A few days in Phily

The trip to Jamaica, the subject of my last post, back in February market the end of a halcyon month of sitting on Vivian's couch and doing a spot of work, between cooking myself breakfast, lunch, and dinner in her Harvard Business School dorm room. The months between now and then have been sparse with content due to their being full of labor, and being spent in settings such as Scottsdale, Arizona, with very little to distract me in the way of pleasure or alimentation.

It's a sign of my aging that I was not perhaps as pleased as I one would have at the opportunity to take a trip overseas, to Asia, no less -- but I thought to myself that AT LEAST I would have the opportunity to eat something other than the strip-mall and hotel fare that I'd been surviving on.

I spent only five full days in Manila, but "days" can't really be used to describe my trip, since I as I had to match the schedule of my call-center clients, I was working mostly nights. Call centers are something of a success story in the country, standing for fully half the new urban jobs created in the past ten years or so. Legions of young people troop into modern office buildings starting around nine pm, and stay in shifts until about noon the next day. I worked late most days, which meant until about 3pm -- at which point the offices were starkly deserted.

The guys I was working with were high end, doing a bit of support, but mostly sales and technical work. The call center "agents" are almost entirely college educated, and slouch in their chairs, cheap headsets jauntily perched atop their heads, as they dispatch with Americans with probably half their intelligence. They are modern men and women, raised on computers no doubt in internet cafes whose endless line of small computer-filled cubicals probably matches their work environments quite well. Their fingers fly across keyboards, windows flicker open and closed across their screens, and they patiently walk their customers through whatever steps are required to un-fuck their computers, or phones, or whatever.

The sales calls were the best ("Press 1 if you would like to open a new account…"). I listened in as one agent handled a woman from St. Louis call in about a software product.

"What sort of company do you work for ma'am?"

Cabinet manufacturing.

"So that's a manufacturing business? Did you know that we have a special version of our software just for the manufacturing industry? Let's talk about that later and first get some more information about you."

I had the image of a volleyball player setting an easy serve up in the air, then waiting poised for the ball to crest its arch.