The Hell of Work: The Call Centre

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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FUNNY MOMENTS AT WORK: THE AIRPORT

Pandas and Pokemon

zooIt was panda breeding season when we visited the zoo a few weeks ago, so access to the panda enclosure was limited. We could only get a glimpse of the male panda through a big Perspex window as he kicked back in his pad munching down on a carrot.

Because these creatures are notoriously devoid of sexual energy zoo staff ordered us to be deathly quiet: one bit of over-exuberant human hoo hah could spoil three months of carefully planned panda foreplay and set back the course of their hanky panky indefinitely. Now that’s performance anxiety. “Sorry, sweetheart, the sound of a human coughing faintly in the distance appears to have killed my dick, so could we just do the Netflix without the chill for the next eighteen months or so?” Get them some earmuffs, for Christ’s sake! Seriously, though, what a squad of true losers comprise this doomed species of fuck-shy, Sooty-faced nuns. Most of us human males would still be able to get it up during an earthquake on a battlefield littered with the half-dead bodies of wailing, dismembered orphan soldiers. A few of us would even insist upon these conditions. You know who you are…

We couldn’t even get a good look at the panda, not only because of the scores of fellow panda-peekers huddled into the viewing area with us, but also because our collective lines of sight were obscured by a mass of trees and foliage that had been planted and positioned to shield the panda from the sight of our disgusting inter-species lechery. So there we both were, my partner and I, craning our necks to get a glimpse of a panda eating a snack through a gap in a thicket of trees the size of a postage stamp, as a crowd of people all shushed each other and swished their phones and cameras in the air above their heads. It was like being at a deaf rock concert in a Chinese monastery. I envied my toddler son, who didn’t even have to pretend to give a shit about the pandas, and was quite content to spin around in circles making helicopter noises.

monalisaThe whole sorry panda extravaganza reminded me of a visit to the Louvre ten years ago, during which I found myself distinctly underwhelmed by the Mona Lisa. There it was – this tiny picture of a long-dead woman wearing a thin smile suggestive of a recently secreted silent fart – encased in Perspex and half-hidden by the heads of a hundred people or more. I’d already seen her enigmatic fizzog hundreds of times throughout my life, as have we all, considering that the Mona Lisa is literally the most famous portrait on earth. Why should I fight through a crowd to get a fuzzy picture of something I could see in any one of a million books or reproductions? Clearly my main – and perhaps only – motivation would be to immortalise my sophistication on Facebook for all the world to see. I don’t need pictures for that. I can just wait ten years and then write an obscure blog post about it that will be read by six Albanians and my second-cousin. Did I mention I visited the Louvre? I may make a lot of jokes about poos and tits, ladies and gentlemen, but by God I’m  sophisticated and urbane.

Watching those people blankly snapping pics and flicks of the panda as it nonchalantly chewed on a carrot brought home to me how ridiculous humans are as a species. Perhaps it’s we who deserve an extinction-level reduction of our libidos. This is fucking madness. Say you recorded footage of the panda on your phone. Who’s going to watch the video? Your friends and family? They’ll be bored shitless. Seriously. They will. Trust me. You? What’s the point? You know you were there. Do you really want to watch that footage again? Of a panda doing ostensibly fuck all? Is your camera a gun-substitute? Are you hunting these creatures and collecting clickable trophies as a testament to your digit-based prowess? By all means take a few snaps at the zoo to act as memory joggers of days gone by for those moments in the years to come when you find yourself frail and insensible and drooling at a window pane, but for God’s sake leave the wildlife programming to David Attenborough.

The only circumstances in which you should be filming pandas are if: a) you come across one unexpectedly whilst doing the weekly shop in Tescos, b) you’re breaking into its zoo cage dressed as another panda and attempting to fuck it.

We left the zoo at closing time, and as we moved down towards the main gate we walked through a huge throng of people of all different stripes. They were all chatting excitedly and immersed in their phones. There was a queue of thousands outside the building, clamouring to join the advanced guard. They were ‘hunting’ Pokemon. The zoo was hosting a private after-hours event. Thousands of people, ignoring the real animals in favour of taking pictures of imaginary ones.

Come on, asteroid. We’re in dire need of our extinction-level event! Make haste!

More zoo-based nonsense: The Hero of Edinburgh Zoo