Call Center by Emmanuel Sigauke -  In Customer Service we laughed at customers, especially those who were irate and abusive. They never seemed to get it, and always sought to sting us with their words, but we just put them on mute and died with laughter.

No one liked being at the call center at all, but when a moment to laugh presented itself, we felt like we were the managers of the call center, as if we made six-figure salaries. Even the supervisors sometimes joined in the fun, as long as the calls were handled on time. For me, handling a call was the easiest part my job and everyone knew me for being able to diffuse an irate customer situation, until the day a man called and, after hearing my voice, asked, "Which part of India are you in?"
 I shifted on my chair like one startled, and my pens scatted down off the desk. This attracted my cubicle neighbor, who said, "Is that another one? I can delay answering my next if that’s a chance to laugh."
 I shook my head no and she answered her sighed in disappointment and answered her call. Then I returned to mine, already dreading the direction that this dialogue would take. I took a sip of water to improve my accent, yet I could already feel a shiver and a drying of my throat.
 "Hello?” said the man. “Are you there or what?" But his voice was soft and slow, as if he had all day to talk to me. Our department had just recently been cautioned on improving call handling time (CHT). Because I didn’t want my CHT to be affected, I decided to lie to this idiot. 
 "I'm in Mumbai, sir," I said. My neighbor turned sharply to look at me, her face wrinkling with surprise, but I could tell that her mouth was poised to laugh on short notice. I winked at her, and she understood, and returned to her customer. My customer whistled to express a response I did not understand, although I already suspected that he was about to seek ways to hurt with words, so, to fire him up, I repeated, “Mumbai, formerly Bombay, financial capital of India.”
 "I knew it!" he said. "I could tell from your, ‘Tank you fori corring Swift Wireress.’ You guys crack me up!" He started laughing, and in the background I could hear a woman saying, "What's that honey?" to which he didn't respond to because he was still laughing.
 I slipped my headphones off my ears; the laughter was too loud. His account had popped up on my screen when my recorded greeting answered the call, so as I started navigating it, I noticed that it had a 60-day past due balance, and all calls, except the *611 to Customer Service or *228 to Financial Services, had been blocked on his two phone lines.  So chances were that if I handled this call liked I should, he would be too embarrassed to continue making fun of my accent. In fact, this was a misrouted call which should have been answered in Financial Services, where customer service was less important than getting subscribers to pay their bills.
What a loser, I thought, as I got ready to grill him. The fact that he thought I was in India already made me feel I had more power than he had in this situation. A stupid, ignorant moron; at least he should have guessed something like, “What part of Texas, or Georgia, are you in?” Or simply, “Where are you guys located?” This would have given me the chance to tell him where were, and if he had given me a reason to lie, which I did on every 500th call if the caller was aggravating, I would have mentioned little California towns like Auburn, Galt, Weed, or Lodi. But he was just an idiot.
  I slipped the headphones back on and found him saying, "Hello Mumbai! Mr. Punjabi!"  And he laughed again. He thought he was being funny, maybe to the woman in the background, so I gave a dry laugh in response, just to let him know that I could hear him. I hated spiteful people like him; sometimes if they thought you had put them on hold, that you could not hear them, they uttered all kinds of hurtful comments about you, especially if you had an accent. Then if you went so far as to tell them that you were from Zimbabwe, oh, trouble.
“How can I help you today, sir?”  I said, already concerned about CHT.
 "For a moment I thought I lost India," he said. "So-o-o, what's it like down there?" 
 "How can I help you, sir?" I said, with a smiling voice, as my supervisor always recommended doing on difficult calls, but anger was welling up within me. 
 "I asked you a question; you can help me by answering it," he said, thickening his voice.
 "Sir, can you ask a business-related question?" I said, checking to see if my supervisor was in her cubicle. She wasn't, so I could stretch this one farther, if needed, to teach this idiot some phone manners. "So how can I help you?"
 "Answer my friggin’ question first!” That loudness of his voice caught me by surprise and I almost slipped into my signature customer-first mode by saying, “Your problem is mine the first time you call.”
 “I don’t care to hear that bullshit stuff of yours!” He even paused to catch a breath. “Maybe I should slow down: a-n-s-w-e-r  m-y  q-u-e-s-t-i-on."
 "And the question is?" I said, raising my voice too, which usually had the effect of reducing my accent and making me sound British. Americans loved the British accent, especially the women.
