A Summer At Netflix

I like many other relatively lazy Americans I love Netflix because let's face it Netflix is awesome. I originally got an account when my older sister booted me off of hers. I was half way through every season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ever and being terribly addicted forced myself to buy my own account. It's eight bucks a month so really who can complain?

And the answer to that question is a lot of people. Over the summer I worked tech support for Netflix. I never truly understood the dense mother fucker jokes or how unbelievably entitled people are until I had to explain to the same someone several times in a row that unplugging the blu-ray while you are waiting for it to load won't help and had someone tell me that buffer was a plot for us to steal their money. (It's twenty-eight cents a day, by making it buffer through one episode of Breaking Bad we don't get that much money.)

I started off my summer by applying to every available job in the area (so many in fact I couldnt actually remember where I applied) and got called back for one interview. Working as support for the online Abercrombie & Fich store. When I went in to interview they decided I would be better off working for Netflix and ended up going through a second interview and was hired as a member of the Netflix staff.

On my first day of training the training instructor, who ironically enough, had the same exact name as my mother, botched my name and called me Sam. After a couple years portraying a male soldier named Sam in my father's Civil War reenacting venture crew, I still have a compulsion to answer to it and thus did without thinking. This led to three months of endless confusion for both me and my coworkers. I did correct the training instructor, but the damage was done and my entire training class will forever know me as Sam. Thus kicked off my summer at Netflix.

My schedule was chaotic. It changed often because I had no life and when someone was asking who could be moved about the answer was always me. All summer long I worked nights and at first was aligned enough with the Denver bus schedule that it worked well.

I'd catch the bus and get to work at 6:00pm work until 3:00am then watch shows on the TV larger than my living room in the break room until 4:00am when I'd catch the bus home. That was on weekdays. Weekends the bus didn't come until five so I'd walk to IHOP with the plan of waiting from the bus, but get sick of waiting around and just walk home anyways. That is how I became the only person in recorded history to get in shape because of Netflix.

I lived five mile away. When my schedule changed so that I got off of work at 2:00am instead of 3:00am I got bored way to easily to wait around. I started off riding my bike that didn't last very long because some drunken ass hole when I was coming home at three in the morning ran into my bike's front tire rendering it useless. (He didn't even slow down.) I started bussing to work then walking the five miles home. That continued for most of the summer.

There was about one week each month after I paid rent and was waiting for my next paycheck that I wouldn't have enough cash for even the bus. During those weeks, this was my schedule:

2:00pm - wake up and put clothes on

2:30pm - eat shitty ramen for breakfast and pack shitty ramen to be eaten later.

3:30pm - walk five miles to work.

5:00pm - get to work and chill in the break room for half an hour to prepare for my shift.

5:30pm - start work.

10:30pm - eat shitty ramen for lunch.

2:00am - get off work and walk five miles home.

3:30am - arrive home, eat shitty ramen for dinner, and watch an episode of something on Netflix.

4:30am - pass out.

2:00pm - It starts again.

For an entire week once every month, I was walking ten miles a day five days a week for three months. The other days I was riding the bus to work and walking five miles home because I was too impatient to wait for the bus. All that put together, I walked roughly 375 miles over the summer just going to and from work. No wonder the traction on my sneakers was practically worn flat.

When one of my coworkers offered to give me rides home the last couple weeks I worked there it was a God send. And when I one of my best friends in the whole world bought me a new bike it was the happiest moment. It took me hours to put it together, but my golly it's nice and oh, so wonderful. I didn't get to actually use it much for going to work because I had a ride home and as such got lazy riding the bus to work and getting a wide home from coworkers.

The commute however was lovely compared to working tech support. Working phone tech support is hell. Not only do you have to actually hear people yell in your ear about how they can't unplug the Blu-Ray Player because there is a TV, an Xbox, and a cat on top of it and it's all pushed up against the wall so they can't get to it, but you also have to try and explain to them in a calm and confident manner why that will fix the problem. This is really difficult when they just keep yelling the same thing again and again like magically it will reveal all the issues to me so I can push a magic button and make their Netflix start working.

