Massive post here, so be prepared - I suggest coffee, some chocolate, and the William Tell Overture for background music as I fill in the massive gaps over the last few weeks.

To summarise, I’m still alive, but working 7 days a week. I picked up a second job to earn money - I moved out of my parent’s house, because I don’t particularly want MM sharing the same room with me under my parent’s roof when he comes over to visit in a couple of months or so. 2nd job pays for the extra rent I am forking out each fortnight from what I used to pay. The median is about $350 per week here in Perth, my previous place got bumped up to $230 from $145, so when I moved home I payed off my credit card, and needed to move back out. Now I have moved, I’m paying rent of $250 per week.

The pluses for this, is I get my own space again, and I can watch TV the way I want to, I can cook and eat the food I want to, sleep in, and not have to do dad’s laundry. Other thing I guess is mum doesn’t see me when I am stressed. She’s realised how stressed I am and has started worrying about me. Being out of her immediate eyesight, I can deal with my stress privately.

I wish I could say something positive about work, but I can’t. Except that we’ve lost our customer focus. When our GM resigned, we had no idea just how much shit he was protecting us from. Now we face mass resignations that we can’t control, from our support team, and pretty soon about half of the team leader group in our cust. service team  are about to resign. We lost 2 last week, and there’s about 3 more about to resign in the next 4 weeks.

I have another job aswell, market researching.  It’s perfectly legal for me to call people on Sundays - so quit whining, don’t you think if market researchers could afford not to work on a weekend, that we wouldn’t be doing just that? I don’t want to work weekends, but I don’t have much of a choice right now. Neither do the other freaks I share a call centre with. You think there are desperate people on Dole queues? Gads, You should see who I work with right now :/

What is it?

Acoustic incidents are sudden, unexpected loud noises occurring through a receiver during telephone or
headset use. They may be crackles, hisses, whistles or shrieks or high-pitched noises.

Although many acoustic incidents occur in call centres throughout Australia, only a very small proportion cause
the symptoms known as ‘acoustic shock’ in employees who have experienced them.

The noises can come from a wide variety of sources, either within the transmission system or from the customer end.

Quite a few have been had in the call centre since about February this year, I’ve had 6 people in my team have them, and tonight I had one. So what can cause these nasty sounds?

Within the transmission system:

• faulty or damaged networks, telephones and headset equipment;
• broadband and narrowband interference; and
• mobile phones or fax machines used in call centres.

From the customer end:

• noises made close to the receiver;
• such as people whistling and babies screaming;
• feedback oscillation from some cordless phones;
• alarm signals and signalling tones;
• phone receivers slammed down or dropped; and
• tones from misdirected facsimiles and modems;

Awesome! Some symptoms include, headache, ear ache, sharp pain, ear feeling full, that type of thing. So I guess tomorrow, I will be sent off to get forms signed and hearing test conducted so I can be told officially i am deaf! w00t