The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

Mitch closed her eyes. “Thank you.” She smiled. “Now harder. And use your nails.”

  By the time Brock finished the last of his slides, everyone in the room was yawning, by turns, like an off-key orchestra. The kind of sunlight that was pouring in through the Plexiglas windows was harsher than what we were used to. By the time this iridescence had blanketed every treetop and high-rise in the city, we were already at home, cocooned in our rooms, sleeping a comatose sleep.

  “Any questions?” Brock asked.

  We shook our heads and made a show of looking to the right side of the room to check the identical monochromatic wall clocks, which announced the time in four different time zones, none of them Manila’s, although Eastern Standard Time, twelve hours away, incidentally did.

  Mitch raised her hand. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately—”

  Philip dropped his empty tumbler on the floor.

  “—and I’m starting to get used to it. Does that work as well?”

  After a long pause, Brock tried. “My generation of Americans, we were raised in a home environment that really nurtured our hopes and dreams, you know? We baby boomers, we were a very promising generation. Very promising. Our parents have been through the worst. The Great Depression. World War II. So for us, growing up, we had these role models to look up to. People who showed us the triumph of the human spirit, who seized their destiny, forsaking material comfort.”

  We liked our elections and beauty pageants, the oratorical bombast of hopeful national rhetoric or answers to questions like “What is the essence of being a woman?” But our open mouths must have betrayed the debilitating headache that Brock’s speech had just hatched in our already heavy heads. Even Mitch, who we surmised could fake a smile through any brutal non-sequitur, was speechless.

  “If there are no more questions—” Brock drummed his index fingers on his desk, and we were on our feet faster than one could say “Pavlov’s dog.”

  Our biology puzzled us. Save for the insomnia, heinous weight gain, and perennially sore throat—reliably our feeblest part—we were healthy, able-bodied men and women in our twenties, thirties, and forties (“Early forties,” Sharon would point out). We passed rigorous medical screenings, peed on cups, coughed while someone held our balls, bent over without squeaking. Some of us stayed away from red meat, portioned our meals, exercised at the gym on the third floor. But even if we managed to get a full eight-hour sleep, we would still find ourselves groggy and exhausted when we got to work, as if all we had was a ten-minute nap on a bus on EDSA.

  Our solution to this was often along the lines of Red Bull, venti Americano over ice, or anything salty and deep-fried. The following week—Jasmine safely through to the final three, thanks or no thanks to us—we were sharing fries at McDonald’s for lunch when Mitch came prancing inside the store. She looked around and, spotting us, headed to our table.

  “Guys,” she said, looking outside the glass wall. “Sorry, but can I borrow a hundred?”

  “You’re late,” Sharon said, not so much out of rudeness but disbelief.

  “I know,” Mitch sighed. “Overslept. Is Brock in?”

  We nodded.

  “Shit,” Mitch muttered.

  Philip handed her a crisp hundred-peso bill. She scampered to the waiting cab outside, waved to us again, then crossed the street to our building, no doubt bulldozing her way through the crowded lobby.

  “That was weird,” Philip said.

  “Yeah,” Sharon said. “Less than a hundred pesos for a taxi, where does she live?”

  “No,” Philip said, “I mean—”

  “The driver didn’t have change?” Alvin offered.

  “Otherwise why would you take a cab if you don’t have any money?” Macky asked.

  “If you don’t know how to take the stupid bus,” Karen said.

  Some of us, like Mitch, were more comfortable in the money front. During her birthday a few months ago, she served scrumptious hors d’oeuvre of the bacon-wrapped asparagus and shrimps-in-shot-glasses variety, culinary feats that we had only seen on cable cooking shows. Who did that in real life, we had wondered, downing one shrimp cocktail after another. For the rest of us, McDonald’s was a benevolent refuge, especially during pecha de peligro , the few days leading up to payday when our wallets bulged with our IDs, condoms, receipts, MRT cards, ATM cards, and nothing more. Once, when we all found ourselves broke at the same time, we shared a can of Century Tuna and packs of Skyflakes at the office pantry. “Look at us,” Philip had said. “Now this is friendship.” (“It’s also poverty,” Karen pointed out.) We were on occasion astounded by the extent of our destitution, which accounted for our payday binges, in North Park and Hassan and Dencio’s, which in turn accounted for the destitution. It was a vicious cycle. A chicken and egg thing.

