Okay, I have to confess something. I've only told a handful of people this same thing before,

but it's time I came clean. But first, to understand this story, you have to understand a little

bit about where I worked right out of college. I worked at Google, in their Boston office on the

Google AdWords team. And to train their salespeople, back then, Google would put you on customer support.

Like quite literally, thank you for calling Google AdWords.

How can I help you?

Phones, chat, sometimes two at once.

That was my steep but quick learning curve to understand both the product and more importantly, the customer.

And that would have been fine by me if we didn't get stuck.

What was supposed to be three months turned into four, five, and then six, and nine months later,

we were still manning the phones and chat systems even though we were supposed to be advising brands.

We were hired to be digital media strategists.

But, due to the economy at the time, Google had stopped hiring to backfill.

And worse, they laid off some people just like many companies around then.

And so, there we were getting numb.

And others frustrated.

I remember one woman I worked with yelling at a customer on the phones.

I went to Harvard. These jobs are really hard to get.

Another handful of us kept getting the same woman calling to set up her internet service.

Uh, ma'am, Google is not the internet.

And then there was one employee on the team who found a clever way to game the software system that Google used. See, there were two

different modes that your account could be logged into during your phone shift, available

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