Back in August 2020, I was hired by an electric vehicle charging company to be a customer service phone agent. I figured it'd be easy – almost every job I've had since the age of 16 was in customer service in some capacity and at the time, this company was getting barely any calls compared to the veterinary hospital I worked for before – but it turned out to be a lot more stressful than I expected. The rough customer interactions often had me in tears and then when business started booming it felt like I barely got to breathe between one call and the next. Eventually I reached my breaking point and begged my psychiatrist to write me a doctor's note to take just a couple weeks off of work so I could get my mental health straight. Near the end of that two weeks when we did a recheck to see if I was ready to return to work, I was still in such a bad way that she requested to have my leave extended another six weeks and urged me to start seeing a therapist again. Thankfully I took her advice and learned a lot about myself during that time off, the biggest revelation being that after more than a decade in the customer service industry, I was officially over it. A little while after I returned to work, I was lucky enough to be able to transfer to a different team within the company. Instead of answering customer calls and creating cases from them, I'd take those cases and create maintenance or tech support tickets from them so the appropriate team would then investigate further. While the work was a bit more challenging, it got me the fuck out of customer service and that alone was a huge relief.
“So wait… You said business started booming, right? Then why'd you get laid off?” I hear you asking. I know, I'm surprised as well. And even more surprising, they laid me off right before “the busy season” is expected to begin (which is one of the reasons why I think this move is going to bite them in the ass). The HR lady basically told me that the company had to make some “budgeting decisions” and are eliminating some “redundancies.” Now to be totally fair, I wasn't the strongest member of the team, but I was good at my job. And almost every person I've seen get hired into that job over the last year would leave either before or right after they finished training, so it's not like the company had an exorbitant amount of us; in fact, there were only 9 of us total on that team. I don't know who the hell thinks only 9 workers making tickets for the company's apps, their home charging units, and their public charging network with tens of thousands of chargers across the continent is “too many,” but what do I know? I'll tell ya what I know: if people continue to make the switch to EVs at the same rate as they have been for the last couple of years, then that company is only gonna get busier, my old team's gonna be slammed even harder, and the company's gonna have to start wasting a bunch more money hiring (and most likely losing) new employees rather than just keep the already trained ones they had. But oh, well. Not my problem anymore.
You know what's funny? With all the stress I felt with this company after nearly 3 years with them, I'm honestly not upset that I've been let go. The saddest part of this for me is that I'm losing the nice 4×10 schedule (4 days a week, 10-hour shifts) that gave me 3-day weekends every week… Of course, that's not the only shitty aspect of this; I'm losing my health insurance this weekend, chances are I'll have to work in-office full time again with whatever new job I end up getting, and I'm only gonna get 2 weeks of severance pay. So yes, ya girl's gonna be applying for unemployment and Medicaid (or another type of health insurance) tomorrow in case finding a new job takes longer than I'm hoping. I'm dreading having to go back on the job hunt, but I've got my fingers crossed in hopes that I'll manage to find something better.