  When we returned to our building after lunch, there was a thin crowd gathered on the wide steps leading to the metal doors. From afar, we could hear a man’s voice, booming and self-righteous, above the murmurs and occasional laughter. When we had made our way to the front of the throng, we saw Himmat angrily gesturing to the two guards on duty, pointing to his turban, and we caught repeated mentions of the words “respect” and “professional” and “offended, so offended.” He was in the middle of a forceful, animated narration of his life story, which we found out began all the way from his youth in a village on the outskirts of Bangalore.

  “My god, I love meltdowns,” Philip whispered.

  It was all fiery and energetic but after a certain point, Himmat was just repeating the sentence “Before religion and race tore us apart we were a singular humanity!” stressing a different set of words or syllables each time. He eventually calmed down after some colleagues of his came to get him. Upset that it was all over so quickly, we had lined up to get inside the building. In the quiet shuffling to the door, a soft whirr from somewhere caught our attention. We looked up and saw, framed by our skyscraper and the one across the street, the wing lights of a low-flying plane, a-blink in the cloudless night sky.

  What we handled ranged across industries, spread over several floors. A small team of five on the thirty-first took calls for a New Jersey start-up that sold skydiving equipment (their hold music was Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’”). On the thirty-fifth, fine arts undergrads drew mock-ups for an animation studio in Los Angeles. One account on the twenty-second transcribed the riveting dialogue of adult films. On the tenth, right above the Dutch Embassy, a team of accountants balanced the books for the world’s largest oil and gas company.

  On the night of Himmat’s outburst, some of us saw the accountants milling in the lobby, their bored countenance belying what must have been billion-dollar transactions under their perusal. They walked languidly, their sandals scraping the marble floors, the yellow circular logo of the petroleum firm embossed brightly on their breast pockets.

  Back on our floor, we spotted Himmat under the forest of unmoving jumbo jets by his bay, talking to people in suits, mostly white guys, including Brock.

  Mitch sidled up next to us. “Did you hear?”

  “What?” we chorused.

  “Guard ran the hand-held metal detector by his turban,” Mitch said.

  Macky stifled a laugh.

  Dibidi, dibidi .

  “They say the guards are on high alert or something,” Mitch said, giggling, relishing the attention.

  “Mitch,” Philip turned to her, “everything OK with you?”

  “What do you mean?” Mitch asked.

  “Is it something personal?” Karen asked.

  “A problem at home?” Philip asked.

  “Love life?” Sharon asked. “You still together with that old guy?”

  Mitch looked at us with a nervous laugh. “Not sure what you guys are talking about.”

  Alvin ran a hand up and down her back. “That’s enough, guys.”

  “You can’t let that ruin your focus,” Philip said. “You’re the best performer in the team. Your output’s equivalent to, what, f
ive, six agents’ combined? That’s half the team. What will we do without you?”

  When we saw Brock leave the group, we quickly dispersed.

  “Start logging in now, guys,” Eric called out from his station. “It’s 3:59. Log in now, people. We have a queue.”

  Mitch, when we turned to look at her, was already in her station, already taking calls while tinkering with the assortment of bric-a-brac lined up around her bay: a framed Polaroid of a man in a hammock, a couple of Agent of the Year trophies, and an antique-looking desk clock from a long-ago trip to Paris. She was already talking in the modulated lilts that all of us, at one point, had secretly tried to eavesdrop on, mildly envious.

  We took our seats and cleared our throats, took a sip of water. In the final few moments before logging in, the operations floor would always descend into absolute silence. In our minds it would be so quiet that we could hear the ringing of the most far-flung phone, the crisp-wet sipping of countless cups of coffee, the industrial hum of that invisible energy that kept all these running, the desktops and fluorescents, the China-made Avaya phones and us.

