1 Year at a call center…!!!

Just as your all must be imagining, life at a call center is quite hectic and pretty much depressing. The major factor that creates this feeling is ‘Night shifts’. The entire city would be on its way back home, whereas would be just getting up from bed and searching for your tooth brush. This was the most annoying thing, while I was working with one of the top BPOs in Chennai during 2005. I used to walk into office and to my sadistic happiness, find that a whole bunch of people had the same life that I had. I remember when I was a kid, I’ve always wanted to be a vampire and during the time I worked with BPO, I pretty much didn’t see much of the sun and ended up having a nocturnal life.

You wake up in the evening; have breakfast at night, lunch at midnight, dinner at dawn and sleep all through the day. The result: Your Internal body clock is completely changed and you health goes for a toss. Short term effects include frequent sickness, nausea, loss or increase of appetite, headaches, and sleep disorders. Inspite of being a healthy young chap, I suffered from most of these after starting off with night shifts. The worst side effect of working with BPO is that you start putting on weight, for I had put on almost 18-20Kg after working in night shifts.

The primary reason I guess why people get into BPO is because all it requires is just a graduation of any sort and in case of engineers, the HR team does not really bother if you have arrear papers. This was why I had landed up at a BPO, right after college. But then again career wise, BPO is more like a whirlpool which sucks you in and very few ever manage to get out of it. Luckily I belong to the latter. The mere branding ‘BPO guy’ tends to tag along with you wherever you go.

The good part of working with BPO…? Well, your team would literally be your only human contact, since you would probably not be interacting with anyone else on weekdays. It’s the same with your colleagues as well, which inevitably ends up creating some of the best and most lasting friendships that you would ever find. From personal experience, I have seen quite a few of my friends getting into relationships and eventually getting married too…

I guess the bigger point is that once you get used to working with a BPO, you can pretty much withstand any kind of work pressure and survive any sort of work environment. In case you guys aren’t aware of it, BPOs have a strict 1hr break policy and exceeding breaks even by a few seconds is treated severely. Managing your food breaks, coffee breaks, loo breaks and smoke breaks within this 1hr is definitely the ultimate test of time management. Another good thing I have seen and been through would be the exposure to people management, in a really short time of work experience, which will prove to be of great use in the later part of your career, immaterial of where you land up.

All in all, I guess every job has its own positives and negatives which one would understand only after stepping into it. And as the old saying goes ‘The grass is always greener on the other side’.