It's strange to think that somebody would fight to keep that job.
It illustrates the depths of the ubiquitous mindfuck under which we operate.
I mean, what if the torture was replaced with a more obvious torture? What if you spent 8 hours a day getting your fingernails pulled out? At a good hourly rate and with nice benefits of course.
Would we squeak?
Speaking as someone who worked in a call center for less than a month before quitting because I hated every second of it, having your fingernails pulled out seems a lot worse. I'd take the call center job.
Another thing that's worse is being broke, I'd take the call center job over that too, if those were my only choices. I'm not sure about a ubiquitous mindfuck, but I know we operate under the need for food and shelter.
> Within months of working at the casino, Ms. Sherrod felt the toll of the job on her body. Her knees ached, and her back thrummed with pain. She had to clean at least 16 rooms a day, fishing hair out of bathroom drains and rolling up dirty sheets.
> When a friend told her about the jobs at AT&T, the opportunity seemed, to Ms. Sherrod, impossibly good. The call center was air-conditioned. She could sit all day and rest her knees. She took the call center’s application test twice, and on her second time she got an offer, in 2006, starting out making $9.41 an hour, up from around $7.75 at the casino.
For a more extreme example: most of us wouldn't think about applying for the job of a hangman, but whenever there was a vacancy, the authorities were inundated with applications.