[Editor's Note: The following requires a little background. A
certain bank/credit card company I used to work for, which shall remain nameless,
used to make all officers and exempt employees (which are employees who get all the
work and hassle, but none of the benefits, of being an officer...guess what
I was?) spend four hours per month answering calls on its customer service
lines. Most of these calls were routine inquiries, such as, "What's my
balance?" and "I need a credit line increase." But there were enough
complicated ones that for a technical person whose expertise lies somewhere
besides dealing with customers in a non-technical venue and who has not
been trained to answer every type of question that comes along,
those four hours a month were absolute living hell. We got a total of
about five hours of training to prepare us for TACS; the folks who actually
worked on the TACS lines get at least a couple weeks of intensive training
to help them answer every question that might be asked. TACS, btw, stands
for Telephone Access Customer Satisfaction. The mandatory 4 hours a month
were referred to by us as "TACS duty", and by the management as "TACS
participation", as if we actually had any choice in the matter. I seem
to remember hearing of someone being fired for skipping TACS. Anyway, the
following was written by Mark Taylor, a former co-worker of mine who's
also no longer with the company.]
Brandy was just called to jury duty, and it got me to thinkin'...
Two^H^Hhree Things are Certain in Life:
Death and TACS Duty
...and Jury Duty
A Brief Comparison of TACS Duty and Jury Duty
Invented by a higher authority (i.e. "The Man").
Referred to as a "duty" to convince you that it is a noble thing to do.
Mandatory because, even as a noble duty, nobody wants to do it.
When it is your time to go, you have to go.
You need a note from God to get officially excused from it.
If you decide not to show up, you get hunted down and punished.
You are there to solve other people's issues for them.
You sit crammed in with other people who are doing their duty.
You don't do it often enough to ever know the rules, so you just pretend.
They record everything that goes on.
You can't just get up to go pee whenever you feel like it.
Fighting city hall about having to do it won't change anything.
(I'm sure the list goes on)
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