The last time I worked as an employee was back in 1998 when I was 19 years old. It was also the first time I’d take the bus to get to work, have coworkers in an office, and most importantly, have bosses giving me a hard time for spending one extra minute in the bathroom.
So today, I’m going to talk about the stories from my first and last job as an employee at a telephone directory assistance center.
But mostly, I’ll talk about the lessons I learned during the three months I worked as a phone operator and how those lessons made me see life differently, leading me to take a few more risks and do my own thing.
Because I don’t think I’d be where I am today if I had stayed an employee my whole life.
My Dream Life at 19
The period before I started the job at the call center was one of the best in my life.
At 19, I had already taken the university entrance exams once, gotten into the Technological Institute in Kavala, Greece, and was planning to take the exams again to get into the Faculty of Engineering in Thessaloniki, which had been my goal from the start.
Having decided to retake just two out of the four subjects back then, my only real job for that year was to focus on physics and chemistry. That meant about 4 to 5 hours a week in classes at a tutoring center, and maybe another 2 or 3 hours for homework. After that, every other hour of the week was completely mine.
So yeah, you can tell I had a ton of free time back then.
My daily routine during that period consisted of going to the gym, playing video games, and hanging out with friends. I wasn’t learning any other foreign language since I’d already gotten my C2 proficiency certificate in English four years earlier, I wasn’t studying any art, and I definitely wasn’t working. Total slacker!
I sometimes wondered if I was living in a dream!
Why I Suddenly Decided to Get a Job
It must have been around Christmas when my dad told me there was an opening to hire people at the call center where he worked.
“Are you interested?” he asked.
Even today, I still don’t know what made me say yes.
It was probably because I truly felt I had way too much free time and wasn’t contributing much to the family, so it seemed like a chance to make myself useful. And then I thought that, at the very least, I’d make my parents somewhat proud to have a son who was finally going to work for the first time in his life.
It wasn’t about money. I didn’t need cash. My parents were providing everything for me.
I didn’t have any close friends working at the time that could have influenced me either. Maybe I also saw it as just an experience, since I knew the gig at that specific call center wouldn’t last more than three months.
So I told myself: go for it, and if you don’t like it, you’ll be out in three months anyway.
That’s pretty much how I started working for the first and, as it turned out, the last time as an employee.
Answering My Very First Call
The first three days at the call center were training days.
Experienced operators, both men and women who had been working there for years, trained us on how to use the equipment, but mostly on how to handle customers over the phone. There wasn’t any specific book we had to read or a strict protocol to follow, other than a few standard opening lines we’d use when answering a call.
“Hello, directory assistance, this is seat 313, how may I help you?”
Of course, all of that felt overwhelming to an introverted guy like me.