by Glenn Diaz
The four of us followed Brock to his bright office, the diligent murmuring of the operations floor enveloping us, a chilly embrace.
27
A week earlier, Karen had One of Those Calls.
It was the shift when the new opening spiel took effect, and to rehearse some of us actually arrived at our stations a few minutes early, a tiny miracle all told. “It’s a wonderful day here at UTelCo,” Karen whispered, “Karen Hill speaking. May I have your phone number starting with the area code please?” She ran it at least two more times, her voice growing firmer and louder each time.
“Yuck you’re practicing?” Philip cried from behind her.
“I don’t like change,” Karen said. She took a sip of her coffee.
“We still talking about the new opening?” Philip asked.
When Karen turned to glare at him, he was already a few meters away, tumbler in hand, flouncing to the direction of the pantry.
Eric arrived, marching slowly down the middle of the spine and muttering “Don’t forget, new opening!” to each station, including, for some reason, the unoccupied ones. When he got to Karen’s, he checked his watch. “Wait, am I late?” he asked. He shrugged off the interruption and retreated to his desk at the far end of the row. At the approach of 10 PM, he called out, “Start logging in people. New opening, don’t forget,” then, voice drifting off, “push for wireless, new opening, whatever.”
Philip returned.
Eric called out, “Manabat, you’re 12-to-9 this week. What the fuck are you doing here?”
“To spend more time with you!” Philip said.
“Log in or bother someone else,” Eric said. “Heard there’s a 24-hour buffet on Valero—”
We put on our headsets, those cursed appendages. We were always adjusting them, frontward to our foreheads when our heads itched or one foam-covered ear to our cheeks when the customer spoke too loudly. Still they always felt as tight, as cumbersome as the first time they squeezed our heads that first night, the tips of our flexible mics always too close or too far from our mouths.
Beep.
“It’s a wonderful day here at UTelCo,” Karen said, wincing, reducing the volume of her headset. “This is Karen Hill speaking. Can I have your phone number starting with the area code please?”
Perfect, she thought, looking around to find agents either busy at work or idling by, taking their sweet time. For good measure she wrote down the new opening spiel on a piece of paper and pinned it among the patchwork of other codigos—cheat sheets—tacked all over her station.
“Whoa, a wonderful day?” the faint voice on the line asked with a chuckle. “The polar ice caps are melting, Israeli fighter jets are bombing Gaza, another Bush is in the White House. A wonderful day, she says. That tickles me. Hilarious.”
Karen let out something between a grunt and a giggle, absently looking at the various squares of paper surrounding her, all ready to be consulted: the call flow guide, from opening to verification to resolution to closing; the fifty-one states arranged according to time zones; a tabular summary of the UTelCo calling plans, including prices, coverage areas, and features; the phonetic alphabet. “Your phone number please?” she repeated.
“Whoa, whoa,” the caller said. “Slow down, miss. I’m an old-fashioned guy, you know.” He chuckled again. “You have to let me do the pursuing. That’s how you get my attention.”
“OK—” she managed to say. She had forgotten to lilt her voice, the early composure evaporating.
“OK, since you sound so rattled, baby, I’m going to give you my number, OK?” he asked. “Ready?”
“Yep,” Karen said, although in truth she had already started to browse through the caller’s account. The caller ID was synched with the entire system and automatically searched the database and retrieved any matching account on file.
Thus she already knew that the joker on the line was one James Hallock, born 11 January 1961 in Alameda, California, divorced father of two, a Cisco employee since 1994—
“Area code 510—” the caller said.
—that he was subscribed to the most expensive UTelCo plan at $62.99 a month, plus wireless, internet, and three features, the payments to which he had not missed since 1997, thanks to an auto-debit from a Bank of America checking account—
“—724—”
—and that, six months ago, according to the case notes, he inquired about cutting off his phone line temporarily because he was going to the Philippines for reasons that the last negligent agent forgot to log.
“—2297. Got it?”
