A Thought on Working

When I was many, many moons younger, like half my lifetime ago, I once said,

I would never work for a company like America Online.

As the housing bubble imploded in the States, I worked at a call center... supporting AOL customers. I thought then that I'd never go on to work for a company like Dell or HP. But I ended up supporting Dell customers for the better part of a decade before leaving the third-party company I worked for due to health concerns. After all, I had to figure out what my own diagnostic lights meant. :)

I observed something there, though: people of color seem to have this stance of fixing systems from the inside. We start working somewhere for the express reason of removing problems -- weeding a garden, so to speak, so that good things can grow in. My time serving the customer base of two different cellular providers highlighted this more on my own dashboard: to heck with the consequences for me -- if the correct solution was to cancel a line of service, I cancelled it.

The Survey Keeps the Score

In customer service and tech support roles, nothing is more vital than that survey that the caller gets at the end of the interaction. I will tell you the truth as your representative, even when it is going to hurt, because I had the survey stats to prove that is what the caller wants.

Have I had to tell businesses that unless they had a separate backup of their files on a different storage device, they may have lost weeks, months, or years of records? Yes. But it all comes in the delivery, and the follow-up treatment that fixes the situations to get them running again. When we get them to a point of rescuing files, and we have the discussion of "backups are like spare tires; you wouldn't take a cross-country road trip without at least one, right?", I commiserate with them on lost files, sharing my experience of having a drive die suddenly.
"One of the most horrifying sounds I have ever heard transcends language barriers," I began. "It is called the Click of Death. Think of it like a balloon popping. It just happens, BAM. I lost scanned pictures of a late relative because I had been lax on backing up to a separate physical hard drive."
With understanding, that person is thankful we can at least get these files, and learns about good backup protocol (check your backups: do they work?).

Thing is, the lost photos story? It's true. I had but one picture left of my adoptive parents left at the time of my incarceration. I think the resonance of truth rang through in my story, so people knew that the tech actually has felt their pain and genuinely wants to help.

"... and genuinely wants to help."

That gives rise to this thought:

aventiv/Securus are a Fair Chance committed company according to our Workbay app.
I will need employment when I get out.
I have previously done tech support/helpdesk work.

If aventiv/Securus are hiring, and accept remote candidates working from home, I can likely support giant circles around the existing group of techs that are handling support tickets for incarcerated individuals on their platform.

Incidentally, it goes back to that thing where we work for people, places and platforms that need fixing until those fixes become prevalent across the board. It also has me rethinking my exit strategy: sometimes you have to walk in the circle of suffering to extinguish it from within. Leaving the US, though I feel like I have reasons related to my own personal safety, would make it harder for me to fix up those same reasons for those I would be leaving behind.

(Wishful) To Do:

Find out if there are any inane or insane residency restrictions for people leaving prison in my home state.
Acquire funds to build a tiny home community right by a bus line back in my home city.
Have tiny homes built by people who know more about building than I do.
Furnishings of the home should be done through upcycling and reusing when hygienically possible (... look, mattresses should be brand new. that's kind of a squick point for me as a prisoner).
Do outreach to people who are willing to help with societal returners, help them with affording utilities and a fair rate rent as they learn to walk again.
Do outreach to prisons, help connect returners to a home and a community that is safe.

Gee... my list is long, and I'm not done kitting it out with everything it needs! :laughs:
Can hardly wait to get to work on that.