While some people rag on over - the - phone individuals, let me talk about another side of it. I worked over the phone complaint department for many, many years. The abuse I took was appalling. I have been called every name in the book. I've had my life threatened more times than I could count at times. I've had people call back 30 times just to keep swearing at me. Why? Because I was over the phone complaints. Because I was one of those faceless "nobodies" that people didn't give a ..... that I was a human being. That I was someone who had feelings, a family, a life outside that square little cube they called a desk. They wanted to scream at someone because the company I worked for wasn't giving them what they wanted. So I was the one who faced the abuse.

When I did sales, I worked for SIRIUS XM, I also did complaint dept. for them as well. And it was even WORSE because SIRIUS XM is a luxury service. And you get THE most entitled you can imagine calling in. Multiple times I've actually had to stop coworkers, whose skins were not as thick as mine had grown, from walking out into the middle of rush-hour traffic. Supervisors didn't give a horse plop about us, though at first they were very kind until you suddenly disagreed with them about anything or made more sales than their "favorites", and didn't care that the abuse drove some of my fellow call center employees to nearly end their lives.

It was no wonder that place had such a massively high turn-over rate and had gotten a rep SO bad they couldn't get enough butts to sit at the desks. I quit after being given a written warning, that's one step below termination, because during my lunch break someone had asked me about the cards I was shuffling while in the break room, I had my tarot cards with me and I often shuffled them to ease the strain on my hands from long periods of typing, and I answered honestly what they were and how I worked with them. HR begged me to stay because I was one of the best they had and had been on the phones longer than anyone else in that place by that point.

We also had to upsell radios and subscriptions. I was one of their best because I was HONEST. I was polite, I listened and did my best to help where I could, even if it meant not selling the premium stuff. I was screamed at for it by my supervisors and I snapped. I refused to take it anymore.

So please, forgive me, but this story almost looked like it was belittling over the phone call-center individuals and almost making it look like people deserve this mistreatment. Maybe I got it wrong, I don't know. But we got creeps like this constantly and it was hard to do our jobs because of it. And as I did that kind of work for years, mostly in complaints but sometimes in sales, I do take it kind've personally.

A lot, not all but many, especially in foreign countries, of the phone phishers don't know what they're doing and don't even understand the scripts they're reading or know it's illegal. All they know is they're supposed to do jobs and are trained only to understand a rote protocol and that's all. So really, it's ok to treat them like they're actual, feeling, humans and just say no thanks politely and hang up. Mistreating them doesn't help.