(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

[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I found one with a PC that seemed to only work for me (Our PCs were about 4 years out of date and you could tell they were castoffs...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. ;)