You’ve read the success stories. The motivational posts, the “I started from zero” threads, the LinkedIn victories. Everyone loves a good glow-up narrative. This is not that. This is the story of what happens before the success — if it even comes. This is the part people skip. The part I lived twice.

Unpaid “trainings and internships” have quietly become the entry fee for jobs across Pakistan’s call centre and marketing sectors — dressed up as an opportunity, sold as a test of commitment, and rarely questioned by the people going through them. I didn’t question it either. Not the first time.

I passed the interview. That felt like something. Like a door opening. What waited on the other side was a cramped room, a night shift of nine hours, and seven other trainees who, like me, had no idea what we’d walked into. There was no trainer. Let me say that again — a call centre, running a training programme, with no actual trainer.

So what did we do for seven to eight hours a night? We scrolled. We overthought. We crammed scripted dialogues, chasing an American accent we’d been told we needed, without anyone explaining why or how. Just memorise. Just repeat. Just perform. Somewhere around the fourth night, one of the other trainees said it out loud — half joking, half not — that we were being trained to sound like someone else before anyone had bothered to ask if we could actually do the job. No one laughed. We just went back to repeating the lines.

It reminded me of Animal Farm — specifically the sheep, the goats, and the horses, bleating the Seven Commandments over and over without understanding a single one. We were not being trained. We were being conditioned.

And after seven nights of this — after we’d given our sleep, our........

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