The strangest online jobs I have ever had: International Pizza call-center guy
When you live abroad as a digital nomad, you will do almost anything for a job so that you can continue to live overseas. It has been and remains a dream of mine to always be able to live like this in a country that is not my own at drastically reduced costs, with the absence of politics, and some really relaxed laws on what you are allowed to do. This is what living overseas is like and once you get a taste for it you have a hard time imagining being ok with returning to the corporate grind commuting / hanging out in the coffee machine, getting busted by HR because you made a joke someone didn't like..... all of that stuff is something I hope I never have to return to. It's just not for me.
So therefore when you live abroad you will do almost whatever it takes to not have to move back to your home country. These jobs are not always something that you really want to do and will often have hours associated with them that are less-than-desirable if you want to live a normal life. Well that is just part of living this life! You will have to adjust your schedule to accommodate whatever industry you are working in and one of these jobs was something that had me basically working the night shift for $10 an hour. I did it for about 2 months before giving up. I didn't burn any bridges because it is important to keep every avenue that you possibly can open if you want to work as a digital nomad, but I basically told my supervisor that I was burned out and I need to take a break so I could live a normal life for a while. This was 6 months ago and once a month or so I pop the supervisor an email to let him know that I am still here and if he has other openings for me to pass them my way.
That's one tip I can offer potential nomads out there: never burn any bridges when it comes to these jobs. If you have to leave, leave gracefully and always give them a lot of notice. If you screw over an employer they are likely connected to other online jobs and you could end up on a blacklist that all these companies share.
So without further delay, let's get into the 2nd strangest online job I have had (1st place comes later) that I have ever had!
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Anyone considering working remotely probably has some exotic idea of what that is going to be like but chances are you are wrong. You might have a home office or shared workspace in mind at a nice coffeeshop with a view but chances are, you are going to be sitting at a makeshift desk in your living room and toiling away at something you would rather not be doing for hours at a time. That was kind of the deal when I was hired by Pizza Hut Europe in a virtual "call center" for English language customers.
It probably seems these days that most people order online with some sort of app or website for pizza delivery, and for the most part you would be correct. However, there are still a lot of people, particularly older people, that can't be asked to use apps and would prefer to call and speak to an actual human for their pizza order.
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I didn't know this job existed for people living abroad until I met a French guy that had this job once and asked him if there were any openings. He said he would ask and the next thing I knew I was getting a call that would test my abilities to work a virtual call center and also test my internet connection. Since I had worked in a Pizza Hut when I was in high school I was already pretty familiar with their menu so that helped a bit but mostly the fact that I was a native English speaker was all they were looking for. They provided me with the software that was necessary and we did a dozen or so practice calls to make sure I wasn't going to screw things up.
Basically, this software would take all the local numbers all over Europe and if the person selected English as the language they wanted to speak they would get forwarded to me. The entire process on their end only took a few seconds and the idea is that they never have to wait on hold for very long. My virtual phone would ring and it would indicate the country and city that they were calling from and we would work through their address and we would get the stuff ordered. It really wasn't that difficult since every imaginable option was right there on my screen including whether or not the particular region they were in offered the product they were looking for. I was able to search for any items that I might not have heard of, but for the most part people were just ordering small/medium/large pizzas with usual toppings. Surprisingly, most of the people I spoke to either were from the UK or Ireland, or they were North American travelers visiting Europe. Sometimes I would get some people who barely spoke English that didn't know any other language that was offered in the country they were visiting. These were the toughest ones to handle but we got through it with the usual "let me read back your order to you" process.
The system would tell me everything that I needed to know and it almost never made mistakes. When it did, I would have to do my best to resolve them and everyone had a ticket number so we could easily refer back to every order, big or small.
This doesn't sound like a tough job at all, I know, and honestly, it wasn't. The problem was that I am not at all in the same time zone as the opening hours of Pizza Huts that are in Europe and Europe spans 7 time zones. Most of my calls came from Western Europe in places such as UK, France, Spain, and once, even a call or two from Italy and I was surprised that Pizza Hut even attempted to have a location there but they do!
The time zone difference is why I only hung onto this job for a few months and they were actually kind of surprised that I kept at it that long. My time zone in Vietnam is 6 hours ahead of the UK and that was considered the prime market and as you would expect, most pizza orders come in at 6pm or after. Therefore my shift was working the phones from midnight (my time, 6pm their time) until 8am (my time, 2am their time) 5 days a week. This mean that anything that anyone was doing socially was likely something that I was not going to be able to participate in and I also had to sleep during the day. Basically I had zero social life during all of this and while it was fine and the money was good because I paid almost no taxes, you can't really keep that up for very long. Even on my days off I couldn't really do "normal" things because my body's time-clock was the opposite of everyone else's. I would sometimes just try to stay up after a shift so I could do normal things with friends but I quickly became too tired or I would try to sleep for just a little while and then do stuff in the afternoon but I had to be very careful when it came to alcohol because this company had a zero tolerance policy for missing a shift. Since you were working from home there was no such thing as sick days either.
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I still like Pizza Hut, especially those super buttery breadsticks that are just horrible for your health
You might be asking yourself why don't they just hire people in Europe to do this and the answer to that simply boils down to money. People wont work for $10 an hour in most of Europe and unless they live in the UK, chances are they are not a Native-English speaker either. In the past many buisnesses outsourced these kind of jobs to India, where they will work for substantially less than $10 an hour but over the decades the western world tired of Indian call centers. Sometimes the people were a bit surprised that someone with an American accent was answering the phones in London and I had to explain to them often that I am not even in Europe but to not worry, I am able to get them their food no problem.
I don't know if this sounds like a dream job to anyone out there but I can assure you that it was not. Working from midnight until 8am is not a great shift to be involved in and I now have an appreciation for why people on the "graveyard shift" in companies all around the world are paid so much more than the daytime staff.
Would I ever do this job again? Honestly, unless I had to I would not do so because it just screws up too much of the other things in your life living in opposite land to everyone else that you ever meet. But it paid the bills and I banked a ton of money during those times since Vietnam doesn't tax on income earned outside of the country and the European Pizza Hut was able to also not pay much in taxes because their employee didn't live in Europe. I wouldn't advise this job to other people out there unless you really are struggling for money and don't really know how to tell you to get this job anyway. It was 3 years ago that I had this job and would only return to it if I had no other choice.
There are jobs like this available out there though, if you ever get hard-pressed enough that you are looking for them!