Your Moment Will Come

Oftentimes, I’ve been tempted to consider my day job something less than stellar. I have greater dreams of making a huge impact on the world, and what I do during the day just pays the bills.

Yet at times in my life and career (particularly back when I was on the phones,) in the midst of the normal business day, I’ve been able to make a difference. There are days when a voice on the end of the line just doing their normal every day business, thinking nothing of it, have blessed my soul.

We all have those opportunities, those rare blessed chances that come like flicker, where we can do something that goes beyond the job description, and takes us to the level of service. Lisa Jefferson told her story to Belief Net. On 9/11, she was working as a call center supervisor for Verizon Airfone.

If you know the Call Center industry, they spend their days in a haze of metrics, service level agreements, and dealing with the high turnover incumbent with that. One of her agents took a call from man who said he was on a hijacked plane. It was getting very stressful for the agent and the Supervisor took the call from her.

Beliefnet: One of the most moving things that most people learned about this was when you prayed the Lord’s Prayer with Todd. I know it brought his family a lot of comfort.

Yes, it did. His wife called me a pillar of strength and told me she was glad that I was the one to take the call and to be on the other end and to be there for her husband.

It’s remarkable that you had the presence of mind to be able to pray with Todd.

A lot of people told me that they wouldn’t have been able to do it, but I guess, God just works in mysterious ways, and I can only say that’s why he used me because I made myself available to him.

It was for that moment, she had become a supervisor. It was for that moment that she didn’t take a vacation that day. God had brought her entire life to that moment, that point of being able to make a difference.

My moment came a few years back. It was July, 2003. My boss called us into a meeting. We had letters from Corporate. The site was closing down and moving its business to India. It was an $8.00 an hour tech. support job, but it was the best job I’d had up to that point.

When I was looking for work, I found jobs with real wages were slim. The best job I could hope to find paid only $6.50 an hour with little chance of promotion.

There was the temptation to despair, to throw an “Oh Woe is me” pity party. As I approached the last day, something happened. My heart was directed to others.

My supervisor faced a grim situation. Her health insurance was allowing her husband to stay alive. She had to get another job and fast, or who knew what would happen? A young twenty-two-year-old being out of job wasn’t so big deal.

I thought of those who’d done a lot for me in my tenths months there, such as the kind man who ran the high stress scheduling desk. They had the job of enforcing management policies, which often forced them to play the bad guy. They kept track of how long breaks went and when things were really busy (i.e., more than 100 calls waiting) you had to call to ask for a break. I remembered the one night, when I’d had to call back three times for a break. The scheduler said, “Oh, I’ve got too many gone.” Generally, that would mean going back on the phone and taking a call that could last who knows how long. Yet, he actually kept on his phone for another 45 seconds with some mindless chatter while another agent got back from break, so I could go to mine.

I thought of the Site Director. The employees reviled him, blaming him for what had happened to the site. He had arrived in Kalispell with the dream of building an Empire, yet now it had crumbled, and he, like the rest of us, would soon find himself on the unemployment line.

I remember one day before the final layoffs were announced, I went to a part of the building that used to house a former contract of mine that had already been eliminated. As I surveyed the empty desks, the bare cubicles, and listened to the eerie silence, I remembered another time, when hundreds filled those desks.

A voice spoke behind me, the site director. He asked, “What are you doing?”

I said, “This part of the building brings back memories.”

He nodded. “There were a lot of good memories here.”

The rest of us had people we could go to; he had no one. He’d married his work. He’d climbed to a high level of management in his mid-20s and our corporate culture left him utterly alone.

I thought of my team: proud professionals, most of which I’d never see again. The vast majority didn’t let the layoff change the service they provided. That was who they were.

I decided to end well. I bought my supervisor a card and flowers. I wrote a thank you note to the scheduler to let him know how much I appreciated him and how he brought an uncommon humanity to the job. I slipped a note under the door of the loneliest man in the Center, letting him know I understood, and that in this time of trial, God was available, too.

For my team, I brought in snacks and used my humor writing to come up with the Top Ten Failed Tech Support Agents, which included these:

8. MR. T

“Foo’, you getting ‘non-system disk, press any key to continue’?…You got a floppy disk in the drive?…And now it boots up…I pity the foo who calls tech support for something so pathetic.”

7. Dirty Harry

“It all comes down to one possibility. You may have the phone cord for the modem plugged into the phone jack and the phone cord for your phone plugged into the modem jack. But, the cords are so tangled you can’t tell one from another. If you unplug the wrong one, we’ll get disconnected. So the question you have to ask yourself is do you feel lucky? Well do ya’, punk?”

That had to be the most incongruous thing I ever saw–a man hours away from the end of his job laughing. It was a sad day, but yet one when I made a difference, more precious than any other in my working life.

Keep the focus, keep the faith. Your day will come. Your chance to touch someone’s life will come through the day to day trials of life, and perhaps even at your lowest point. You just have to keep pressing on. Your moment will come. The only question is if you’ll seize it.

Linked to Real Choice who I hope finds this uplifting.

—–