The Joy of Techs

Where do I begin.

I'd been part of the in-house temp program at Sony for a year and a half. (My life moves in often-eerily-regular cycles of a year and a half.) I'd moved back to my college town earlier that year with my fiancée.

Temp work at Sony was going nowhere. No benefits. No semblance of security. Same old secretarial fill-ins and desktop publishing. Very good company -- beautiful site, nice atmosphere, killer employee discount; I'd have accepted any job offer without hesitation -- but I was learning nothing new and the only creativity I could inject into my duties involved sprucing up memos or laying out cover sheets for proposals. And they didn't have a position for me.

Our housemate pointed out a job fair in the paper, so I feigned a doctor's appointment and attended said fair one workday afternoon. I paid my attendance fee and discovered an astounding dearth of prospects. Here's an large insurance company looking for sales representatives...no thanks. And here's a large manufacturing company looking for sales representatives...no thanks. Hey, here's the local telephone company! Looking for sales representatives. I got my résumé copied on 20 sheets of expensive paper for this?

Ah, but there's the table for MicroWarehouse. Have I heard of MacWarehouse? they ask. Yes, I certainly have. I introduce myself, hand them my résumé, and discover they're soon going to be taking over Apple's direct telephone sales (education, business, special promotions) and they need technicians...people with Apple knowledge.

I quickly interviewed there twice (more doctor appointments) and they hired me so fast I had to terminate my temp assignment with two days' notice.

So I began my life at MicroWarehouse.

After a month of training (normal MacWarehouse peons get two weeks, but the Apple division got special guerrilla instruction), I was ready to work. I and three other techs (two of them picked from the MacWarehouse Tech Support department), plus the manager, had the enviable job of sitting in front of a Quadra 650 (this was before Power Macs) 24/250/CD with a 16" screen and a TelePort/Gold modem, waiting to answer pre-sales questions from sales representatives and, on occasion, customers.

Wait we did. The training folks did such a good job, educating the sales reps so well, that the tech support call volume projections wound up being far higher than actual. We sat around. We played Maelstrom. We played Myst. We played Diamonds. We played sampled sounds. We played Oingo Boingo. We played with the QuickTake. We played with our toes.

Every once in a while, a phone would ring. We wondered: Do I answer this call? Or do I bounce it to someone else? Telephone rings volleyed to and fro. "We're sorry, all of our technicians are currently too busy with network Spectre to answer your simple question."

After a while, the higher management began to catch on. It was decided (The Imperial Passive) that one of the techs was to be "loaned" to MacWarehouse tech support, which was always understaffed. That tech was the other guy they'd hired off the street. Not surprising -- he was the only Apple-certified technician in the company. The ex-Mac-Techs said it was hell over there, but at least he got the salary he was hired for (notably higher than the top wage in Mac Tech) and he'd be back with us in four to six weeks. (He returned a few months later.)

After another while, it became clear that their projections for sales call volume had also been off -- in the other direction. There's the Traffic Manager (where do they come up with these titles?), yelling at the telemarketers to get back on the phones. And so, one day, the order came into Tech Support that at least one technician would be required to take sales calls.

We fought it, but we wound up doing rotations out on the sales floor. Even the manager. I was dragged out periodically when I was the only technician on duty. (Let me interject that sales involves a rather different skill set from tech support. As an Apple pre-sales tech, you concentrate on product specs and compatibility. As an Apple telemarketer, you handle five different price lists for different markets, multiple shipping addresses, overnight vs. ground shipping [ground sirloin is preferable], educational customer qualification, two financing programs, certain schools you're forbidden to sell to, and so on. Techs try to get things working -- TMs try to get things sold. Put a tech on the sales phones and you're not going to see a lot of product move, especially when you don't give him any commission.) ...Where the hell was I?

It even got to the point where the whole tech department was closed down all day, just to put three extra people on the phone. ("Three?" you ask. Yes, three. After a while, MacWarehouse tech support "borrowed" TWO of us at a time.)

Five months into my stay there, I moved into a lovely new apartment much closer to work.

A month after that, it was my turn in the barrel.

MacWarehouse Tech Support welcomed me with a few days of perfunctory tech-technique training and threw me on the phones.

It was hell. Nonstop phones. People complaining about inexpensive, barely-acceptable-quality products that don't work. People who, by absorbing mass-media images of computers, learned just enough to be terribly dangerous to their data...and their hardware...and the sanity of a tech. People who should never have been given access to a computer. I can't go into depth...your browser would melt. Suffice it to say that Tech Support Tales -- a mailing list compiling nightmare tech support calls -- is pure, unaltered truth (and MacWarehouse contributes a fair percentage of its stories).