“Yes, just give me a second,” Karen said. She loudly pressed some random keys to assure Mr. Hallock that she was hard at work pulling up his records. She reached to her right, tapped Philip on the shoulder, and gestured for him to come and take a look. She highlighted the case notes on the Philippine visit, toggled Mute, and asked Philip what he thought.
“I go for pedophile,” Philip said. “Name sounds like a pedo’s name.”
“I’m thinking mail-order bride,” Karen said. “Sounds straight.”
Seeing the two, Alvin, who sat to Karen’s left, came and had a look. “Ooh. Probably came over to meet the parents of his Filipina wife.”
“He’s so cute,” Karen said, hand running up and down Alvin’s back.
Philip nodded. “We don’t deserve him.”
Karen fished a compact mirror from her purse and rested it against the monitor. Philip asked the two of where they would like to have lunch, to which they shrugged, which meant the usual—Subway, McDonald’s, KFC, Jollibee at the Export Bank building if they were in the mood for a five-minute stroll, Rufo’s on Makati Avenue if their tapa craving was too strong to ignore. The two returned to their seats, and Karen un-toggled Mute.
“Thank you so much for waiting,” she said. “Mr. Hal -lock, right?”
“It’s Hey -lock,” he said. “As in, ‘Hey, lock up your daughters ’cause I’m comin’ to get ’em.’” The man’s intonation lilted in a jovial sing-song but with no accompanying chuckle, so Karen wasn’t sure if it was a proper joke. Maybe an ambiguous hum would suffice, or would he mistake that for petulance? She looked at the call flow guide to steer this strange, wayward call back on track, but her mind unconsciously recalled the furious rehearsal of the new opening spiel moments ago and she blurted out, “It’s a wonderful day here at UTelCo—” She closed her eyes. A scream gurgled un-screamed in her throat.
“Excuse me?” Mr. Hallock said.
“Give me a second, sir,” she said, pressing more random keys.
She looked around and wondered if someone heard her miscue. Some sniggering Quality Assurance analyst on the next cubicle? A third-party auditor in a glass-and-steel medium-rise in downtown Naperville? Both? She tried to comfort herself: they couldn’t be that foolproof, could they, the Big Brother ears of Magellan Solutions? Surely they were not immune to bacterial infection, to fatigue. It must take its toll, all the recording, the side-by-side monitoring, the cameras that rolled without end. And how to store all the accreted data, the astronomical rolls of audio recordings and CCTV footage meant to police the battalions of generally well-trained but ultimately human, blunder-prone agents?
“Are you still there?” Mr. Hallock asked.
She thought about simply hitting End Call onscreen, to send Mr. Hallock and his bag of jokes back to the queue, which would once more put him on hold, trapped for the next thirty minutes in that purgatory where the company jingle alternated with robotic assurances that “Your call is very important to us!” and “We value your time!” At least until another agent, hopefully more patient and more Hindu, picked up.
“Hello?”
“What can I do for you?” Karen said.
“OK,” he cleared his throat. “I want to disconnect my line.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that you want to disconnect your line, Mr. Hey -lock,” Karen said, finding the right words and, with it, the self-assurance.
Page 10 under “Apol
ogy.”
“If you’ll tell me what’s wrong, maybe we can do something—”
Page 6 under “Probing.”
“No, no,” Mr. Hallock said with a chuckle. “I love UTelCo. Don’t get me wrong, I love your company. My family had been a customer for ages as you can probably see there in your records. I’m just moving out of the country indefinitely and I just want everything sorted out before I go.”
Leaving the country—like death, it was one of the few scenarios outlined in the Manual for which there were no “Suggested Rebuttals.” Otherwise, if a customer could no longer pay their bill, a lower-priced plan ought to be proposed (Page 7 under “Value for Money”). If they were moving to another state except Hawaii and Alaska, their line could be transferred to their new address in as little as two business days (Page 15 under “Alternative Arrangements”). If they were signing up with a more affordable rival carrier, they were to be promptly reminded that, among other things, there was nothing quite like the prestige of being a UTelCo subscriber (Page 8 under “Appeal to Status”).
“That can be arranged,” Karen said.
