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[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

[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.