(no subject)

[katyism.livejournal.com]

For those of us who are employed as drone monkeys in call centers or similar, what is your work room or area like? My underlying motivation in asking is to compare your workplace's layout, space, equipment, etc with my own. Post pictures if you like.




From my crappy camera phone, this is the best angle of the room I could get. There are about 15-20 of us in the room during regular daytime hours. There are little cubicle stalls along the first half of either wall, with 2 workstations apiece for the Windows team (me) to work on. In the center of the room is a big storage thingy with a workstation behind it for the supervisor on duty. In the back half of the room, on the left, is our Mission Critical workstations for the guys who post system outage notices and help with the more secure campus system problems.. (they don't have walls but there are only 3 workstations back there, they have tons of space) Along the left side of the back wall which you can't see, are 5 single-person cubicle stalls for the Mac team. It appears to me the PC side is overcrowded and needing more personal space for everyone. I hate how I don't have walls around my workstation.


This is the cubicle stall thing I sit at every day, it is pretty much identical to what all the PC consultants have, but the picture is of the workstation next to mine although my heinously huge mug o' caffeine is visible. No privacy... obviously anyone could see the screens of the person sitting beside them.

Comments

[ladynisa.livejournal.com]

you have walls and shelves and two monitors AT WORK. you bastard.

[katyism.livejournal.com]

ok this is good... i've never seen or worked at another call center and i have no idea if we have it good or not. i do like my work area just due to the 2 flat screens. at home my computer is on the floor and my 70-lb CRT monitor is dying and i can't afford a desk or another monitor. i'd rather get a raise at work than be provided dual monitors but it wasn't my decision. bleh.

[rettiger.livejournal.com]

No shit, that equipment is far better than anything I have ever had.

I have two computers, but one is mine from home.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

No privacy here either. Our desks are these big objects that look like + signs and each of us has a little corner of the plus sign. I have used mylar wrapping paper on the inside of my cube to make it look more individual and I have pictures of family, my cats, and my two colleges up, along with Chicago memorabilia (the city, not the show), a clock, my lucite award statue (ha!), my Marvin statue, a penguin candle, a statuette of a girl in a graduation gown (for getting my master's in May), a statuette of a witch, one of a goth girl, and one of a black cat. And my Harry Potter page a day calendar. And my 20-sided die so that I can roll perception + awareness vs. customer stupidity. And I have some dragons.

And a few stickers saying CTHULHU SAVES, HAIL ERIS, and BRAIN FOR RENT.

And one saying "...as sharp as a page of Oscar Wilde witticisms that's been rolled into a point, dipped in lemon juice, and jabbed into someone's eye!"

I would post pictures but we're not allowed cameras or camera phones in the building.

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

I need to get a d20 like that to go along with my skooshy d6 that sits on my monitor. :)

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a friend of mine passed out the d20s for D&D's anniversary. They're quite handy. I should bring in the rest of mine.

I also have a flying pig, a monitor statue of Hermione Granger, and the Salamander of Pentacles sitting on my monitor.

And I have a lamp that looks like a movie camera and a sign that says COMPUTER WIZARDS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR MEMORY.

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

I do have a set of mini-dice that go everywhere with me (Ah, my geekdom prevails...), but I'd rather not leave them scattered on my desk. :P

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

That's one nice thing about this place--you can leave stuff on your desk and it stays there. Unless it's a pen.

At the last place I worked, you even had to disconnect your headset when you went to the bathroom, and take the headset with you, or it would be taken.

[cyrenoe.livejournal.com]

Well, they wouldn't be taken. I just end up with enough papers, notepads, documents, etc scattered on my desk that dice are more likely to be lost or an annoyance than anything else. ;)

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should note that there are usually at least 100 of us in the room at any given moment. We are in a building that used to be an airplane hangar so it's very dark and there are no windows. Which is why it drives me nuts when people ask me how the weather is where I am. I want to give them my zip code and tell them to look at weather.com.

heh

[edgeofentropy.livejournal.com]

I've been told my desk looks like the normandy invasion...lots of desk flair...there's one guy here with an impressive lego collection too

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

I'm not techsupport anymore; I help maintain ClearChannel's (the radio side) servers. However, I did get to upgrade from a cube farm (of cubes that weren't even "yours", you just came into work and grabbed a free one, hoping it is your "favourite"), to this:

[katyism.livejournal.com]

nice. we don't have assigned cubes here either, the people with seniority tend to sort of "claim" certain workstations but if it's taken you're out of luck and have to go sit at a machine where the guy with sticky hands sat last time and left crumbs on the desk...ugh. i staked out a corner cube as soon as we hired some new people this summer and so far no one has touched it aside from ghosting it once (last night. i had to set up all my custom shit again)

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

I found one with a PC that seemed to only work for me (Our PCs were about 4 years out of date and you could tell they were castoffs... We would have to keep customers distracted while we waited for them to work properly) and was also right next to the supervisors.