“Thank you,” Mr. Hallock said, “I know there are spirits in this house but unless they like to call up and chat with their spirit friends, no use having an active phone line while I’m gone.”
She chuckled on cue, and for a few wondrous seconds there was accord on the line.
“Oh, all right,” Karen said. She remembered that there was an option she could offer here and debated with herself whether she should bring it up. At that moment, Brock walked into their spine to hand something to Eric, and Karen felt on her back the breeze from Brock’s imposing stride. “We have this,” she ventured, “this thing called Sleep. It’s like hibernation for your line. For a minimal fee of $5.95 a month, you’ll be able to keep this number that I’m sure you’ve had for years—”
“No, thank you,” Mr. Hallock said. “And listen, I thought this would be a three-minute call and according to my watch UTelCo has wasted an hour of my morning already. My Monday morning, for crying out loud. Can you please, please , take care of this?”
“OK, give me a second to process the disconnection.”
“Halleluiah,” Mr. Hallock said.
A commotion erupted a few spines away. Two voices instead of the usual half-heard monologue, loud enough to invite undisguised eavesdropping from as far away as the directory assistance account across the floor, where some agents stood up. When Karen also stood up to look, she saw two security guards escorting Andrea from another team toward the door. Last week, Andrea went home during lunch without notice, an act so outrageously seditious we didn’t know whether to wipe hankies adoringly in her face or cast coarse stones at her direction. Her supervisor, a small-faced Jesus-Jesus goody-two-shoes named Candy, noted that at least Andrea “had the presence of mind” to press Aux on her phone so there were no abandoned calls even if she, well, abandoned her station, ha-ha-ha.
“Aux-uwi” became a running joke around the floor after that, and everybody found it funny except Candy, who later decided that Andrea acting all “casual” about it and laughing about it were just too much. It was bastos, “like the money changers and the poor people in the temple whom Jesus shooed away,” she said.
The earlier shouting match, we’d find out later, had begun when Andrea discovered that Candy was trying to transfer her to the pariah team with the worst schedule (4AM to 1PM, to service the Hawaii and Alaska accounts). In retaliation, Andrea reportedly opined to her seatmate that, for a Born Again Christian, Candy sure kept talking about her virginity a lot. Like a new mother! But those at least had pictures to prove it. The scuffle was so bad that the building guards had to be called on scene; the only other time it happened was some months ago, when a disgruntled agent overdosed on Valium and management ordered a thorough search of the stations.
Karen stood up, stretched her arms and neck. Her eyes caught Brock’s office, a tiny glass-encased aquarium next to the farthest bay. Brock, she saw, was typing on his iMac.
“So what is it?” Philip asked.
Karen looked at him and had no idea what he meant.
“Oh, yeah, give me a sec,” she said after a while.
Disconnecting a line—it was one of those straightforward calls that felt like manna from heaven. There was no apologizing for a missing bill, no convincing to subscribe to an affiliated wireless. She looked forward to ending it, to wish Mr. Hey -lock good luck, wherever it was that he was going. But even before she could stop them, the pesky words were halfway out of her mouth: “By the way, sir, while I’m processing your request—”
Page 27 under “Initiating Small Talk.”
“Yes?” Mr. Hallock asked, with a terseness that could be annoyance but which she chose to take as interest.
“I saw in your records that you had gone to the Philippines?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I was there for six months. Just got back last week, in fact.”
“Is that where you’re going now?”
“Oh no, no. I went there for work, set up my company’s Manila office, trained the staff, that sort of thing. You see we’re very hands-on as an organization.”
“That’s fantastic,” Karen said, the T’s enunciated. “I have relatives in the Philippines, actually.”
“Oh, is that right?” Mr. Hallock said. “Are you almost done—”
“Where in the Philippines are you moving to, Mr. Hal -lock?”
“Oh no, I’m moving to Chiang Mai to be with my wife,” he said. “And it’s Hey -lock.”
