Complaint Review: Gallup Organization

The actual motto given to respondents is "Let your voice be heard." I worked at Gallup and excelled there. I Loved it. I Loved my surveyor brothers and sisters of the trade. I'd arrived, as far as call centers go. The walls are covered with retro black n' white classic pics of the father of polling objectivity, "George P. Gallup," a man who really thought that all should be polled identically without bias, deviation, or favor. The Tracker Certification is grueling, but a necessary right of passage special to Gallup tradition.

As far as the whole Teamsters/Unions thing goes I'd heard about it through the gossip mill. Frankly, my generation doesn't give a hoot about unions. We're more "hand-to-mouth" survival and "What have you done for me lately, Baby?" We're "so money", we're high producers that aim for the top and won't back down. Like robot surveyors, "Trackers," as they called us. The best of the best in the call centers' wild west. If you get a seat at Gallup, you've arrived, Baby! Plain and simple.

So we younger newbies, pukes, and pukettes couldn't care less about Jimmy Hoffa's politics. We just wanna eat. Like the fictional character actor Edward Norton artfully portrayed, "Tyler Durden", in the cult movie "Fight Club."

The worst thing at Gallup, is an honestly "damned" policy. It's not Management's fault at all, mind you. But it's most certainly etched in stone, till "Hell Freezes Over".

It's the "Six Months concurrent employment before leaving or putting in two weeks notice" Gallup handbook policy. So many good, excellent, stellar, master surveyors have run afoul of that and they will NEVER let them come back. NEVER!

You're done, caput, Fin, with your Gallup mafia, if you violate that Golden Rule. It seems Management and ownership should have more of a say over this policy. Telephone surveyors' lives are sporadic and not always extremely predictable, they're human. Things happen: car trouble, illness, personal problems, school, or just simply not remembering "the fine print" in the stupidest policy on this planet.

If you go awol at Gallup, you're done. No more chances. It's as if they ex-communicate you from the entire family. Nobody will talk to you, not even outside of work, afterwards. You're marked forever then, even if you were a "Rambo" or "La Femme Nikita surveyor."

This is so lame because there are really only a few companies across America in which you can be employed, with any life sustaining pay rate, in this wonderful trade. Once you've mastered it, you get addicted to it and love it more than anything else you've ever done for a living.

Alot of other call centers don't employ such a rigid and draconian policy as long as the employee's work is needed and the concern desires to make money and profit in the already fledgling economy as it falters. They're not Gallup though. Most of them don't even compare to Gallup.

What will these merciless policies of Gallup's matter when Wall Street crashes and Bear Sterns simply doesn't need consumer satisfaction surveys anymore?
It seems this policy should be revised in order to let the information gathering flow and let Gallup profit however it can in an already sinking mortgage industry/Wall Street/bankers' crisis.

Factor in the rising price of fuel and then maybe they'll revise the policy when the trucks come to a screetching halt and the Teamsters refuse to deliver soda, coffee, or cigs to Gallup Management and Corporate Governance in Omaha. Who will then keep "the push," in the "push-polls" flowing throughout American residences and businesses nightly for the corporate and political white-collar crooks(coveted survey clients) then, I ask you?

As far as the unions go, people have bigger problems in life these days. I don't drive a truck. I did surveys, a whole lot of them, for a living when my life was happy and fulfilling. If I wanted to be a trucker and worshipper of Jimmy Hoffa I would've gone to truck driver certification school and learned how to back up and parallel park the big "Breaker 1-9" rigs for a living.

Finding out the absolute truths about my respondents choices: where they ate, where they shopped, what they bought with their own hard-earned money, what online dating/matching services they used, what computers they purchased and why, and what workplace purchases they made is what drove me. Which political villians of any and all political parties, like Batman and Joker, they voted for was also extremely intriguing to the intellectual observers' mind reconnouetering their open thoughts. You have to be able to hear them rant and rave about that, regardless of whether you think they needed to get therapy somewhere. Being a daily and nightly telephone line Freud, mistaken on the other end of the phone for a telemarketing rouge, was what made me rise and shine everyday at 2pm on a weekday with a smile full of glow, a sense of power in America, and the true gutt motivation of an information warrior!

I don't need to strike, I just miss the best job I ever had and wish I could be given even just a second chance at it. I just want to eat at night. I wasn't even worried about unions and making the company kiss my butt when I worked there, it was just all about the competition. Getting as many as possible and a bunch was never enough. In your own mind, to heck with Management.

If you worked at Gallup and you were a producer, not just a common suckerfish mouth to feed, you competed more with yourself and your own quota than Management's. People that had to even worry about meeting "quota", like it was some whip and chain, didn't need to be at Gallup to begin with. But that was the 1970s, I suppose.

Gallup is thee Harvard or Yale to call center jockeys. The pisspoor naysayer commie union gnats, and quota complainers, usually don't even get an interview, or a Metro bus ticket, for Tracker Training(telephone surveyors' bootcamp) at Gallup.

Everybody who flips the prompt screens, throttles the retun key, and sucks an respondent's brains dry for a living is truly a "Scab", or "Strike-breaker", at heart, in our dasterdly honed trade. The day they water it down to become a monks' or Nuns' bad vibes free zoned convent or monestary is the day they should put a "Closed" sign on the front door.

Heck, I dressed fifteen, thirty, and fifty minute surveys up as a cute little "Just five minutes of your time stirring stew for your kids' dinnertime, Ma'am," or "Sir," so many hours of my cogitating night or day I didn't have the time to play with gurlymen union bosses like "Jimmy Hoffa" or "John Carey."

Let the Teamsters go cry to their wives about their backs and broken loose wheels. I only cried at the end of a twelve or fifteen hour double jet-lag shift, once I got home, when my hands were shaking from so much caffination I couldn't sleep without a warm bath, a warm glass of milk, and a plate of cookies.

All I want is my old danged great job back! I don't need to get paid like Jack Nicholson, I just want to do what I'm really best at. I loved people, talking to them, and slithering inside their various human minds.

Second chances go a long way for good karma in life.