Profile For Jackson H.

This is when call centers lost their glamor to me, as one of the main reasons I found out that they had shut down my old job working for the travel agency was that they had opened a call center in Dallas, Texas, where they could pay new employees HALF of what they were paying us, and that was starting to become the national average.

Things get a bit complicated from that point, as at the same time I had allowed my best friend to move in with his ex-girlfriend--now just good friend--and her two kids. This helped pay for rent on my apartment, as they were chipping in with the bills, and I spent most of my time alone in my room anyways, so the lack of space didn't really bother me much.

She ended up meeting another man online, who was a soon-to-be-retired navy man living in Jacksonville, North Carolina. My best friend and her went off to visit them for a weekend, my best friend going partially to make sure she was safe, and she ended up getting pregnant during that short stay. The navy man wanted to do right by her, so he invited her and her children to move in with him, accepting my best friend when she said she didn't want to just leave him behind, since my best friend has been kind of the surrogate father to her at the time two children.

I ended up coming along for the ride, because damned if I was going to let my best friend move to the other side of the country without me, and we sent her and her children on ahead by plane while my best friend and I packed everything up in the house for the trip. The navy man took a one-way flight over to drive the 28-foor Penske truck for us, while I drove my jeep.

This was the first time I had ever driven further than western Montana (Flathead Lake), and when my best friend asked if I needed him to take a turn at the wheel, I actually turned him down since I was having so much fun just driving.

We stopped in Idaho the first night, since we started out in the evening, then again in southern Montana, next at a truck stop on the western border of South Dakota, where there was a horrible wind storm passing through. South Dakota didn't give me a good first impression, let me tell you that. Then we stopped for the night in Kansas City, Missouri, where some of the navy man's friends lived. Our final stop was at a truck stop in West Virginia, before finally hitting Jacksonville, North Carolina, in the dead of the night.

The navy man was amazed at my endurance on the road, and asked if I had ever looked into a job as a trucker. I told him about my one failed attempt nearly a decade before, shrugging it off, and quickly finding myself another call center job.

I've now been in this town for nearly six years, working at my second call center job here, with my life going nowhere. The navy man had retired, but his relationship with our female friend had soured to the point that he kicked us out of his home with nothing more than a week's notice to get our stuff packed and leave. This is after my best friend and I had given 90% of our paychecks to him during the previous two years with the understanding that once he was retired he would pay us back.

That never happened.

Thankfully, we did find a place to move in to quickly enough, though once more I was at the point that I was making barely enough money to pay the bills, and most of our groceries came from the food stamps our female friend got from SSI.

I was depressed, I had anxiety, my blood pressure was through the roof, and I had almost given up on ever being able to make enough money to do more than just make ends meet. My diet was worse than ever, since the groceries had to be bought in bulk due to having two teenagers and a small child in a house with three adults. Food was bought based upon three things: cheap, fast, and lots of it.

I had just reached burnout at my job when a snowstorm hit, blanketing the town in enough snow and ice that all but emergency services shut down for several days. Being a coastal town in the South, it didn't take much, only 4 inches of snow.

That gave me the time to sit down and really think about what I was doing with my life, and what I really wanted out of it.

I didn't immediately think of trucking, as I had long ago given up on that dream, but I did remember what my grandfather had done before he passed on, getting himself a piece of property and building it up himself. He kept himself busy, he had a huge warehouse built on his property, and build an apartment into one end of it to live in where he had easy access to all of his varied tools.

That, that was something to dream about, though not on the kind of money I would ever earn at a call center...

And then, I remembered my old dream of becoming a trucker, and started to do some research.

I found out about the DOT physical, and the blood pressure requirements it had, and realized that I needed to work on my health first. My blood pressure was 185/125 at the start of January, and between diet, exercise and a dream of a better future, I have managed to drop it down to 141/91 in the span of three weeks. My goal is to start my new life in little over two months, once I know my blood pressure is steady.

Screaming along so far in The High Road, and I'm going to repeat it again and again until I can pass that written test with my eyes closed!

Love this site,and love all the knowledge and support available here!

Keep On Truckin'!