No one seemed to like sitting near the supervisors, for some reason. ;) I loved it. they'd ask me to do favors, which meant I got to be off the phone. :P

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Nice upgrade.

I have done the cube farm thing too. Yech. Sometimes you'd come in to work and the whole 200-desk floor would be full and you'd have to wait for someone to vacate a desk. Would you be paid for the time you came in? Heck no.

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

Very nice upgrade. A very unexpected one, but it's SO much nicer than working for TheCrappiestManagementEVAR.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Well, congratulations to you!

[cyrenoe.livejournal.com]

Danke. :)

Just goes to show that sometimes, sending out one's resume at random to a few places DOES work.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Heh, I wish.

[ladynisa.livejournal.com]

Ah, the almighty cubicle farm. Worse for personal sense of worth and self-esteem than a canning factory.

[tadiera.livejournal.com]

And ours had low walls between most of them, too. So you'd hear the person behind you. Your customer would hear the person behind you. Ugh.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Ours didn't have walls at all, just everyone sitting at these long desks next to each other. hee

[cyrenoe.livejournal.com]

Ick.

My SO works for Delta, in their reservation's callcenter... They get these tiny desks that're only enough to support the monitor, with the keyboard on a seperate tray. There are tiny divider walls just between the monitors (so you're like, 2' from the person next to you) and the desks are adjustable.

Even my cube farm was better than THAT. ;)

More Camera phone love...

[jecook]

Hmmm... I went from this (a desk in the break room):


to this:


This shot is from the door, which is why you can't see the screen. I have my own office, but I'm in the back of the suite away from everyone else, and I'm next to the soda machine. And people still bother me, either asking for me to do the impossible for them ("Can I get a copy of Office Standard for my home machine So I can work at home, even though I have a laptop/ have a computer at the site I supervise?" to asking if I have change for the machine or how to get soda from it.

Re: More Camera phone love...

[japester.livejournal.com]

I lurve your powerboard strip. I need one of them for my desk

[agentz.livejournal.com]

I don't have any pictures of the place I currently work handy, but here's a link that has small pics of one of the places I used to work...

http://www.interdec.co.uk/case.asp?cs_id=3

I'll maybe try and snap a couple of my office with my phone first thing tomorrow

[trenthamfamily.livejournal.com]

Yipes!

Our work area reminds me of office space... rows and rows of cubicles that are next to one another. All computers pointing in the same directions that yeah, I guess you can see everyone's screens but then again I set my resolution SO TINY that I can hardly see it :)

Okay I like my walls now!

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

My place looks like a LAN party. Four desks in a square, facing each other in the middle of a room about the size of a generous bedroom. The supervisor's desk is next to the window.

[kailiia.livejournal.com]

i'de show you my call center but we're on a lock out.strike right now and i dont have access into the building :(

essentially it is clear walled cubicals.. uber ergonimic chairs of happy and 17 inch monitors.. most are CRT but slowly revolving into flat pannel.

if i get the chance to get photos i will share..

I Feel Queasy (oh look, posted it in the CORRECT place this time...)

[purrrsephone.livejournal.com]

Today is a dark, dark day.
And for this reason:

I'm here at work and I'm looking at these pictures, and I'm actually jealous that you all have such a nice work space compared to mine.

There, I said it.

My god, I really do hate this fucking job.
>__< ;

Re: I Feel Queasy (oh look, posted it in the CORRECT place this time...)

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

Man, do I feel sorry for you. That place must suck donkey cock.

