The Lost Episode of "The Office"

[I've decided to return TO STATE OF MIND .COM to its humble origins as my personal blog sharing stories of a young black man in Toronto; his music, his work, his city and his culture.  So I thought I'd dig up one of my popular 2007 posts on my struggles with Canada's corporate culture.  Thankfully I've found a career I love outside the corporate world, so I can look back at this very true story and laugh...]


So I'm looking for a new job. Again. And it's depressing to think that I may end up in another call centre with the rest of Toronto's young black population--educated or uneducated. It's as if the majority of us are not allowed to progress past the telephone customer service departments of Toronto's major corporations. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think I may have figured out why. They ("The Man," "The Establishment," etc.) don't think young black people can be professional. Here's a story to illustrate my point:

Starting in January, I began a call centre job with one of Canada's biggest banks, along with many young black people and members of other visible minorities that are a staple of Toronto's call centre workforce. This was an outbound position, but I thought it would be different, as the company seemed surprisingly customer-focused, sometimes running campaigns specifically designed to save clients on banking fees or reduce the amount of mail they receive from us. We were taught to inform clients that we were calling because our company had made a commitment to its clients to stay in touch and meet all of their financial needs.

It turned out that we stayed in touch way too often, only to push credit and insurance products to generate revenue for the bank. This was accomplished under the guise of this new commitment to put clients first, as we often found ways to save them a few meager dollars on their already-overpriced services before diving in for the kill. "This coverage will protect your family's lifestyle and such-and-such and to add it for you I need only to confirm your address and date-of-birth," and so-on and so-on.

Needless to say, many clients did not respond well. My manager, a white dude we'll call "Bob," told me not to take the constant yelling, screaming, bitching, cursing and name-calling personally. If anything they're not mad at you, Bob would say, they're mad at the company. Not true, I'd reply, because when I worked at inbound call centres where people called in for help with their problems, they'd be yelling because they're mad at the company. In this outbound call centre, they are mad at me because they don't want me calling them in the first place. Bob would just shake his head, he couldn't fool me.

Anyway, I'm a 6-foot-5, 270-pound black man who (I'm told) scowls a lot, so I'm not used to being talked to any old way, and the abuse on the phone each day took its toll on me. Eventually I began to tell smart ass customers that if they could handle their own affairs like they said, then they wouldn't owe us thousands in credit card bills, they wouldn't be paying service fees for using too many banking transactions each month and they wouldn't have had five late mortgage payments in the last year.

My new resolve to put mouthy, ungrateful clients in their place did not go over well with Bob, instead it earned me a sit-down with him about professionalism.

After telling me how great I'd been doing lately--which I wasn't-- and how much my numbers were improving--which they weren't--Bob got down to business. He'd listened to a few of my calls, he said, and they were great. But at times, he said, he could hear 'that whole street thing' come out of me. He could even picture me 'swaying from side to side' as I was speaking, he said, leaning in and nodding as if looking for my approval.

Street thing? Swaying from side to side? What the f*** was that supposed to mean?

I sat stonefaced and said nothing, letting him finish his tips on professionalism, but I thought about it a lot later. First of all, Bob chose his communication with me based on my book's cover--I'm black--instead of getting to know me and my communication style. Second of all, Bob assumed that, because I'm black, I'm from "the streets" and that's what "came out of me" to cause me to act un-professional.

But I'm not really from "the streets" am I? Yes, I grew up in Toronto within walking distance of two or three housing projects and yes, I have close friends who are in prison and/or hustling. But I went away to college and got a degree and have been working steadily for years. Street people don't work. They're stick-up artists, squeegie kids and drug-dealers.

Could it be that Bob was mistaken? Could it be that it wasn't "the streets" that came out of me but my blackness? The same blackness I've always tried to hide on the phone because the average bank client from Antigonish, Nova Scotia or Red Deer, Alberta would freak if they knew a ni**er from Toronto was looking at their banking information?

Is it that blackness that Bob found unprofessional? I mean, he's a white guy who grew up in the suburbs, so his only real knowledge of black people might be what he sees on television: A bunch of us being led out of public housing townhouses in cuffs after another pre-dawn raid on gang members. Or sprawling to make a spectacular catch in the endzone and breaking out in the chickenhead dance. Or slapping bitches asses and bragging about how much our jeans and/or rims cost in a music video on BET.

I guess he would think we're unprofessional and the rest of the white corporate world would as well. That's why my co-worker got promoted up out of that call centre at the same big bank to work in their offices downtown and she's the only young black person in her department.

So as I said, I'm looking for a new job. Again.