Lost Cause

Over the years, a few responsibilities have become intrinsic parts to any position that I hold in a company. Besides being ‘the dude who rants a lot,’ ‘the dude who always looks like he needs sleep’ and ‘the really irritable guy’, I have also spent a portion of the last few years as a trainer, in one extent or another. First, as the lead mentor at a call center that offered directory service for cell phone users, and as a pseudo technical trainer for end users in my building.

I started training, specifically mentoring, with admittedly inauspicious intent. I wasn’t looking to share my knowledge with those who were lacking, or make the team better as a whole. I started training because I absolutely hated answering phone calls all day.

The job consisted of sitting in front of a computer with a headset on and connecting people to phone numbers we found in a database. I was one of the faster operators in the building, with my call times averaging between 15-25 seconds apiece. Stretch that out over a few hours, and there was often a case where I would take 1000 or more calls in a day. Stretch it out over the year, and well, you get the point. For someone who gets bored with everything easily, all the calls that I had answered had taken their toll.

I also saw training as an opportunity to impress management with the wide variety of abilities in my skill set, and hopefully, an opportunity to meet girls. Unfortunately, after just a few weeks, most of the management learned that I was an impatient ball of nerves. Even though my trainees would walk away from the experience with a greater knowledge of the job, they might also walk away emotionally scarred. Management kept me on as a mentor, but never promoted me any higher.

The experience with the women at the job wasn’t much better. With the exception of one girl that I met in my tenure, the girls that were coming in were too old, too young, too dumb, too aggravating, too boring, too crazy or just flat out not my type.

Although I started with mixed motives, but ultimately I found the experience rewarding. As many times as I had to prevent myself from choking the trainees, the time I spent with them taught me patience and teaching techniques that have traveled with me to other positions. The biggest lesson that I learned was, no matter how hard you try, no matter how intelligent some people are, not everyone is capable of learning everything. Most everyone is naturally either right or left brained, favoring one over the other since birth.

After a certain amount of time trying to teach someone, a trainer must write some trainees of as a lost cause, wish them the best of luck, and show them the door. It’s not something that a trainer likes to do, but is necessary as part of the job. A new hire who isn’t keeping up with the rest of the class, slows the class down as a whole, becomes a liability to the manager they are going to report to, wastes the trainer’s time, and ultimately, wastes their own time. Giving them their walking papers just helps them to find something they are better suited at.

Take one trainee I had for example. For our purposes, we will call her Sharon (mostly because I can’t remember her real name). Sharon was a woman in her early to mid-thirties. She had spent a good majority of her adulthood as a stay at home mother, taking care of her two kids and the home. With her kids getting a little older, and not needing her at home during the day, she decided to get a job to occupy her time.

Sharon was a musician by nature, more comfortable with the keys on a piano than the ones on a keyboard. The only real experience she had with computers was checking her e-mail and browsing the web. Her typing skills were sub-par, compared to the other trainees in her class, she barely had enough speed to pass the typing test required to get the job.

After three weeks in classroom training, learning the ins-and-outs of the job, like everyone else, she was handed off to the mentors to refine the skills she would need to be successful. I was the first one to sit with her and watch her work.

“Sharon, is it?”

The only response I received was a slight nod, indicating that she was a little nervous.

“Ok, Sharon, I am going to plug my headset in and listen in to a few calls of yours to see what rough spots you might have, and how we can polish them out.”

“Ok…”

I plugged myself in, took a seat next to her and began listening to a couple of calls, noticing that her average call time was well over a minute. The expression on her face was looking more and more anxious by the second. I tried to ease her into the experience as simply as possible.

“Just relax, pretend that I’m not even here.”

Her first call came across the line. A friendly recording played, asking the customer what city and state to look for information in. The customer promptly responded.

“Phoenix Arizona, please.”

Sharon managed to finally put a sentence together.

“How can I help you, sir?”

“I need the number for a Dairy Queen on Bell and 29th.”

“That will be just one second sir.”

