waiting for you to call me up and tell me i'm not alone

I found this NYT article on call moitoring fascinating in its insights into the surveillance and policing of affective labor. Workers are graded on their "empathy."

Now call monitors rate operators by checking off boxes on detailed electronic questionnaires that assess qualities like efficiency, conversational skills and ability to mollify frustrated customers. The scores from each monitored call are collected to rank an operator's performance.

Handling angry callers "is like dealing with road rage," Mr. Pike said.

Operators who can defuse aggression - a not-insignificant talent - win plaudits. Operators also have to deal with the slow talkers, the lonely chatterers and the absent-minded. At night, the drunks come out.

And the article also talks about how this work is racialized and the relationship between racialization, outsourcing, and capital flight.

With thousands of call center jobs moving overseas, monitors are also noticing a growing reaction against operators with foreign accents. More customers now ask to speak to an American after they hear an operator with an Indian accent, said Miriam Nelson, who helps run Aon Consulting's center.

"In India, the operators are doing a lot of the courtesies they are trained to do," Ms. Nelson said, but they often miss the nuance of conversations. She added that some Indian call centers show their operators episodes of "Seinfeld" and "Friends" to teach them about American culture.

Nothing on television, though, can prepare an Indian operator for chatty American consumers who like to talk about the ups and downs of the New York Yankees or the latest blizzard in Chicago.

Perhaps inevitably, monitoring is also moving offshore. HyperQuality, which is based in Seattle, has 100 call monitors in New Delhi who eavesdrop on call center workers around the United States. Those raters, oceans away, are trying to make sense of hot lines and hotheads, too.