As I was told multiple times by my boss I was quick and talented at fixing the problem, but I was too curt in my responses and didn't sound confident. I tend to give really short responses that answer the question without a lot of fluff added, so people think I'm just being rude. As a stutterer by nature, I don't generally sound like I'm all that confident in what I'm saying either. If you were to look at me while I was explaining you could probably tell that I knew what I was talking about (at least I like to think so), but from my voice alone there isn't much hope in my explaination, apparently. It's not the first time that I've been scolded for stuttering either. In sixth grade my English teacher who, let's face it, hated me decided that my stuttering through a presentation was a sign I didn't prepare enough and should be docked a crap load of points. I will never understand this mentality. It literally makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Once you've worked tech support, I promise you the joke of "Have you tried turning it on and off again?" is no longer funny. I kid you not, almost nobody has tried that by the time they call in to complain and the excuses I tell you are beautiful. I have heard, "I can't reset the router by unplugging it because I'm using truck stop Wi-Fi and it's Netflix just trying to steal my money." (That one was a popular theory.) To the much more polite and less conspiratory "Crap! I have a God awful amount of stuff piled on it. Can we do something else?"

People really don't have to want to work to get their Netflix working. I swear to God I almost slapped a friend of mine about a month ago when she decided to complain about Netflix tech support. She couldn't log into her account so she called and they sent her a password reset which she never got. When that happens something went wrong obviously and usually it means that you are trying to use the wrong email address or less likely if it's something on our end you news to call us back so we know it happened and can look into it. Technology isn't magic people. (Just don't bitch about Netflix tech support to me if you don't want a lecture, mmkay?)

After about a month, there was glorious moment when I, Sam, was given the chance to take a typing test to be switched to chat tech support. I leapt at the chance and literally danced when I finished my last day of voice. (Granted that was more because we had an impromptu flash mob at work than anything else, but there was dancing.)

Chat is pretty much the same as voice except you don't have to actually hear the stupid people, you can watch movies while you work, and you get a shit ton more people chatting in to request that we get a specific title. I got so excited when I saw that Dexter was on Netflix I literally did a little dance. Not because I liked the show (haven't actually seen it), but because it meant people wouldn't be bitching at tech support because Netflix doesn't have it. (The fact that I had stopped working at Netflix months ago was irrelevant.) There are two moments of my life where I lost all hope for humanity while working tech support. 1) was when some jackass spent an hour just repeatedly asking me to suck his dick (at one point he asked me to suck the skin off his dick. Seriously, dude? That can't be comfortable.) And 2) was when I had someone chat in two days (yes two days) after Orange is the New Black premiered on Netflix to complain that we didn't have the second season yet. I get the show is amazing and addicting and all that, but we have to actually make the second season first. The instant cassettes from Space Balls don't actually exist.

Now on chat, I had a new boss that called me Sarah and there was another guy on the team named Sam. My boss gave me some incredibly strange looks when I'd turn around because she called for Sam. The chat floor manager also really liked to yell "Sarah" when the two Sarah that worked there were on the floor just for the sake of seeing us both turn around. It was a really confusing time in my life. (Ranked up there with questioning one's sexuality and trying to figure out where the hell you are supposed to go in a game of Forsaken.) While I was quite convinced before that common names were evil, I became quite solidified in this belief from working at Netflix. Seriously, why are names so difficult?

While I hated working tech support because "dumb as a box of rocks" doesn't accurately describe people that call in, I loved working for Netflix. It was an incredibly relaxed environment. Much like how in high school I had friends that wore capes to school, at Netflix I had coworkers that did so. There was often a high risk of getting shot unexpectedly in the head by a foam dart or paper ball. There was always free popcorn (this along with ramen was a staple of my diet). We had a type off to celebrate the Forth of July. The winner was a guy that typed so fast the official statement was made, "It's like if Jesus could type." Corporate would come and listen to our feedback as to how things could be improved. And above all else everyone there is really great to work with. They understand the concept of playing why you work and still being a professional to the customer even if you are just repeatedly bashing your head into the keyboard in hope that it will make them seem smarter.

Most people who call and chat in are generally nice and just not sure how technology works, but there are enough of the incredibly dumb and rude ones to make you rampage and when you get a customer that understands technology just isn't sure what's going on you literally dance. (There is enough dancing at Netflix to be an episode of Glee. It's just not organized, synchronized, or pretty to watch in anyway.)

So as someone who has worked tech support I beg of all humans who call or chat in, be nice to the person your talking to, there isn't a magic fix all button, and I swear to God you will not die because Netflix got rid of that one show or movie.