Completely in a daze, she sat there and stared at her terminal for about twenty or thirty seconds. No typing, no looking at her notes, just sitting there and staring. She looked as if she was about to type something, then turned and looked at me, completely at a loss as what she should do next.

Hoping that all she needed was a direction, I wrote down ‘type the word dairy in the first box’ then showed her my notepad. She read the note, followed the directions to a letter, sat and stared for another twenty seconds, then stared at me again, looking for another clue.

I wrote her another note, ‘Begin your search’. She read the note, stared at me again, and then wrote. ‘How?’ directly below the message I had just written.

At this point, I was starting to get a little irritated. Either she was too nervous to function properly in this job, or after three weeks of paid training, she had not yet learned what key to use to complete her primary function. I pointed to the proper key, and she did something that no one I had ever mentored had done. She slid the keyboard in my direction.

As a general rule, to prevent dependency on others, everyone in the mentoring program had decided collectively not to enter anything into the trainee’s keyboard. We were there as advisors only, not to do their jobs. We wrote notes, gave them pertinent information and spelling, and gave them pointers along the way, but never did their job.

I slid the keyboard back in front of her hands, and pointed at the key again, this time more explicitly identifying the key she needed to use. She gave me a dirty look, angrier than any other I had ever seen, then pressed the button. Thirty or so listings appeared on her screen, they were various businesses with the word ‘dairy’ in the name from around the valley. With the listings and their street names in front of her, she should be able to scroll the listings to find the proper one. Instead, she starred at the screen for another twenty seconds, and slid the keyboard in my direction again.

“Sharon, I’m not here to do the job for you, just to help you out. Scroll down until you find the listing.”

She did as I had instructed, scrolling down to the bottom of the list, where I saw, quite clearly, a listing for Dairy Queen at 2900 E. Bell. I promptly took the tip of my pen and pointed it at the entry displayed on the screen.

She pulled her hands away from the keyboard, leaned back, and tried to soak in what I was telling her. To help get my point across, I started tapping the listing with my pen. Either completely oblivious to what I was trying to say, or functionally illiterate, she informed the customer of the progress of her search.

“Uh, I’m not finding anything for that listing, sir.”

Now, fairly irate, I took my pen and started poking at the listing on the screen with the enthusiasm and fervor of a convict shanking a prison guard. My pen tip bounced off the screen 6-7 times, leaving ink marks on the glass. I did everything I could think of to point out the correct entry besides taking a Sharpie, circling the listing and writing, “This one, stupid!” on the glass.

“Just one moment, sir.”

A two minutes after she picked up the phone, Sharon’s flickering, 3-watt light bulb she calls a brain, finally turned on. She turned to me and smiled with a sense of relief.

“Here we go sir, I have…”

I put her calls on hold and explained what she did wrong, making sure to inform her of every minutia of her errors. Repeating them 3 or 4 times to make sure that she was aware of them.

I took her calls off hold and the pattern repeated itself. For two hours, she would get a call, slide me the keyboard a few times, and I would resist the urge to smash it against the desk in front of me. After fifteen days of training, she was unable to make sense of the system. I took some time to browse the average call times of the other students in her class. Each and every one of them had reduced their times well below the recommended 48 seconds they needed before being passed off to their managers.

Sharon’s average time was in the 120-second ballpark.
Afraid of having an aneurysm, and fearing I was taking the wrong approach, I backed off for the day to let her get some time to go it alone. I headed back to my desk, chanting, and finished my notes on that day’s progress.

“…Calmblueocean, calmblueocean, calmblueocean, calmblueocean….”

I usually keep my notes rather professional, but I was so wound up from the day’s events that I couldn’t help myself.

Notes on first mentoring session for new hire Sharon:
Despite my apparent inability to aid in Sharon’s development whatsoever, I continued to sit with her in the hopes that something, anything; that I was trying to tell her was sinking in. I was sorely disappointed.

Sharon is completely unable to figure out even the most simple of calls on her own, turning to me as a crutch, even for listings that were well known landmarks down the street from the building we are now in. She repeatedly makes the same mistakes, even after being told how to correct the mistakes a multitude of times.