  Beep.

  “It’s a wonderful day here at UTelCo! My name is—”

  Brock had started to walk back to his office when we saw someone approach him with a sheet of paper. He took a look and at once closed his eyes, as if in deep pain. He gave the guy, one of the more senior supervisors, a pat on the back of the head.

  26

  G uys,” Brock called out to the auditorium buzzing with cold and sleepy agents, “do you think what we do here is some kind of a joke?”

  “Be specific,” Sharon whispered.

  “You think what we do here is funny?” Brock asked.

  “Well,” Philip said, “there’s that 9/11 thing—”

  We nodded. Days ago, we received a directive from Naperville instructing us to remind switching customers that “only UTelCo phone lines stayed up in New York on the morning of September 11.” A rival carrier, using a new technology, had brought down their rates to rock-bottom levels, and since UTelCo couldn’t compete on price, its last resort was an “Appeal to Patriotism.” The response from our callers, in the few hesitant occasions when we used this suggested rebuttal, was cold-blooded amusement. A few times they laughed so hard that we had little choice but to join them, a camaraderie so touching and unexpected that a few of them did end up staying with UTelCo.

  “Can you guys shush for a goddamned second?” Karen asked.

  We looked at her.

  Brock paced back and forth in front of the hastily called account-wide assembly. There were murmurs, errant yawns, and, from a remote corner, a series of dry coughs. Someone’s ringtone—the Jasmine Trias cover of an Elton John song—turned heads, and the culprit, a veteran team leader, gave Brock the peace sign.

  “Let’s see here,” Brock began, taking out a piece of paper, the same one handed to him earlier. He said he had just been informed that around a third of the calls from our phones last week were made to a 1-800 number that a quick search online revealed was the hotline to American Idol . “I’m not sure why we didn’t find out sooner. I had to hear it from Tim Miller. Tim fucking Miller.”

  “A third?” Philip whispered.

  Brock smiled, then recited, in an overly formal tone, “the damage.” Abandoned calls, 291. Customer Satisfaction, 46 percent. Billable hours, 42 percent below target, meaning the company had lost nearly half its income for this account last week.

  Did we derive, he asked, some sick pleasure from thinking that we were somehow able to outwit the company, the company that for years had provided us with gainful employment denied to so many other Filipinos? “What were you guys thinking? Did you think we wouldn’t find out? Really, I’m stumped over here.”

  We expected Mitch to raise her hand, say something consoling in our defense, something apologetic and maudlin, with elements of nationalism thrown in. But when we looked at her, she seemed a little constipated and lost in thought. (Alvin would claim, in a future assessment of the events of that day, that there was the tiniest hint of a smile in one corner of her pursed lips.)

  “Unfortunately,” Brock went on, “I’ve been told it’s logistically impossible to find out which phone lines made the calls.” And suspending all agents whose shift overlapped with the little operation would paralyze the Manila site. So he was going to wait until someone came clean, and, until then, lunch would be cut down from one hour to thirty minutes, the two fifteen-minute breaks would be down to one, and any absence or tardiness would be meted an automatic written warning. “We’ve been too lax with you guys. We’re seeing that now.”

  “You know the worst part is?” Brock asked after another pause. “Your girl Jasmine’s not even Filipino. Not really.”

  In the slow march to exit the tense conference hall, we saw Mitch making her way to Brock. They had a brief chat—Brock occasionally nodding—before they walked to his glass-encased office next to the floor’s farthest spine.

  “Fucking Mitch is going to rat us out,” Sharon said at the Lung Center.

  “Brock’s hands were shaking, did you see it?” Philip said. “In all my years here—”

  “I hear they’re moving everything to India now,” Macky said.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Alvin said.

  “I got it,” Philip said, blinking rapidly. “We don’t go to work tomorrow. We show them that UTelCo needs us more than we need it.”

  “Right, right,” Sharon said.

  Macky nodded.

  Alvin looked at us.

  Karen took a long drag at her cigarette.

