Hello, Watercooler.
I'm a single mother of two. I live and work in the St. Louis area, and I'm forty years old now. I've been in customer service for almost fifteen years now, and honestly… Yuck. lol
I used to think this was just going to be a stepping stone. Something I did while I figured out what I actually wanted to do with my life and raised my kiddos. Fifteen years later, I'm still on the phone, still saying "let me see what I can do" when I already know there's nothing I can do.
I want out. I really do. But every time I apply somewhere else, all they see is customer service on my resume, and that's it — door closed, next. So I feel stuck. Like, actually stuck. Like the industry decided who I was before I ever got a say in it.
Here's the thing, though — I still love parts of this job, or at least I used to, and some days I catch a glimpse of it again. When I actually fix someone's problem, and they mean it when they say thank you, I go home feeling like I did something that mattered. But those days are rare now. Most days, I'm just tired. Tired in my body, tired in my head, tired in ways I don't even have words for. You sit there and absorb everyone else's worst moment of their day, back to back to back, and management tells you to smile through it and take the next call as if nothing happened.
We get treated like we're replaceable. Like, our whole job is to take whatever people throw at us and thank them for calling anyway. So I'm asking: where is the customer service for us? Who's taking care of the people whose entire job is taking care of everyone else? Companies love writing scripts telling us how to stay calm and de-escalate, but nobody writes a script for what we're supposed to do with everything we carry home at the end of a shift.
I'm not asking for much. I just want somebody to notice.
Sincerely,
Stuck on Hold in St. Louis
Got a story? Tell me by the watercooler