Taking One for the Tim

I told you guys I work in a call center right?

I should probably be wearing shoes.

That's better (even though it looks like I'm wearing wooden clogs).

Forget it, let's go back to the socks.  Just pretend I have shoes on.

I can remember when I first started working here.  I came to learn that if I could crush the competition (eg. my coworkers) in sales that I could win a cool five dollars in gift card money as a reward.  It's not much, but it sure beats, say, being set on fire.

Which is actually what they did to low performers in medievial call centers.  To answer your first question, yes there were call centers back in medievial times, and to answer your second question, I know they didn't have phones back then.  Two words:  Carrier pidgeons!  They tried voice recognition once using parrots but it didn't work out so great.

But I digress.

We took inbound calls and only had one product to sell.  Some of my coworkers struggled with the sales but I found they came pretty easy to me, at least at first.  It didn't take long for me to climb the ranks like Nelly to become number one.  Pretty soon I was winning gift cards all up in this place!

Things were going pretty smoothly until one day when I won a gift card for Tim Horton's*.  I naturally assumed that this would be five dollars as well, but not so!  I was told that these ones only had two dollars on them.  The reasoning was that this was enough to buy two small or one extra large coffee. 

Being the rebel that I am though I wanted medium coffee.  This however would leave me with about 43 cents left over on the card,  which would then quickly disappear into my wallet or pocket under many layers of point reward cards and never seen or heard from again.

To make this endeavour a little more worthwhile and reduce such frivolous waste, I decided to save up 4 or 5 Tim cards and buy some manner of lunch combo from them.  Over the next week or so I secured the necessary amount of cards needed to buy a proper lunch.  It was at this point that I began to think, "Wouldn't it be funny if I saved up seventy five of these bad boys and bought the actual Tim Horton's coffee machine instead?"

...

Initially I dismissed this thought as too insane to actually work, and I tried to reason myself down to a more reasonable course of action.  It didn't take.


To put the final rock on the gas pedal I decided to also send out a team-wide email to my coworkers, promising that I would win enough cards to buy the coffee maker and brew everyone coffee with it.

I sat down in my cube and readied myself for another day of work.  Nothing to do now except sit back and wait for the sales to come rolling in and, by way of extension, a copious shower of Tim Horton gift cards.

It was about this time though that I hit an inexplicable wall in my sales.  Suddenly I was starting to hear the word "no" a lot more than I had been accustomed to.  I even tried to spruce up my pitch a little but to no avail.

As you can see I was clearly a victim of defective customers.  As I started to drown in my own sea of grandiose ideas and rash promises, panic began to set in.  Before this I had been at the top of my team in sales.  "What if this is it?"  I kept thinking.  "What if I've reached the pinnacle of my career and never sell another thing in my life?"  This nervousness only served to fuel further panic which led to an even sharper drop in my performance.

By this point, I wasn't winning squat.  I felt as though I had let down myself, my team, and most all, the Timster himself.

"This is it" I thought.  I was almost certain that I'd soon wind up an unemployed hobo living in the streets, surviving off the precious few gift cards I had won back in my glory days.

It was around that low point that an older gentlemen on our team came over to me and said: "So I hear you're saving to buy a Tim Horton's coffee machine with the cards you win from the sales incentives.  Well I think it's a great idea and I want to support it.  Here, take these cards.  They were sitting in my desk."

I managed a stunned thank you.  I couldn't believe someone else bought into my crazy dream!  This turned out to be the small boost that I needed to get back on track.

Suddenly the intense feelings of despair started to fade and the aroma of failure began to dissipate.  I was selling again!

Soon I had surpassed the 20 card mark.  And that's when the dam burst!  Soon everyone was pitching in to help make my dream a reality.  I was trading regular gift cards to coworkers for their Tim cards, and my boss would even slip me an extra Tim Horton's card here and there come prize time.  I was on a roll! 

At last the big day came.  After four months of saving, I finally had the seventy fifth card and the $150.00 worth of Tim's money that I needed!  Emails were sent, cards were gathered, and off I went.  I marched right out of work, went straight home, and... took a nap.

But right after that I found a friend who would be crazy enough to film the experience, and then very carefully selected my target: A Tim Horton's that was very much out of my way, thus ensuring that I would never be seen in there again.  Actually I was pretty certain that I wouldn't even be allowed back into that location after the stunt that I was about to pull.

I barged into the store, picked a Tim Horton's machine up off the shelf, went up to the counter, and waited for the cashier to ring it in. 

I then handed her about 5 Tim Horton's cards to start with.  She scanned them in efficiently and watched as two dollars came off the price for each one.  When the cashier had finished with that stack she announced the new total to me.  I noticed her beaming with pride at the quick work she had made of my tiny stack of cards.  She announced the new total to me, as if thinking I was out of cards and expecting me to be paying for the rest of the coffee maker by some other means.  How wrong she was!

I started to pull out more cards, and when she was done scanning those, more cards still.  I was pulling them out of pockets, my hat, and anywhere else I had hidden them on my person.  Pretty soon almost every worker in the store stopped what they were doing to come and watch as I made this poor girl scan card after card.

When the cashier was finally done scanning all the cards, she wearily asked me if I wanted my receipt.  I told her that I did.  She hit the print button and the receipt began to spew forth.  

It took almost a minute for the receipt to fully print.  It was massive!

Coffee machine in hand, I triumphantly marched into work the next day to fulfill my much anticipated promise.  I even had coworkers pitch in extra Tim's cards and money beforehand so that we could turn it into a full blown epic Tim Horton's day.  I blissfully spent that afternoon careening through on an out of control coffee-soaked sugar ride, brewing pot after pot of coffee for my happy coworkers as we gorged ourselves on donuts, muffins, and timbits.

I'd like to think that the Timster would have been proud!

*For all my foreign readers out there, be sure to check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hortons