Reader Kelly drops a dime on Circuit City, whose call center will be moving, presumably to reduce expenses. The new location won’t have dividers between desks or running water on Sundays.

Circuit City’s proposed shift might be meaningless small potatoes to most of the heartless bastards who call their toll-free hotline, caring little for the human being at the other end of the phone, concerned only with their own billing complaint. But if these changes go through, everybody loses.

Call center workers will lose the little dignity they had left, as they pine for the two-foot cubicle walls that once separated them from their neighbors. All the while an electronic slave ship master lords over them, beating a rhythm on his drum.

Customers will suffer the wrath of abused and humiliated call center employees. How much slack do you think a perpetually-watched Circuit City employee is going to cut you?

And other employees of the company will arrive at HQ Monday morning, to find the toilets overflowing with the weekend shift’s excrement.

Kelly’s e-mail after the jump…

I don’t know if this would be helpful to you or not, but a friend of mine who works at Circuit City was
recently complaining about how poorly they treat their customer service reps. He works in the top tier of the customer service tree and he says they have plans to move the department to a cubicle-less room with just rows of desks (and a monitor at the end of each row). This means that that in addition to having zero personal space for hours at a time, there will be nothing to dampen the voices of all the other reps nearby, which means all the reps will be shouting over each other to be heard.

Also he mentioned that since nobody is supposed to be working in the corporate office on Sundays, they shut the water off in the building. Awesome. Maybe they could save even more money by shutting down the water altogether and setting up some Port-O-Potties outside!

It might be a good idea to warn your readers to expect some disgruntled reps next time they have a serious problem “Where Service is State of the Art.”

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