Free time/Work time

Up until a few weeks ago, I had possibly one of the worst jobs out there, I worked in a call centre raising money for various charities. It sounds all nice and moral but I was basically paid to phone up old people and manipulate them into setting up direct debits which they probably couldn’t really afford. The set up was one big noisy room full of people in headsets doing a job they despise. 

The calls were made on an autodialler, so there were usually a couple of minutes between the calls where you weren’t connected to anyone. This is called ‘wrap time’. It’s time spent at work, which you are paid for, but is spent doing ‘nothing’. Is this time wasted time? Is it free time? Or is it work time?

Personally, I feel like I would have gone mad had I spent those thousands of few minute intervals doing ‘nothing’, so I would spend the time reading. I feel that since I was doing something semi productive, reading, the time wasn’t wasted. Especially seeing as I wasn’t exactly laden with options of other productive things I could do, sat at a desk in a call centre. Reading felt like a perfectly good thing to do with that time. 

Because I was reading, doing something I would do in my free time, and I wasn't required to do any work related duties in this time except wait for the next call, does that mean this time was free time? While I was doing something I would count as a free time activity, I was still in a work space, and was bound to that space by my status as employee, so it would be a stretch to say my time was ‘free’. Of course, I was still being paid during this time, so while I wasn’t actively doing any kind of work, I was still selling my time to the call centre.

What I personally found astonishing, was that the majority of the people at the call centre would spend their ‘wrap time’ doing pretty much nothing. A few times I forgot to bring anything to read, and I found my shift to be about a thousand times more painful than it usually was (which was pretty painful). Wrap time is basically a ‘break’ between calls, a break from work. As a break is usually associated with a lack of effort, it’s understandable why most people would use that time to do ‘nothing’. 

I wanted to ask people what wrap time meant to them, but without directly telling them to do something by asking them to answer my questions. I specifically wanted them to tell me what they thought of wrap time during wrap time. So I gave some people a piece of paper before the shift started and asked them to do what they wanted with it, or express themselves how they liked with the piece of paper during wrap time.

What I got was some doodles, an origami flower, and a paper aeroplane. I feel like I was expecting to get something from this activity which was unrealistic. Just because I asked people to express feelings on something, doesn’t mean they will necessarily have any feeling on the topic, or be willing to tell me about them. Personally, I think if I was told to basically do some extra-curricular writing about something while I was just trying to get on with my job I wouldn’t be too keen on complying. Plus, if I’m asking these people to question wether or not this time belongs to them, then by asking them to do something for me during this time surely I’m defeating the point in some way.

Unrelated to my thoughts on wrap time, I (unfortunately?) lost my job at the call centre about a week ago as I apparently wasn’t making them enough money. I wasn’t actually that bad at my job, but how the system works there is that they hire/fire so many people every week. They clearly do this to ensure that the turnover is as high as possible. So they hire hundreds of desperate people each week and give them all zero hour contracts, only to fire them a few months later because they  aren’t cruel enough to literally force money out of the elderly. I’m sure if any of the managers knew about my attempt at an intervention they would not have been pleased at all. 

Aren’t call centres lovely things?