[taii.livejournal.com]

We have assigned desks at my work, which is just as well, as having to install firefox and a butt-ton of extensions would be a PITA if I hot-desked...

we're a very open evironment [I'd take pictures to show, but I have no method of getting them to a PC], with long squiggily desks that fit 4 to a side, and have low partitions between them - think 2 plus-signs placed side by side, then rounded off.
There's about 150-200 people in here at peak times, but it doesn't get noisy due to the design of the building - it was designed as a customer service centre, so noise reduction techniques were used.

No shelves and no-one sits against walls.
Not much room for personalising our areas either - although some try

it's quite roomy, really. Not too bad an evironment - you can stand up and look at the cute workers easily ;)

[rrrebo.livejournal.com]

I work in the same place as redqueenmeg. I sit right behind her. One nice thing about the room we work in is that we keep the lights turned off except for the automatic security fixtures that stay lit all the time, but at very low levels. I keep my workstation light on just to help balance the glow of the monitors, but it's also on the lowest setting. I find the twilight environment to be somewhat soothing.

I have about 40 Star Wars toys and various other memorabilia strewn strategically about my star (not a cubicle, but one quadrant of the +), 3 monitors, 2 PCs, bigass Avaya old-school digitial terminal phone, a fan, some tech manuals, and about 3 years of Maximum PC magazine.

Situated around the call center are large monitor kiosks that show either the various call queues and Avaya stats (CentreVue) or the local news channel, though sometimes when I come in in the morning, Buffy is on. ;)

One corner/annex of the room looks like frickin' NORAD. 3 5-foot screens display various things like nationwide WAN status or tv, and has 2 rows of workstation enclosures like mission control. Behind these workstation is the executive conference room, where the highmuckymucks show us off to new clients. The windows are LCD glass and can be unfrosted in various wipes to reveal the call center very dramatically. Woo!

I also worked with redqueenmeg at the same previous employer, where we were basically just sheeple. No personal workspace, an FOF environment (Favorites On Floppy), no respect for skills whatsoever. Convergys, the McDonald's of outsourcing, where all they want is an ass in a chair. Horrible place.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Happy workday to you.
You work in a zoo...
And so do I.

[floatingpencil.livejournal.com]

Our office is actually really nice. I don't have any pictures, but it's almost brand new, the head office of a reasonably large software company. Yes, the desks are in groups of four and the dividers between are only about nose-high, but it isn't particularly noisy because we get a lot of space between the desks.

The desks are large, and we each have a cupboard/drawer set next to them so that the whole thing forms a comfortable corner-desk arrangement with plenty of space. Assigned desks, so customisable, and nothing goes missing. Our chairs are very nice, probably expensive, and can be altered every way conceivable. The office comes with plants, drinks/sweet machines, a coffee shop, a proper shop, a restaurant, gym, cashpoint, and a nice (and big) atrium complete with trees.

Honestly, it's a fabulous building to work in. The only down side is having to speak to the damn customers.

[caponex.livejournal.com]

Ours is one of those "grab a workstation where you can" 1/4-cube farms. There are at least 8 more rows just like this one. The rest of the room is empty, but they will be expanding.

[katyism.livejournal.com]

heh, everyone looks like they're in various degrees of frustration

OHMYFUCK

[purrrsephone.livejournal.com]

Hey, I recognize Derek and Henry there...they look bored.
Looks like you work where I work...oh WOW...
I feel bad for you.
But now do you guys see how much it sucks being packed in like sardines with only as much as a pseudo-desk, if you can even call it that?
Damnit, now I'm wondering who you are and how I know you.
Damn you to hell!

Re: OHMYFUCK

[caponex.livejournal.com]

Check the sugar. I think it got switched again. ;) You know who I am, you just don't realize it yet.

[katyism.livejournal.com]

We have better chairs, but not enough for the whole room. Asking for more, and asking for the phones to be placed somewhere else, is akin to asking for a magical budget increase. We got pay cuts this year, I don't know how willing they'd be to spend money on chairs.

[veeedka.livejournal.com]

You saw the new desk next to mine today, right?

The usual guy who sits next to me, and has done since we finished training just got booted out of his desk by an iincoming senior, and had his desk set up like so:



Came in from Liverpool.

[veeedka.livejournal.com]

You're telling me!

Apparently, they are coming in tomorrow.

They had it all set up by IS for them, before they even arrived... talk about a red-carpet treatment!

I think I'll give them a piece of my mind when they come in tomorrow... booting my friend out of his desk.

Grrrr!