The day I became a hikikomori

IV

At first quarantine only meant two things: the inevitable loss of the weak friendships I've made with my fellow classmates and the inability to continue with my daily jog.

After the lockdown we started sharing our work and feedback via Whatsapp, and at the end of the semester we made a zoom meeting on which we talked about books for a little while. I told them about the latest book I was reading—A Song of ice and fire 1: a game of thrones—and they were really excited about it but also really worried they don't spoil me the whole saga.

But that was about it: I haven't really spoke to anyone after that because we weren't that close, to be honest. We've shared our favorite authors and discuss a lot about our craft—which we barely know, to be completely honest. And it seems we have nothing more to say.

Anyway, about my daily work out, I found some influencer that was making home routines, so I started following her and working out at home. But I was so used to my usual routine than this change of pace seemed to me like a step back.

And it was. Those routines are fine, don't get me wrong, but they sure aren't as effective as a nonstop jogging for a full hour every single day.

I hope I could get a cheap treadmill or something so I could work out like I used to.

But on the brightside, I didn't have to go to the gym or the cultural institute where I took my courses, so I had even more time to spend reading and writing.

And I did for few months, until I turned 30. It was fine at first: I got cake, some presents from my family, and a couple people from my literature courses wished me happy birthday. But a few days later the existential dread kicked in. I started thinking my youth was over—and also wasted away—so got a little depressed; I also thought in 10 years I was going to turn 40, so I had just 10 years to solve everything in my life or I'll be too late.

At this time I started to think seriously about getting a job; we were on a lockdown after all, and making some friends or getting a girlfriend seemed even harder in this situation. Also building a career from scratch will take more time than everything else, and I can't stretch enough how my time was running out.

So I started to look for job offer, but there weren't a lot at this time, so I decided it was time for my emergency plan: I update my résumé to age: 30 and sent it to the call center.

They didn't called me back, though.

So I sent my résumé again, but this time I also sent the results of an old TOEFL test I took when I got to college, and it worked: they immediately sent me some information about the hiring process, and they invited me to some zoom meetings to get me introduced to the company.

They didn't even scheduled me to a job interview.

And my TOEFL results weren't even that high, to be honest.

After I gave them all the documents and info they wanted, they hired me and enrolled me in a 6-week training course with some other people.

The first days were horrible: I was so stressed out and anxious I could barely sleep, and the idea I had to waste the rest of my life answering calls of angry customers didn't really help to cheer me up.

"Well," I constantly said to myself, "if you find and get a better job than this one, you can quit."

Needless to say, I still have this job, and after a few weeks I got used to it. Yes, I was still in training and I had to wake up early every day, but I only had to connect and participate once in a while, and they were paying me for it.

And I met new people. They seemed pretty nice, so I tried to befriend them. They didn't like books as I did, but some of them had great taste in music.

We even get to know each other when we went to the site to get the equipment we were going to use to work at home. Most of them seemed way different than I thought—some were taller or thinner or older than their webcams revealed—but that didn't prevent us from hanging out once again. We went for lunch at a seafood restaurant, and we made some jokes about our workplace and talk a little bit about ourselves—obviously I didn't tell them anything that I've written so far.

It was nice.

And after a week or two we started taking calls.

It was so stressful at first some of my now coworkers quit after a few days.

But again, I got used to it after a little while. And my supervisor was really nice to me and help me out a lot, and my job wasn't really that bad.

I was on customer support for some internet + cable + mobile kind of company—let's call it xxxxxxx—and my job was mainly to prevent customers from disconnecting their services.

I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it as well.

But it was pretty chill, though; the customers weren't that mad, so most of the time you could convince them to keep their services by telling them their benefits or offering them something better. And if they still wanted to disconnect their services, you could just do it and call it a day. Also there was a waiting time for an average of 20 minutes between each call, so I could write and do whatever I wanted while waiting.

But one day the company decided to pick me and some other coworkers randomly and change us to the payment department.

It was hell: I was back to back every single day from 7 am to 4 pm; the customers were always asking for payment arrangements we couldn't give, credits we shouldn't give, or supervisors who were never available—and in these cases you were supposed to write a report about it, and the supervisor was supposed to get in touch with the customer later, but they never did, and most customers knew this, so they will almost always declined our offer of a callback, and we had to wait like an hour or even more until a supervisor was kind enough to take the call but not kind enough to be helpful in any way.

So, from that point on my job was about convincing the customer to pay his/her bills as quickly as possible and without any kind of help whatsoever.

And the customer was supposed to end up happy and satisfied with the nothing I gave him/her.

I tried many times to contact someone of HR and ask him/her to transfer me back to my old department, because I hated this one and was sure I wouldn't last long there.

They never answered.

I was about to quit more than once.

One time I decided to quit. I talk to my supervisor, and he reported it to HR. A couple days passed

And finally someone of HR got in touch with me. She asked me to keep my job during the holidays and maybe they'll transfer me back to my old department next year.

I accepted mainly because of two reasons: 1) the holiday bonus and 2) a 4-month bonus—because apparently to work there for 4 months is a very rare achievement that very few people get, and needs to be celebrated.

So now I'm in a department full of people I don't know, who seem really mad all the time, always hating on the customers they have to help out—but they can't, because we can't do anything in this department except take payments—on the other departments, but never on the company itself. For some reason everyone seems in love with ******* even though that's the main reason of all their misery.

But anyway, the thing is now I have a job, but I still feel as alone and empty as always.

Am I still a hikikomori?

I do not know.