So, I'm not a truck driver yet--I plan on applying around mid-March so that a majority of the worst weather has had time to die down a bit before I hit the road--but this is my tale.

I went to college straight out of high school with a dream of becoming a computer programmer. Everyone had always told me that I was good with computers, and I was a fairly lazy and unambitious young man, to be dreadfully honest, so getting a job where I sat in front of a computer all day seemed like a dream come true.

Unfortunately, the school counselor suggested that I take both Java and C+ classes in the same semester 'in order to decide what programming language I liked'. Which was a horrible idea, since that's like taking both French and Spanish classes at the same time. They're just similar enough that you start mixing between the two.

I tried to struggle through, but then my Grandpa died, and my mother ended up burning out at work between depression and stress from working upper management at a federal credit union, and she had to file for bankruptcy. We struggle for a bit, but between the poor class scheduling and my own personal depression, my GPA dropped too low, and I lost my scholarship.

Dropping out of college, I ended up going to Job Corps (a DOL-run trade school) where I learned how to become an A+ certified computer repair technician, where I graduated with honors... right as the dotcom bubble crashed.

I ended up couch-crashing at a few friend's houses for about a year and a half, most of that spent 'house-sitting' for a friend in the Navy to give him peace of mind while he was out helping tend the nuclear reactor on the Lincoln out in the Pacific.

During that time, I did actually apply for an OTR trucking job, but I didn't have any recent employment, and I'd only held a driver's license for two years, so I was denied.

Seeing nothing else I could reasonably do, seeing as I was still rather lazy and unambitious, I sent to Job Corps AGAIN, this time learning how to do household electrician work... right about the same time that the housing market crashed.

Twice burned, I was 'lucky' that a recruiter for a large bank was looking for potential employees for their call center, and I was lined up with a job pretty quick. It seemed like the life to me, since I had a job, and my parents had moved to a new house and had a room that I could 'rent' from them (read, pay for my own expenses, since they were making less money in the house after my mother had to quit her management job for health reasons).

And then the bank sent my team manager to Costa Rica to train new hires in a new call center there, all the time saying that the new reps overseas would be 'taking the night shift, not replacing you'. Nobody believed them, and sure enough a few months later all of the approximately 1500 call center reps were called into the different conference rooms, where we were basically fired via conference call. To be fair, they were good about giving us all severance pay packages, a 3-month notice, and assistance with finding new employment, so it wasn't TOO bad.

Sadly, instead of looking back into trucking for a living, I did the easiest thing and found another call center job, where I was on contract working at the Nintendo headquarters in Redmond, Washington, doing technical support for the handheld DS and DSLite. To do that job there was a two week training class before you got on the phone, while another class was being done in the other room for the people that would be handling technical support for the Wii when it came out. THAT class got like five weeks of training.

Come the launch of the Wii, Nintendo found out they did NOT anticipate the call volume on opening day regarding all of the issues with the wrist straps and the infrared sensors in the remotes. So, the poor schmucks like me who had 2 weeks of training, and had never even SEEN a Wii before, we taken off the phones on opening day for half an hour, in groups of 10, with a single Wii in an unused room... then thrown on the phones on launch day, just like those people who got an extra four weeks of training.

I stuck with it though, because the pay was good, and because it was still just sitting in front of a computer all day, until the 6-month contract ended and I had to find another job.

On to call center number 3, which was booking stays for customers at a timeshare company, which paid even more than I was making before. These were what I liked to call the 'glory days' of working in a call center, where I was making up to $2000 a month after taxes. Once again, sitting in front of a computer, surrounded by cubicle walls, with florescent light glaring from above.

That job lasted a good four years, before the fates struck again. They had promoted me to a special team of agents who handled booking stays for prospective clients, who only purchased a one year 'trial' package with the travel agency. I was making even more money, so it seemed like a good fit to me... until they decided to close down that department, without allowing any of its agents lateral movement back to their old positions.

So, I went from one job making $2000 a month, with a 15 minute commute, to another job making about $1500 a month, with a 30-60 minute commute, with a toll bridge, and downtown Seattle paid parking... having to pay the toll both ways, when going to work taking calls for the same company handling the tolling.

to be cont.