, are there because they want to be there, and
are appreciative of their teachers. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences
at my jobsites. On days off, such as Sundays, I often go for walks, exploring
the parks and the city. Vanadzor gets progressively more fascinating the
further you go; scenes of abandoned Soviet-era factories and buildings with
trees growing out of them abound. The suburban and rural areas of Vanadzor are
worth exploring as well, to give you a more authentic view of how Armenians
live than you might get in Yerevan. And if you like to hike, you don’t have to
go far. The city is surrounded by lush, tall green hills. I was overcome by
their beauty when I first ventured into them.
Living in Vanadzor enriched and
enlightened my Birthright experience in ways staying in Yerevan would not have.
Don’t just take my word for it; this is what some of the other volunteers in
Vanadzor had to say.
“There’s not to much to do, but I
really like the weather,” says volunteer Arnaud Chahinian, “It can get quite
cold and I like that. But because there are not so many things to do, I have
the time to do what I want. There are not so many Birthrighters in the city, so
you become more deeply immersed in local culture and community. You don’t spend
so much time with other Disaspora Armenians. “
Vanadzor gives volunteers an
opportunity to see a more authentic Armenia, and with fewer volunteers than you
would get in Yerevan, it can mean closer friendships. “With a smaller group of
volunteers, you get better acquainted with the other volunteers in the city, rather
than trying to meet with 50 other volunteers in Yerevan.” adds Arnaud.
Yepo Sarkisian concurs, “I like Vanadzor
people. To me, (Vanadzor) people are more welcoming and caring than Yerevan
people. I would say that was my experience that village people were welcoming
and loving. Yerevan is more dry and “do it yourself”, which at time for me that
was good too.”
The volunteers that I interviewed
universally enjoyed their jobsites.
“I have three jobsites,” Arnaud explains, “With
the French club I teach at NGO, I feel quite free to do what I want and it’s
nice because I can make my class what I want it to be. But because it is free
and voluntary students come and go, so it’s not very serious. My second jobsite
is translating things into French for Birthright and writing an article of my
hitchhiking trip. The main one is at Oran, are activities like poetry, sewing,
arts and crafts. I started a French club there as well, it’s a good place to
stay. With these three jobsites I work 6 hours a day.”
Emily Varadian had this to say, “As for my Vanadzor job placements, I loved them.
The children's hospital was a great learning environment where I observed
speech therapy and exchanged ideas and methods with the professionals. And Oran
was great too! The kids there were so friendly and willing to learn, in both my
English classes and my speech therapy lessons. In Oran I was able to work
directly with the kids doing speech therapy, which was challenging but made
possible with the help of my translator. I made games like memory and bingo and
we practiced speech sounds. It was a learning experience on both ends, I
hopefully helped the kids learn how to articulate the target sounds and I also
learned Armenian letters and sounds while working with them.”
Vanadzor in Pictures
That
was as far as I got with the article. I figured it’d be nice to show off some
pictures I took while there, to give the reader a feel for the place.
One of the first places I was taken by my host family was to this water fountain that gives carbonated mineral water. Locals often stop by to fill up bottles and jugs with the water. I can't say I ever saw anything like this in the US.
The further you get from downtown, the more badly paved the roads can get. But this is what a typical neighborhood looks like in Vanadzor. It feels more real here.
Atop the highest hill in town is the Kirovakan Hotel. Kirovakan was the Soviet name for Vanadzor.It's a bit of a hike getting to it, but the view is worth it.
This building was hauntingly beautiful. I was told it used to be a hospital, but it was abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union. Shame for such a nice building to go to waste.
The view that greeted me from my bedroom window.
Here's one taken on a sunnier day from the apartment I stayed in.
This was on the outskirts of town, deep in the hills. I couldn't figure out what it used to be. A nice example of decaying Soviet architecture.
I'm pretty sure someone wealthy lived here, maybe a city official. But I found it interesting whenever I passed it.
If you couldn't already tell, it was overcast a lot in Vanadzor. It just so happens I love that kind of weather. I loved the clouds in this photo.
If I were ever to live in Armenia I think Vanadzor is where I'd like to be. The weather is great, and it's that perfect balance, not as busy and loud as Yerevan, but not too rural and remote.