“Ah,” Karen said. “Now please stay on the line so I can give you a confirmation number as proof of this transaction.” She stared at her codigo for the phonetic alphabet, filled with notes and errant doodles, remnants from inane games she had played with her seatmates during the few priceless times when the system was down: a golf club next to G – Golf, a turban beside I – India, and a hairy outline emerging from a trash can near O – Oscar.
“You OK?” a voice asked as she felt a hand down her back. Brock, behind her, looked at the timer on her desk phone. “Yikes, long call so early, huh?” he asked.
She nodded and un-toggled Mute. “Thank you so much for waiting, Mr. Hal -lock.”
“Yes.”
“If you have a pen and paper with you, your confirmation number is 692—”
“Uh huh.”
“—570403.”
“Got it.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Yes, there is, in fact, something that I hope you’ll help me with,” he said.
“Sure,” she said, smiling, as Brock walked away.
“Do you know that Cisco developed UTelCo’s phone system?”
“Sorry?” Karen asked.
“I was a senior programmer then,” he said. “I remember me and some guys flew in to Naperville to present to Tim Miller’s team. Tall guy, salt and pepper hair?”
Jeremy Andrew Hallock of Alameda, California, proceeded to regale Karen with choice insider information—about the call management system, the queuing support mechanism, and even, as Karen’s stomach was visited by a tiny cyclone, how this so-called confirmation number worked. The first two numbers indicated the center—69 for Magellan Solutions in Manila; the next three, 257, was her employee ID; and the last four, 0403, is for April 3rd, the date today. “In other words,” he said, “I know that it was ready the moment the call began, and yet you decide for some goddamned reason to make me wait for ten and a half fucking minutes. If the Better Business Bureau gets a wind of this—”
Karen clicked End Call, removed her headset, and stood up to go to the Lung Center for a cigarette.
She returned to her station fifteen minutes later and found Brock talking to Eric. Still reeling from the Andrea episode, we felt a dreary sense of excitement: what a day, and all before the first hour.
“You forgot to go on Aux,” Eric said, pointing to her phone.
“Please go on Aux 4 now an
d follow me,” Brock told her.
Karen looked at her supervisor.
Eric’s face didn’t break its severity. “Do you need me there?” he asked Brock.
Brock gave it a thought. “Nah.”
Eric looked at her with what Karen preferred to think was apology. With Brock in the vicinity, we performed, like monkeys with neutral accents. We loudly spoke to our mics, laughed generously, made effusive hand gestures. Philip and Alvin did not even stand when Karen and Brock passed by en route to his office, where he told her to shut the door and sit down.
For years Brock had been a regular fixture around the floor, making idle chat about the ongoing NBA playoffs or the strange summer drizzle, tinkering with his laptop, or smoking alone at the Lung Center, but at that moment it was as if Karen was seeing him for the first time: his plump cheeks, his goatee, the porcine eyes that, she saw only now, were the color of cataract. He sat on his desk and began to type on his computer.
Karen sighed. “I’m sorry.”
He went on typing as if he didn’t hear anything. It was not a nice office as it seemed from the outside. It was slightly elevated, and he could see everyone’s heads bob up and down, in delight or stupor, but they could see him, too. From the wall stared announcements of various company initiatives: the monthly incentive program for the top sellers, the corporate tie-up with the gym, the referral bonus now at P5,000 and an iPod. His email notification dinged every fifteen seconds or so.
“So I’ve talked with your caller here, Mr.—” Brock checked his monitor, “Hallock. Jeremy Hallock.”
Karen ordered herself to look at the American and fight the reliable discomfort at being in close proximity with the white guys.
“I convinced him not to push through with the executive complaint. He knows his rights, that man, which is bad news for us.”
She pulled at the hem of her shirt, once, twice, to adjust how the fabric fit the curves of her torso. “I’m really sorry.”
“Didn’t you cover this in training? When a customer mentions—or even hints at—routing his issue to a state or federal agency, like the FCC or the Better Business Bureau, that’s your cue to transfer. The moment you hear the Better Business Bureau, you should realize it’s bad. Very bad. It can cause us our jobs, Karen. Not just you—”
