Thread by @RayneyDaze

I quit my job today and started a Twitter account for my cat (@KCPuppyCat). Why is going to take some time to explain. At least on the first count, anyway. Puppy deserves his own Twitter. But the job is about #a11y(accessibility) & a company with zero respect for their employees.

No, I'm not going to name the company. Suffice it to say they are in healthcare and provide customer service and other things related to benefits offered by other companies. They're kind of a middle man, controlled quite a few government regulations. There's lots of those around.

If you read the reviews of a company and there are a few disgruntled former employees saying horrible things, it's normal. If you look and nearly every review talks about how badly employees are treated, that's something else. I should have known. I thought I was prepared.

There were complaints about how "you only get 15 minute breaks and they count points against you if you're a minute late." But that's normal. There was talk of favoritism...that's pretty common too. Even the talk of mandatory overtime didn't ring any alarm bells at first.

What didn't concern me at first that should have was talk of how incomplete training was, how employees were expected to do 2 weeks of training and be on the phones right away. I've had a job where that was the norm, but training was actually decent and we were actually prepared.

This training was a bunch of power point slides being read aloud, a few tidbits added in here and there, two extremely short "roleplay sessions" and hearing 2 partial calls and 2 full calls. We weren't prepared at all. What didn't help matters was how few people paid attention.

To be fair, some of it was ability to retain information, too. I believe everyone should be able to find a job they can do, but jobs we're hired for should be jobs that we actually can do. When a trainer has to repeat the same instruction 50+ times over 4 days, that's a problem.

Anyway, for a job with a ton of complex CRM systems and even more types of situations we would encounter, training was wholly inadequate and rushed. Not only that, they rushed us out of training two days early. 10 days of training first became 9, then became less than 7.

Because I know people have been waiting, here's the #a11y stuff. Before I started, I tried to broach the subject of accessibility more than once. But the HR person spent less than 30 seconds on the phone with me directing me to drug test & start date.

So I brought it up on my start day. The IT person in the office talked to me, told me at first that they were on Windows Server 2008 (they weren't - it's 2016) and that Ease of Access settings were locked out (they sort of were). What was available to me was minimal.

I'm low vision. I read light text on dark background with a good bit of enlargement. What was available to me was high contrast mode (GOOD), magnifier (inadequate), and that's it. I asked about different screen resolution and text enlargement (in windows, locked down by policy).

Not only could they not do that, (as per IT), the way their computers are set up, the environment is brand new every time you restart the computer. So every day I had to struggle to set up what I did have before getting logged in to multiple systems. Mornings were a pain.

I've talked about Citrix before. This isn't the fault of the
company I worked for. But that was, yes, another issue. I found a workaround that made things "barely usable" but it was a far cry from "accessible." Or maybe I should turn those around.

https://twitter.com/RayneyDaze/status/1343778000706412549

Anyway, I raised these issues repeatedly through training, including mentioning countless times that I couldn't see the power point slides as presented through Webex. Ah well, I kept up on the concepts, even if I couldn't see screen shots of the systems we'd be using.

I was lucky though, in comparison. Others fell behind quickly. For those in my class, a slower speed of training covering the concepts was badly needed. When they suddenly told us on Tuesday that we would be on the phones Wednesday, people got upset. "But we have two more days!"

We were at first told we'd still be in training, but that wasn't true. Maybe technically, but functionally we were on our own. They informed us we'd be off on Friday (that was one of our 9 days of training) and work Saturday, starting our new schedules Monday.

Telling people they're working Saturday on Tuesday isn't terrible. Telling people at 4:30, "Hey, quick! Don't log out! Stay a few minutes!" and springing new schedules starting the next morning is far worse. Yes, we lost those last two days of training completely.

They took an extra day to get us access to the scheduling system and tell us about mandatory overtime. Imagine my surprise when I start Thursday morning and find out by looking at a system I technically still don't have a login for that I have overtime TODAY.

If I had a late shift, I would have been late, not knowing I was expected to come in early for overtime. Needless to say, there are a lot of employees who quit because of how they're treated. One final issue and I'll wrap this up. The tech problems were constant and severe.

I'm talking about people losing half a day, a day, or more of training (or on the phones) because their systems wouldn't work and they were either on hold with or working with IT for all that time. I spent almost 2.5 hours waiting for IT once and never did get an answer.

This system isn't working, the cloud computing terminal wouldn't let them in at all, they couldn't get logged into this or that, couldn't save necessary files locally, couldn't access x or y. In the end, it wasn't worth it. They've got issues.

https://twitter.com/RayneyDaze/status/1344113429855031297

@threadreaderapp kindly unroll this monstrous thread for my followers please and thank you?