Ambient Devices – Christmas hires and fires
Christmas (and the 2 weeks after) at Ambient was the rush season, when thousands of people would learn about how RF propagation works, and learn perhaps more than they intended about the business-prognosis of the pager-bandwidth airspace market at the time.
One Christmas was particularly heightened because it began with a bang – midway through December our entire building was evacuated due to an electrical fire that ultimately killed a technician. At the same time, Boston had some substantial snowfalls, which made temporary help harder to guarantee.
PG managed to get us into two contiguous suites in the hotel across the street, so he and Andrew borrowed a van and rustled up the necessary folding chairs and tables to make a rudimentary call center with – AB spent most of a night setting up the PBX system that would let us route calls form the 800 number to the suites. It looked, and this would become relevant later, like a classic boiler room / pump-and-dump setup.
We often had to hire temps, which was difficult because our support task went deeper than most CSR temp roles – the standard role was basically a human who would help customers through a phone tree or debug tree, and that's about it. Because of how returns work, and because the product was often given as a gift, there was an extra stage of customer-education we had to go through in order to get a customer to believe us when we said that their device was not broken, but it also would never work at their home (because it was not in an area covered by the pager network).
I spent perhaps more time than was needed explaining the actual mechanics of the situation to each CSR, possibly because I was ashamed to know-but-not-reveal how unanimously the verdict (“out of luck”) would be dispensed each day.
One of the temps was a gregarious dude who resembled Cedric Yarbrough (Jonsey in Reno 911), and would make a point to hold your eye contact while he was “expertly” handling a customer for us. He liked to emphasize frequently that we were his customer, and how much he was doing to elegantly serve the callers because that seemed to be the best way to flatter us into compliance. But he also loved sports! So much so that he would often mime sports-actions (lining up a golf swing; being hut-hutted the football) in concert with the dynamics of the phone conversation he was having on his earset. Most unsettling was football and other multi-player sports because if you failed to shake his eye contact, he would continue to involve you in the ghost-sport – you'd be on the hook to catch his pass or field his homer. I fantasized, but never found out, what would happen if you suddenly inverted the game, fumbling the catch or complicating the situation.
The manifestation of this was that you could easily lose double-digit minutes deftly managing eye contact with the various temps on the floor at any point – implicated at every step of the way in the drama you'd staged.