That little green lizard on insurance company T-V commercials may be helping create jobs in eastern Iowa. The Geico gecko is becoming almost as recognizable as other animal celebrities on the tube like the Taco Bell Chihuahua or Coca-Cola’s polar bears. Officials with the auto insurer say there’s been a dramatic increase in calls to their customer service and sales centers in recent months and they’re having trouble handling the overflow of calls from bigger metro areas, including San Diego and Dallas. The Geico calling center office in Coralville has grown from about 200 employees in May to 300 now, and the company plans to add another hundred positions in the next half-year. The starting wage for the agent positions is about twelve dollars per hour. The annual salary for manager trainees is 27-thousand dollars. A company spokesman says many insurers are raising rates and customers are shopping around for better deals.
