When I moved to Canada from Maryland in 2016, I was in desperate need of a job while I pursued my theatre degree at the University of Ottawa. Lucky me: a call centre was steps from campus — in fact, I could see the drab office building from my dorm room window.
On my first day, my trainer told me this particular call centre focused on “market research” — a fancy phrase for surveys. Those initial few weeks on the phone, I called Canadians on behalf of organizations like Statistics Canada, asking how they felt about everything from their garbage collection to their single-use coffee makers. The gig was mind-numbingly boring, a test of my capacity to sit still for eight hours a day.