Her inability to retain any knowledge that I have given her whatsoever shows either complete contempt for my experience as a CSR, or the attention span of a 5 year old.

A short list mistakes Sharon made repeatedly in my two hours sitting with her:
Using the word ‘The’ as a keyword for searches
Asking what state ‘New York City’ was in
Letting the air go dead for more than 3 minutes
Putting customers on hold to get a drink of water
Mistaking the ‘call termination key’ for the ‘begin search’ key
Repeating words such as ‘crap’ on the air when unable to find a listing
Not searching all available outlets when trying to find a difficult entry

In short, she is completely unable to perform even the most basic tasks required of her as a CSR. Furthermore, I am not an expert, but it is my recommendation that she be tested for a learning disability. Sharon, at times, exhibits signs of illiteracy.

I also think that HR should review the requisites for hiring, if only to save the time, money, and effort it takes to train someone such as her.

My recommendation:
TERMINATION!!!

I came into the office the next day after some introspection. After much thought, I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and figured that I might be the problem. I passed her off, along with my notes, to another mentor. I figured someone with a softer hand and more patience would have better luck.

Out of sight and out of mind, I was at my desk finishing up some notes on a rather successful session with another trainee in Sharon’s class. The training lead, Amy, took a seat next to me.

“Uh, we need to talk about your notes on Sharon…”

“What about them? I thought they were pretty concise.”

“Well, Jake, they’re rather…”

“Rather what?”

“Mean!”

“Mean?”

“Jake, listing mistakes she made is expected, but questioning her literacy? Don’t you think you are being just a bit rough on her?”

“Actually, I thought about it a lot last night, and came to the same conclusion.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I handed her off to Stacy.”

Stacy, was without a doubt, the best person I could think of to mentor Sharon. Calm, personable, patient, and persistent, she was always the best fit for someone who needed a seemingly insurmountable amount of improvement.

No sooner had I spoken her name, she walked up. Her face carried a look of shock, as if she had just witnessed a violent crime. This was completely out of the norm for someone who usually had a smile on her face, even when things were rough.

“How’s it going, kid?” I came to the conclusion that she had the same luck that I did, but she looked like she needed to vent.

“She typed the word ‘return’.”

“Say again…” Amy was confused, as was I.

Stacy started again. “I told her ‘now hit return’ after she typed the name of the listing. I looked down to write something, then looked back up, and the word ‘return’ was in the search box. I was with her for two hours and I still can’t drop her time below two minutes.”

I looked at Amy with a smirk that had ‘I told you so’ written all over it. “So Amy, you still think that I was being mean?”

“Well…”

Tired of the hemming and hawing, I looked over to Stacy. “Let’s just see what she has to say about it.”

“Can her!” Stacy is not known to be mean, but those words came out with so little hesitation that I think that she might have actually experienced some sort of joy saying them.

Amy looked at the both of us, shocked. “But she is so nice!”

“She sucks! She sucks a lot! She might be the dumbest person I have ever met in my life! We sat with her for four hours, Amy, four hours, and she hasn’t improved! You really think any manager is gonna take her with her times that high?” I’m never at a loss for words when frustrated.

“No… They won’t.”

“Nice is not competent, Amy, you know that as well as I do. She has had three weeks of training, two days on a fairly simple job, and shown no improvement at all.”

“Ok… I’ll take care of it…”

Amy reluctantly walked over to Sharon’s desk and started to talk to her. It was in inaudible conversation that I didn’t want to witness. I turned back to Stacy, still standing in front of me, aghast.

“Go to break, kid, you look like you need it.”

“I’m gonna go talk to HR.”

A few minutes later, after she had done the dirty deed, Amy came back with a look of relief on her face. Under the shadow of the muffled obscenities coming out of the HR office, we began to chat again.

“We both kind of decided that she was better off somewhere else.”

“So she wasn’t upset?”

“No, I actually think she was expecting it. Well it just goes to show you…”

“Goes to show you what?”

“Like my dad always said, you can’t expect a painter to fly.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“Never mind.”

To this day, I still have no idea what she was talking about.