If you've ever made a call, whether it's ordering pizza or calling customer service, there has probably been a point in your life when, after hearing someone answer, your mind has gone completely and totally blank. Maybe this sensation has happened to you multiple times. Maybe that number has reached the dozens by now and depending on your age it could be even higher than that. My point is, it's actually totally normal to need a pause between the initial “Hi thank you for calling xyz business, how can I help you?” and now that I’m mentioning it you can probably think of a few instances where you have been guilty of this awkward tic of the human brain. There’s a fairly similar scientific observation known unofficially as the “doorway effect” you may also be familiar with. The doorway effect is the phenomenon of walking into a separate room with a goal in mind only to find you can’t remember your plan of action the moment you pass from one room to another. I could bore you with the science mumbo jumbo and probably lose a few of you so i won't get too into it right now but the skinny is this: If you step through a doorway, your brain is so lazy and so focused on short term memory that you're almost guaranteed t forget what you were doing. I imagine the same principle could be loosely applied to the phone call conundrum i mentioned a moment ago. Both situation, like most civil rights movements and the need to tell others about the totally awesome world changing dream you had last night, no one notices or cares until it affects them. I’m not exempt here either.
See, I wasn't always so obsessed with the little silences that occur between connection and attention during customer service calls until I went to work under my long time friend, Lila, at a call center. It’s a relatively small business in the middle of podunk Florida, nowhere, and the job mainly consist of getting yelled at by entitled older people asking why I, a twenty five year old girl working in a call center, was taking so long to fill their prescriptions. Old people love that silence in between my greeting and when they can collect what's left of their brains to form a cohesive complaint, and usually I’m okay with that silence too, until recently.
The last few weeks, and possibly longer with my attention issues being what they are, things have been...strange at my place of work.
It started innocuously enough, a few calls a day that would be twenty seconds of silence only to be interrupted right before i could hang up by the same angry woman asking if i could help her find her daughter. The request was unnerving enough, believe me, but it only got scarier after every instance. Every day she would call and every day she would frantically and angrily ask me where her daughter was. I had initially thought she was maybe looking for someone else in the building, a coworker perhaps, but there was no one in my office building or in the warehouses attached who knew whose mother would be calling and harrassing that way.
Worst of all, no one could figure out how to stop hr from calling. We had initially blocked her number after one particularly bad call had left me in tears and Lila’s manager gave her the go ahead, only after her giving a rousing speech about how her calls were taking up time from paying customers no less.
Things got even stranger when she began calling from different numbers. Not one, not two or even a dozen but a different number five times a day, every day. I don’t have the best memory but even I can see our phone records showing the change every time. we tried keeping up with them at first but now it’s useless. I’ve become almost resolute about the fact that she’ll call no matter what we do. All I can do now is hang up on her as soon as the silence breaches five seconds or more and ray that it isn't an irate customer calling back because i hung up too soon.
The strangeness of our mystery caller, perpetually on the hunt for her missing daughter, was only amplified by our office’s strange fascination with the woman.
There were five of us total, myself included, in our tiny office and it was within our small gray purgatory that my coworkers had set up a small dry erase board to mark the woman's calls. Every time she would call, they would mark a date and time, the perfect symmetry of her insanity making every call that much more chilling. We began to notice that, without fail, her calls would be made at four distinct times every day. The first was made at exactly 8:26, the second at precisely 9:31 and the third at 10:15. The only call that ever wavered in time was the final call that usually occurred between 10:23 ad 10:26. Asher had been the one to suggest the morbid fantasy football of my job even going so far as to place bets on whether or not he would call at those times on the dot every day. No one made any bets after the third week of her calls.
It’s 10:21 now. I’ve noticed Asher and the others eyeing up my desk already as if waiting for the pavlovian reward of watching my face drop from receiving the mystery call.
At 10:22 Tyrone stood up and walked over to the empty desk next to my own where the dry erase board was set up, hand already on the little red marker we began to use after the black one had faded and inevitably dried out since our favorite customer had began calling.
At 10:23 Asher had joined Tyrone next to my desk, his eyes darting between my phone queue and my face.
At 10:24 Isaac had wandered over to asher’s side, using his shoulder as an arm rest, his dopey face looking almost concerned in a way only his childish features could.
At 10:25 the three men now at my desk began to look anxious, Tyrone’s mask of stoic grace slipping with every tick of the office clock. The ticking was almost deafening in the silence that had taken hold of our office in a jarring grip. Everyone was staring as one at my call queue as the seconds tick by, Asher gripping a paper in his hand and wringing it nervously.
10:26 rolled around and after almost five minutes of complete silence, my phone range with a call unknown as the number.
I’m not exactly at the highest risk for a heart attack or stroke but in that moment, I could have been because it was in that very moment that the phone rang and both Tyrone and Asher made noises akin to a dying animal and the beast that caught it respectively.
“Suck it bitch yeah!” Asher yelled at full volume, which in a tiny and quiet office was startling at best “Guess who’s twenty bucks richer This guy!” he said, pointing both thumbs harshly into his chest. Asher was a very fair skinned redhead with more freckles on his face and arms than most people have on their entire bodies, so I can only imagine the motion would leave a bruise.
“‘Goddamnit you cheating ginger bitch.” Tyrone grumbled a litany of other swears in Asher’s general direction, none of which registering with his otherwise motionless face.
Giving them a moment to return to their desks, Isaac staying behind in a strange sense of solidarity, I pressed the answer button.
“Thank you for calling the Prescription Pals customer service center, how can I help you today?” I asked in a monotone voice, my body unconsciously tensing up as my finger hovered about the end call button.
“Hi yes, I was hoping you’d be able to help me.” a woman’s voice intoned from the receiver of my phone. The look on my face must have given away the level of shock my mind had been feeling in that moment because not only was this call at 10:26 unlike any other call before that had occurred at exactly 10:26 but it was also unquestionably the same woman whose call I was expecting.
My mind went blank. This woman had the same speech prepared for her scheduled calls. The words never wavered, not once, but here she was using a tone that was almost so normal I didn't recognize it at first.
“Hello? Are you still there?” she expressed almost timidly. I couldn't move. I was as frozen as I had been the first time she had called. “Eddy, I really would like your help today.”
I vaguely heard Isaac get up and say something to someone who was behind me before I heard more than felt an arm reach over me to grab at the phone where it sat in its cradle. Doing so disconnected my headset and allowed the person picking it up to speak to whoever was on the line.
Lila’s voice began assertively from about my head “Ma’am I don’t know you and I don’t care to but I am only going to ask you one time not to call my employee or anyone under Prescription Pals again.” and just as soon as the phone call had begun, Lila put the phone back on the cradle, her slender fingers running along my arm as her hand came back to her side. “Eddy can I see you in my office?” her tone changed dramatically when speaking to me as opposed to my crazed stalker of a ‘customer’, a switch which made me forever grateful I had never been on her bad side before.
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