Nehaveigur

Don’t you just hate those market researchers calling you? They’re annoying. They’re persistent. If you make the mistake of answering your phone, they’ll steal your time. They ask you one irrelevant question after the next.

Do you agree? Because I have something to tell you something. I’m not proud of it: I used to be one of them. I worked in a call center for a year after high school, calling hundreds of strangers each day, wasting their time.

Why did I do that? I had just finished high school in Austria. I had no idea what to do with my life. Right after the final exams, I took a plane from Vienna to London. I had no place to stay and no money. That meant that I needed to find a job quickly. And market research was the first one I found.

So how could a German-speaking high school kid from Austria like me find a job working in market research in London? Well… the firm that hired me called Germany, so they needed German speakers.

Working there was dreadful. All of us were completely replaceable. We were treated badly. We had less than two feet of desk space each, like battery hens. The managers were awful too.

One of them clearly hated me. Let’s call her… Suzie. I don’t normally ascribe negative emotions to other people, but in this case, it was obvious she couldn’t stand me. I still don’t know why. The only time I ever saw her smile was when I came to work late. That meant she could dock my pay, and she loved that.

But having this job made it possible for me to live in London, and that made it worth it. Back in Austria, I had grown up in a small town – 3,000 people, most of them working in the brewery or in farming – and there wasn’t much going on there. There was nothing going on there!

London, in comparison, was all the excitement I could wish for, and I was happy to pay for it with the tedium of the call center. In London, there were people from all over the world. In London, I shared an apartment with people from Pakistan, Sweden and Mexico. In my Austrian town there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t originally from Austria. In London, I never got bored – outside of the call center. In the call center: Different story.

There’s another reason why I don’t regret my time there: It made me realize that I wanted to do other things in my life. After that year of calling strangers, I applied to college in England, got a Bachelor’s, and later a PhD. Whenever I had to put in long hours and hard work studying, I knew that this was a lot better than going back to that call center. Even now, I sometimes remember how lucky I am to not work there.

Maybe, without that year as a battery hen, I wouldn’t have been motivated to become a scientist. Without being a scientist, I wouldn’t have come to America ten years ago. And to me America is everything London was, but even more so.

So thank you call center and thank you sadist manager Suzie.

What else did I learn? Working a low-status job is hard. Having no money is hard. Having no chance of advancement is hard. Not knowing if your work is making a difference is hard. Having no security is hard. Such is the reality low wage jobs.

But when this is what you do, the last thing you want is the pity of those who are more fortunate. You don’t want charity, you don’t want well-meaning advice, and you definitely don’t want anyone to question your choices. Because as bad as your job is, you still have your pride. Maybe even more so than someone who has a lot of other things, too.

If you have kids, or if you’re planning to have kids, don’t push them too hard to go to college. If they want to take a year or two to explore the world, to have an adventure, or even work in a call center, let them. My parents did that and I’m grateful for their benign neglect.