  Himmat was again smoking in his regular corner by the ATM terminals, but now he was surrounded by a group of Filipino agents. One of them walked to the edifice in the middle of the courtyard, a life-size installation of a tank surrounded by bronze statues of soldiers and nuns and ordinary folk, above which a huge long-haired woman hovered.

  Mitch appeared from out of nowhere. “Hi, guys.” Smiling, she handed Philip a hundred-peso bill. “Thanks again.”

  We looked at her.

  “What the fuck was that about, right?” she said. “Crazy.”

  “It is crazy,” Sharon said, “And when I find out that someone here, in this circle, even possibly someone who had just spoke, had ratted us out—”

  “Sharon,” Karen said.

  “You know, to be honest?” Mitch said. “It did cross my mind. I love Jasmine! And my fingers are super-fast, as you guys know.”

  The last two hours of the shift were typically a dead time. Supervisors would have started to clear their desks. Quality Assurance people would have been done with their audits. The maintenance personnel would soon make their rounds to empty the waste bins in their assigned rows. Agents, with few calls trickling in, would chat with their neighbors over the dividers, their cursors hovering over the logout buttons on their onscreen phones.

  But when we came back, the operations floor was as alive, as noisy as it had been at midnight, when call traffic was at its peak.

  Mitch parked herself next to our stations and said she had One of Those Calls last night.

  “We need to log in, Mitch,” Philip said.

  “Should be straightforward,” she said. “Customer just wanted to disconnect his line.”

  “Mitch—” Alvin said.

  “So I told him the usual things, right?” she said. She went through the list of available rebuttals with ease—quality of service, value for money, the prestige of having a UTelCo line, even that stupid thing about September 11. When it started to seem hopeless, she offered to move the customer to a lower-priced plan. “He freaked out,” Mitch said. “He started cursing and calling me names, asked me how much I made in a year, then finally demanded to speak to an American. I told him no, we were going to fix this right here, right now.”

  He went nuts! Mitch said. She lowered her voice to mimic her caller’s. “‘I’ll have you know, missy, that I own a chain of international fitness centers.�
��”

  “Wow,” she had drawled in her most sarcastic voice.

  “Where am I calling?” the customer had shouted.

  “UTelCo offices are based in Naperville, Mr. Giuseppe,” she said.

  “Baloney!” the customer said.

  “Then I became really apologetic and told him I didn’t realize he was a member of the UTelCo Super 1000 Club—I made that up—and was eligible to be transferred straight to the office of the CEO. Then I transferred him to collections in Mumbai.”

  “They can trace that kind of thing now, you know,” someone said.

  “They can trace all they want,” Mitch said. “It’s my last day.”

  Mitch’s desk, we noticed, had been cleared of all her trinkets, the lively skyline of knickknacks now a bare horizon.

  “Your shit’s not here,” Sharon said.

  “Very observant of you, Sharon,” Mitch cried excitedly. She smiled and gave Alvin’s arm a light squeeze—wake up—before marching away.

  “Hello,” whispered Brock from behind us, “yeah, can I see the following in my office for a minute?” He looked at a piece of paper. “Let’s see here. Philip, Alvin, Sharon, and Macky.”

  We looked around for Karen. She was not at her station.

  Work: it had always gone on unmindful of the crisp, twittering morning that slowly unfolded outside. Somehow, even after years of working this shift, even though we sat above the city and closer to the sky, we always found ourselves surprised by the first light, the glacial, unobserved shift of sky from black to leaden to deep blue, the sun nowhere but also everywhere on this side of the tilting ground. Soon, colors: on the skyscrapers, the horizon of sharp-cornered silhouettes, the solitary aircraft on its final descent.

  Brock called out to the rest of the floor, tone unmistakably more severe. “Log in now. You’re already seven minutes overbreak. Log in. If I catch anyone on Aux or Wrapping—”

  A couple of claps, and the rest of us put on our headsets and waited for the beep. When it came, our memorized spiels rushed out of us. On cue, we thanked our callers for calling us, introduced ourselves with made-up names, and conveyed a most ardent desire to help them, in all the ways we could, and more. The call done, we awaited the next.