During summer, the hours are very long and grueling. You may get scheduled for a 2 or 3 hour day, then 4 ten-hour shifts. During this time, customers are especially antsy and angry because there simply isn't enough equipment available for everyone who's decided to move at the last minute. There is simply no time to breathe and management is very little help. Maybe there's not enough management, but getting answers to a frustrated customer's queries can take 5-10 minutes. If you're trying to get ahold of the customer's local branch for them, forget about it. Not happening. This just makes the customers even more irate.
Failures at the centers are often blamed on "the call center", whether or not that's actually true. "The call center" has absolutely no control over what equipment breaks down or isn't returned, which is how most locations end up being short of equipment to rent out. Be prepared for a LOT of customers hanging up on you if they suspect that you're not actually IN Bangor, ME or Burbank, CA or wherever they're calling from.
It doesn't help that many trainees are turned out on the unsuspecting public wholly unprepared. It's definitely unrealistic to expect that training will cover EVERYTHING, but every training class gets told different things. Some people had no idea how to look up certain types of reservations, some didn't know what our bonus structure was like, some weren't told important details about hitch or U-Box reservations. It's a mess.
Things get less hectic after Labor Day, but then you also get much fewer hours. Some coworkers are already getting 2 hours scheduled per week, which isn't a living wage. But we're still expected to have very open availability. Taking on a second job is quite difficult with this expectation.
The bonus structure was recently changed so that you're penalized for there not being any calls. This is not something you can control. Even if you're scheduled for a time when you only get 2 or 3 calls total per hour (which happens for overnight shifts), you're still expected to meet your quota which is based on scheduled and not actual talk time. When I was hired, it was based on talk time.