If you’ve never worked in a call centre, then you’ve probably never stared at a monitor and thought to yourself, ‘Hey, I wonder if I could fit my head in there?’ and then drifted off into a pleasant daydream in which your bleeding, frazzled corpse is carried out of the call-hall to freedom on a mortuary gurney, shards of glass fringing your scalp with the last tiara you’ll ever wear.
I worked in a call-centre for six months in my early twenties. It was short and brutal, much like a stint in borstal, but without the exercise, and with even more drugs. It’s a totalitarian state built inside a nightmare; a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where the Chief has already been lobotomised by the time you arrive (he’s blowing bubbles, but he aint chewing gum). It’s a place that’s haunting, hopeless and sterile, yet also fierce, fascistic and frenetic; like somebody shoved a third-world factory inside a hospital and then started a war inside it. Time is money, and if you aren’t taking calls, you’re a liability. That headset’s got to stay clamped to your skull no matter what, even if terrorists smash into the call-hall and threaten to shoot anyone who even vaguely resembles Madonna. Every piss break precipitates an interrogation, and if you’ve got the runs and have to dash to the toilet more than once in any given six-hour period, don’t be surprised to find that senior management have empanelled a jury in your absence.
I was the guy you called to register your new mobile phone’s sim card, an indispensable lynch-pin and cornerstone of the company, and in no way just a lump of cannon-fodder. If a customer agreed to give their personal data to the evil corporation to which my marginally less evil company was sub-contracted, then they’d receive five pounds free call credit in return. Sounds like a good deal, until you factor in the endless torrents of bullshit marketing literature they’re about to receive every day until death, plus the £20,000 they’re going to lose when their personal details are inevitably sold on the black market.
In the previous paragraph I said, ‘I was the guy you phoned’. For the sake of accuracy I should have said: ‘I was one of literally scores of faceless, corporate drones you phoned’. I was a human robot; a tide-over until they could work out a way to make the role obsolete and save a few quid, which of course they did, because they always do, but in this case thank fuck they did, to save future generations from the artery-slicing hopelessness of this particular ‘D-Day meets Groundhog Day’ of the soul. Thanks, internet!
It wasn’t just us drones on the call-floor who were warped and curdled by our environment. There was a world-weary female cleaner who used to greet us each and every morning with a cheery and heart-felt ‘Goan take a FUCK tay yersels!’, middle finger held aloft, before bounding off down the corridor like an angry St Bernard. She had the same perm as a 1980’s wrestler, little neck to speak of and big, bulging Popeye arms. She made the ladies of Prisoner Cell Block H look like Miss World contestants, and probably could have choked a whole biker gang to death with her bare hands. No wonder she was angry, though. For the whole six months I worked at the call-centre a toley terrorist was at large (if you don’t hail from Scotland, a ‘toley’ is just another word for a ‘jobby’). No gents’ bathroom in the building was safe from a battering by his bothersome botty by-product.
If the cleaner was angry, then this guy was fucking livid, and was venting his fury and hatred in the most hideous – but perhaps the most apt – way imaginable: by writing on the walls with his own shit. Fax that to HR. Sometimes he favoured the simple approach, eschewing the artistry by just shitting in the bin. We often wondered about the logistics of the act. Did he squat over the bin like some acrobatic cat, or did he manually lift his poo from elsewhere? And if he manually lifted it, did he at least observe health and safety protocols by bending his knees and not his back? To the best of my knowledge, the bin-shitter was never caught. And no, it wasn’t me. I have an alibi. I was jizzing in my manager’s coffee at the time.
I think I understand why the phantom shitter did it, though. What drove him. Twelve hours of reciting the same script, of repeating the same questions, of hearing the same endless rat-a-tat-tat of the keys, of enduring the same Soviet-era approach to employee surveillance, day after day after day after day, is enough to make anyone start behaving like a chimpanzee having a full mental breakdown.
So that was my day. The mantra. “What’s your name? What’s your address? What’s your home telephone number? What’s your date of birth? What’s your email address?”
As the boredom set into my skull like concrete, I chipped away at it with mischief. I started getting creative with the questions. This was my very own word-based version of shit-in-a-bin.
