The day starts with the managers' briefing. They address us four times a day at the beginning of every shift. They sit at the front of the room where we can all see them and they can see all of us.
They inform us of our hourly sales rate, how it is not high enough, who made the biggest sales, what the new target rate is and what sales-related game we are going to play to boost morale. What would Jeremy Bentham say about this modern panopticon?
The unfolding spectacle would be funny if so many people didn't partake in and enjoy it. It feels cartoonish, like a gimmicky Wolf of Wall Street where 30 Jordan Belforts compete to be the top salesperson. Instead of Wall Street glitz, the fortune we compete for is made by selling raffle tickets for charities.
Their briefings sound like the worn-out scripts they provide us with to make sales. Sincerity is the chief sacrifice of an artificial environment. Nothing burns with honesty and everything feels staged. We are trained to build rapport, trained where to pause for effect, trained when to switch tone to inspire compassion for the cause. We are trained to game psychology for sales.
So, too, do the managers build rapport, pause and switch tone in their briefings. What they try to sell is the self-belief that we can conquer a shift. It is hard to believe them when they employ techniques they have taught you. I hate feeling I am being sold something.
Call centres suspend reality. The world shrinks to the size of the computer in front of you. Partitions separate you from everyone else. You are confined to this world. Every 15 minutes an automated message detailing your sales rank in relation to everyone else blinks onto the screen. You are constantly monitored, constantly pushed to compete.
Eventually you forget you are being watched, like those prisoners in Brentham's panopticon. What was once delivered by a computer becomes self-reflexive. You monitor yourself, comparing yourself to everyone else. This insidious process moulds new salespeople.
"My voice carries across Australia from Sydney to raise money for the country's largest charities. This is ostensibly ethical. The corrosive effect of false sincerity eats the moral sanctity of helping charities."
Technology has developed so the combination of an internet connection, computer codes and telephone lines combine to compress time and space. Anyone can be called at any time. Vast geographic distances are meaningless