The Idler

Dole Calling

Everyone knows that Call Centres are crap - the sweatshops of the 20th Century/modern slave trade etc - but my Call Centre job was really, really crap.

After losing a perfectly reasonable office job I found myself lacking funds for an upcoming holiday and so decided that the best thing to do was to get a quick easy job that I would have no trouble working extra hours for more money and which I could leave without any problems. So I walked into my nearest Temp agency and, a few days later, I found myself sitting at a “pod” (a cluster of four or five desks arranged in a circle), a pair of
headphones on my face, staring at a cheap computer screen which froze consistently and taking calls for a cheap phone-call Card company.

Basically, people would buy cheap phone cards that would enable them to call relatives in far-off lands for half the price that BT offered. There was only one main problem: the company and the service was complete and utter
crap.

The lines wouldn’t work, the cards would break easily, the numbers on the cards were inaccurate - the list goes on. This meant that the service only worked reasonably well for a few hours on a Friday afternoon.

For the rest of the entire week I took abusive nasty endless calls from people who couldn’t speak English. Often they would put relative’s on to translate and I would find myself speaking to a 12 year old girl about the complexities of Telephone Line maintenance. Old women from India would begin to cry; men from Bangladesh would threaten me as they had 19/20 year-old
grandsons living in London and they were going to come to the office etc. In the end the calls became so abusive, so endlessly bleak and nasty and difficult to resolve, that one day I walked in and decided not to answer a single call.

You see I had worked out a little trick - when a call came through you simply answered it, put the abusive bastard/bitch immediately on hold/pause and left them there. They would think they were still in a queue (and would continue to hold and not hang up; thus according to the computer and my Line Manager (an aggressive little man-hating Lesbian, if ever there was on) I had answered and was dealing with a call. I would pretend to speak to a silent line and then, loudly and politely, resolve the problem. My trick soon spread around my “pod” and then the rest of the open-plan office - in the end I doubt a single call was being taken.

One day I was called in the Managers office along with my Line Manager (the above-mentioned lesbian) and told that my attitude was wrong and that if I didn’t “pull my socks up” (his actual words) I would be fired. I couldn’t believe that they weren’t reprimanding me for what I had actually done and so I calmly stood up and said, “This circus is over. So thank you and fuck you.” I then simply walked out.

I heard that 2 days later the “trick” was discovered and about 70% of the office were thrown out.

Gary Cole