“Who’s your favourite member of the A-Team?”
“What’s your favourite colour of butterfly?”
“What are you wearing right now?”
And they’d answer, I swear they would. It’s incredible. As long as you maintain an even, professional tone and encase the daft questions inside more conventional questions, and don’t ask too many daft questions overall, most people will feel compelled to rack their brains for the correct answer, or at the very least try to give the sort of answer they think you’re expecting. Some people laughed and joked back, which was great, but most people adopted an earnest – almost imperious – tone, and answered as if they were tackling the million pound question on a gameshow.
“What’s your favourite jungle cat?”
“Em… now I know this one… em… Just give me a second… (Grins proudly) Lion?”
When you’re in a locked-down, oppressive environment like the call centre, you need a comrade-in-arms as a ballast for your sanity, even if you have to draw a face on a paper cup and spend all day talking to it, sharing your problems with it, gently stroking its plastic face – even taking it out to a club with you and then spending the early hours of the next morning making urgent, dirty, drunken love to it, which I absolutely, categorically state that I did not do, despite what my lying ex-girlfriends might tell you.
Thankfully, though, my comrade in this case was a real, flesh-and-blood person (or at least I hope he was, or I’ve got bigger problems than I first imagined). I’d been in the same year at school with this guy – let’s call him Scott, mainly because that’s his name – and fate had conspired to unite us in yet another stifling, authoritarian institution.
We tried many tactics to keep us from cracking. We cut speech bubbles out of blank sheets of paper, filled the bubbles with incredibly childish and offensive chunks of dialogue, and then placed them onto pictures of people in newspapers and magazines in an attempt to make the other person laugh out loud while they were on a call. When we were in a less sophisticated mood, we’d just draw dicks on everything. We were usually in a less sophisticated mood.
We also played the word game, where you had to donate a word, or list of words, to the other person that they then had to somehow smuggle into a conversation with their next customer, no matter how incongruous or offensive the word. Jobby, testicular, orgy, shit. They all made appearances (many other words were vetoed, as I’m sure you can imagine). But we quickly grew weary. We needed to up the stakes, so we stopped trying to smuggle words in, and started forcing people adopt them as their security passwords instead. We usually told them that the password had been automatically generated by the system and was unchangeable, so go get a pen. “OK, are you ready? I’ll spell it for you. It’s B-A-W-B-A-G.”
So very immature, but so very, very satisfying.
My favourite time-squandering prank, though, was the millionth customer wind-up. It began as a day just like any other, with lots of boredom and dick-drawing. I answered the phone with my usual, achingly-polite mantra. On the line was a pleasant-sounding woman with a thick Yorkshire accent, who asked if she could register her sim card. So far so excruciatingly familiar.
‘Congratulations!’ I said, a few million mega-volts of happiness ripping through my words, ‘You’re customer one million, and you’ve just won free phone calls for life!’
First silence, then an urgent, jammering stammer, redolent of Zippy receiving a particularly vigorous blowjob. ‘Oh…I, uh… ah, ah, ah, oh that’s great, love, that’s great.’ She lowered the phone to share the news with whoever was in her vicinity. She sounded tinny and distant, but blatantly shell-shocked. ‘I’ve won free phone calls for life,’ I heard her say, to high-pitched chirps of excitement, and then ‘Hello?’ as she came back to me at full volume.
‘Oh my God, I am so, so sorry,’ I said, my words weighted with so much regret I could almost taste the Oscar. ‘I don’t know what to say, I feel terrible, I’ve made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake. I was looking at the wrong panel on my screen.’
Wait for it.
‘You’re only customer nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine. I’m so sorry.’
Silence.
‘I’m so sorry. You haven’t won those phone calls.’
There was another long, long, loooong silence. ‘It’s not your fault, love,’ said the woman who was now the most despondent human being in the western hemisphere. She sounded broken. Depressed. Just like me.
Yass! I’d never felt happier.
If you’ve got any memories/stories of working in a call-centre, please share them below so we can all feel better about our miserable fucking lives.
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