You finish the call and the phone is ringing before you can breathe. And it goes on. And the managers ask if you can please stay through lunch and they'll bring in pizza or subs or, on awfully rare occasion, chicken, which nonetheless gets cold and stale because it's impossible to eat while you're on the phone. Day after day.

And the telemarketers.

• How many telemarketers does it take to change a light bulb?
  If you can hold for a moment, I'll ask a technician.

My saving grace was that I was in fact an employee of the Apple Tech department, and would be going back in a couple of months.

Heh.

Three weeks later, the Mac Tech supervisor took me aside and told me Apple was cutting some staff. I was one. (The two ex-Mac-Techs were also cut.) However, I was doing a great job in Mac Tech, and they'd happily keep me. Not a word from the Apple division...I was simply cut off.

Four months away from my wedding, in a new apartment (which I'd actually moved into because I could afford it on the Apple Tech salary)...I had no choice. I accepted their "offer," took a $3000/yr pay cut, and shortly was switched to a new shift working weekends. (Never got off the weekend shift. In fact, I had to file for a vacation day to get Christmas off, the company having overlooked their weekend workers -- MacWarehouse never closes.)

I discovered all the wonders of cheap corporate culture -- the interdepartment noncommunication, to the point where Mac Tech learned of new products ONLY when a customer would call and complain about one that didn't work ("Excuse me, sir, I need to check some information" -- [HOLD button] -- "Hey! Has anyone heard we're selling another $99 modem?"); the regular habit of stocking shoddy goods, covered up with managerial mandates to lie to customers ("No, ma'am, I've never heard of any problems with that $199 CD-ROM drive"); the underhanded purchasing of incomplete goods, covered up with more lies ("No, sir, that Macintosh system isn't supposed to come with any system disks -- or any backup utility -- or any manuals"); the layers and layers of bureaucracy preventing any real change like, say, a decent wage for technicians...again, I could flame for months. Oh, just read Dilbert.

My wedding came and went. I did get a week off for my honeymoon, thanks largely, I imagine, to the fact that my supervisor's wedding was very close to mine. I invited a bunch of my fellow techs and none of them came: Two had previous arrangements, one couldn't find a babysitter, one had a misunderstanding with me, one caught a cold (never mind that two of my guests had fevers, and one of them stayed for the whole night), and one -- whoops! -- got thrown in jail. (To be fair, one of them did come -- but he was one of my groomsmen, a college roommate. In fact, I was the one who got him hired at MacWarehouse. Sorry!)

Time dragged on. Until.

One and a half years after my initial descent into Mac Tech, finding I had for too long been waking up every morning consumed with bitter hatred for my company, I decided I had had enough. I could take no more.

I woke up on the first day of my work week (Friday according to the real world) and, the weekend's thoughts echoing in my head, I took a shower.

No job prospects. Rent, utilities, food, car loan, insurance. Credit card debts. Wife pregnant. Would lose excellent health-insurance benefits. Pondering this in the shower, I lost focus.

Drying myself, I turned to my wife and said, "Am I really doing this?"

"Damned right you are," she said. What the hell, I thought. It's time.

I walked into work precisely at the beginning of my shift, in white button-down, black pants, black necktie, good shoes -- business dress on a dress-down day. I tried to find my supervisor: Took the day off. Manager: Took the day off. Human Resources person who'd recruited me: Took the day off. Snooping around the backways of the building, I located the supervisor on duty. I stood there, letter in hand, and he said, "You're quitting, aren't you?"

I handed him the letter.

     September 1, 1995
     11:00 a.m.


     To:   [Supervisor]
           [Manager]
           [Director]
           [Human Resources person who recruited me]



     I immediately resign from employment at MicroWarehouse.
     
     
     
                                                    [Signed]

He accepted it with a smile. Turns out he'd given his two weeks' notice that morning. (Lots of resignations in Mac Tech...I wonder why.) A Human Resources person gave me an Emergency Exit Interview ("Why are you leaving...Is there anything we could have done to keep you here?" Eh-heh. She needed three extra sheets to record my remarks.)

And that was it. I drove away. Who cares what happened after that.

(Okay, so a month later, I accidentally got a temp assignment surfing the Web for two weeks...which turned into three weeks, then four, and so on...ultimately landing me a position as a Web Site Administrator for a Fortune 100 company...yeah, whatever.)

Slack is Real.

MicroWarehouse and MacWarehouse are registered trademarks of MicroWarehouse Inc. Apple is a registered trademark of Apple Computer Inc. These names are used only for the purpose of fictional verisimilitude. This document does not express the views of either company or their employees or affiliates.