Evil Inc.

I currently work in customer service for a large, soulless corporation. Mainly, I answer e-mail. (Everybody who's sent me e-mail about this site now laughs bitterly, because they know how long I take to get back to them.) I am a tiny cog in one of the company's many faces. Some of the other cogs in this line of work aren't happy about their lot because we hardly ever actually help people, and the company's customer service is, overall, an inconvenient and godawful mess. I, on the other hand, am not happy about our lot because being a cog is often fairly dull. I'm there because I am paid to be there, not out of any real desire to help people, particularly not to help people with their service from this large, soulless corporation.

As a cog I am paid to receive input from customers, evaluate it according to a set of standards and respond according to another set of standards. Whether or not this response is helpful has far more to do with the standards, which are created by a series of driving gears and pistons so far away from the customers that the answer is generally No, they are not very helpful. In my own little part of the machinery I have a limited amount of movement as to how helpful and kind I can be, and only in certain situations. At these times, whether I am kind or indifferent depends mainly on how much that particular customer has annoyed me. So again the answer is often No, I am not particularly helpful.