My cluelessness is a bit much; I'm autistic and I was very isolated for the first decade and a half of my life- I didn't even attend school or online school. So I had no concept of what was okay. I got this job in a kind of location-specific company as customer support. I answered calls, went through basic questioning. “What's going on, how long has it been going on, have you tried xyz, can you tell me which lights are on” etc. I fill out the ticket for tech support. We were a “family”. We had each other's backs.
Throughout my time there, I was given no scripts, and no training. I worked hard to keep up because if I could learn and advance, they'd pay for my college to get a more significant job within the company. It seemed like a great deal, except that I was constantly told what NOT to tell customers (the truth about why they were having problems, and how they were our fault) but not what to tell them instead. I had to learn to lie on my feet and so many of these people had technical backgrounds and knew more than I did about what was going on.
I skipped lunches and breaks during periods of major problems and also came in early, stayed late, and worked overtime. I think they got in trouble for people not clocking their breaks, so they changed the system to self-reporting their starting, breaks and ending times and for a while had us lying. Then suddenly corrected that and the manager who was a cool guy with little power over the BS, made a point to say it was illegal to skip breaks like that.
Things start getting rough within the company due to unpredicted external factors, and they were at the same time merging companies with another smaller, similar company. That smaller company had two total technical support who also acted as customer support. I had been given zero training, just learning on the job with a starting point of no technical knowledge, for the main company.
The first thing that happened was that, because the two people working for the smaller company were overworked, without warning that was suddenly the job of all customer support; to answer the phones for a product we knew nothing about, file tickets in a system that wasn't made for that product and on top of that deal with the fact that every single person who called just demanded to speak to one of the two people who'd been answering their calls and fixing their problems for years.
The second thing that went down was, as the pandemic hit, more people were using the products at once due to being at home, and nothing was ready for that. So influx of calls, more people realizing how bad the product really is and cancelling, shady cancellation practices and instructions on how to not help people trying to cancel. They suddenly put me on tech support, which I was never trained on. And then payments started coming late and at first, people worked through it. But as it happened more often they'd stop working until they were paid, and finally, people were fired.
Not only did they fire the people who did the actual work, rather than opened tickets and answered calls, but they fired the ONLY PERSON who could work on a third merged company's product. Meaning we had customers who suddenly had no support for their product, at all, and when they called we asked what to tell them- what specifically to tell them. And all we were told was, “Not the truth.”
Not long after that we were sent to work from home. Every day was terrible. I was put on nights, and instructed (over the phone, no paper trail) to learn how to do some pretty major tech support within a short time frame, or I'd be fired. While working alone, at night, with nobody to help me, and while my messages were ignored throughout the entire day by the people who were supposed to be helping. I'd get calls from customers at night, usually one or two but sometimes a dozen or more. And all the while knowing I'd be the only person there to answer calls for the next eight hours while nothing would get fixed.
I had a mental breakdown due to that, the pandemic, and issues with my living situation and family and ended up in a mental hospital for a week. I emailed HR and let them know the night before, but when I got out apparently they had emailed back that I didn't qualify for medical leave and to “call them to discuss my options”. I was fired the following morning, over email, which I did not reply to. I was paid what they owed from my last pay period and PTO.
But that's crazy. Somehow they're still in business, although being sued by both ex-employees and customers alike. I wish I could safely review them as a former employee but I know the CEO would come after me, and my situation was extra-specific because nobody else put up with as much as me, and there were so few employees- especially near the end. So they'd easily realize who I was.