I’ve Taken Over 100,000 Calls. What Burned Me Out Became My Blueprint.
Let’s be real. When you’ve worked in tech support and customer service long enough, you know what burnout smells like. You hear it in the sigh between calls. You feel it every time you finish helping someone and get punished for taking too long.
I didn’t lead teams. I didn’t climb the ranks. I took the calls.
For nearly 30 years, I handled the front line—phone queues, field tech work, screen shares with people too scared to click anything. I moved up in skill, not title. And every time the stress boiled over, I walked—or got walked out. But somehow, I kept coming back.
Because when someone who thinks tech “just isn’t for them” follows your steps, breathes through the panic, and says,
“Wait… I fixed it?”
That hits different. That’s why I stayed.
But here’s what makes this work unsustainable:
It’s not just the angry customers. It’s the metrics that measure the wrong things.
We’re asked to move faster than trust can form.
We’re told to resolve human problems like machines.
We’re placed in silent competition with our teammates—because someone’s always watching the numbers.
And if you care too much? You fall behind. If you don’t care enough? You break people.
That’s what burned me out. And that’s what I’m rebuilding.
I founded the Milton Lumbergh Association to create the kind of training space I never had. Not a course. Not a workshop. A full-on mentorship lab called FixLine, where support professionals learn how to stay human while they help. We teach emotional resilience, technical fluency, and the one thing missing from most training rooms: dignity.
We don’t fix contact centers. We build the kind of people who make them worth contacting.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a blueprint.
No angel round. No pilot launch. Not yet.
Just me, this vision, and the momentum of knowing it needs to exist.
If you’ve lived this work or believe in building something better for the people behind the help, I’d love to talk.
Dave
Founder, Milton Lumbergh Association