 "Oh, so now you are getting an attitude,” he said, not even acknowledging the improved accent. “Who is the customer here?"
 "But you haven't asked anything that shows that you are a customer, have you?" I said, with no trace of an accent at all. A few of the representatives whose cubicles were closer to mine raised their heads to check if I was fine. I nodded to the one on the opposite cubicle to show that I was still okay. And my customer was breathing heavily and his voice was shaking.
 "Listen, idiot, answer my question or I’ll ask for your supervisor."  The way he said supervisor sounded completely obscene, a disregard for common decency, as if that was the power that allowed him to be rude to me. I pressed the mute button and sighed, closed my eyes and remembered that yes, a request for a supervisor was his right. Nothing I could do to stop him. But I hated escalators.
 “I said should I ask to speak to your supervisor?” he repeated, trying to match my accent.
 "No one stopped you, dude," I said. I could feel my lips shaking and a cloud of carelessness beginning to gather within me. "Shall I get a supervisor for you? Because I will be happy to find one for you, understand?"  Oh, when I said that word, understand, the way I used to say it to my high school students in Harare, I knew I was ready for anything.
 He went silent for a moment. Good, learn to behave, I thought, as I ignored whatever my neighbor was trying to signal; I didn’t care about what her nosey ass was trying to tell me. But the customer’s silence was lasting too long; I didn’t want that to happen.
 "Hello? Sir?" I said. “Are you still there?”
 "Don't call me sir, Kabinder."
 “As I said when I answered your call, my name is Jason, not what you just blurted,” I said.
 “You changed your name too? To seriv Amrican costomus, huh?” He almost sounded like he was doing karaoke. What was he doing?
 I had to bridge this call to business, as the call sequencing model pasted to my computer required: "In order for me to assist you, sir, could you please verify the last four digits of your social security number?"
 "My what?" he asked, and I felt a pang of pain because I never could get them to understand me whenever I said the phrase. I hated having to ask them to verify their accounts, and even my supervisor knew. 
 "Your sosh," I said. He grunted to show that he still had not understood me, so I added, "Your SSN."
 "Oh, social security number? That’s what you should have said," he said, and I thought I even heard a trace of empathy in his voice. But he could not just turn things around now. He was the one with a past-due account, the one who had to be nice so I could reconnect his account.
 "That's what I said—social security number."
 "No, dude.” He coughed out a laugh. “You said shoshia shecret numb."
 "And when I said sosh, or SSN you thought I was saying?"
 "Who knows? Maybe something you verify there in Mumbia, or whatever.?”  He  sounded like he was giving up on me, as if this call was beginning to distress him. In fact, his pause lasted longer than I could afford. He was now affecting my stats: the handle time, the quality, productivity, and the hold time for other customers in the queue. The meter on the computer screen had turned red, which meant that I had exceeded the allowed five minutes. As I was about to offer to get  a supervisor, which was never allowed, he came back on the line and said, "All we know here in America is that you guys there are taking our jobs, and you can't even speak proper fucking English!"
That surprised me, but I agreed with this view; outsourcing was a common discussion topic among employees. We feared the day we would go to that general meeting in Folsom to be told that we were free to relocate to Tuscon, Arizona, which no one would be prepared to do. When the company closed the Honolulu center to open ours, they had given the employees the generous option to relocate to California, and, of course, we were here because no one in Hawaii had taken that offer. And we knew the company was happy about that.
My customer was right too on the issue of English, if only he had not already been rude to me. I never thought that customer service in America should be filled with people like me. The last thing you want to hear when you call your phone provider’s customer service is an accent; it’s just too much to deal with. But I was here at the helm, he had to deal with me. I was just as entitled to feed my family as he was. So if he thought I was in India, so be it. Had he known that I was in Stockton, California, he probably would have fainted, considering that he lived in Redding, where I was sure the word diversity didn’t exist in their dictionaries. 
 I sighed, but fearing that he might have detected that I sympathized with his view on outsourcing, but the idiot took us back where we should be, by saying, “Did you just yawn in the phone? No wonder our economy is fucked up.”
 “Sir, please use clean language,” I said and I was serious. “How can you expect respect if you can’t deliver common courtesy?”
  He started laughing again. “Crean ranguage. How about you learn some English?”
 Back to my buttons again. I controlled myself and waited for him to continue. He was the customer, my king.
 “ How can we fuckin' trust that you people can handle our business? All you do is yawn and butcher my language."
 He had taken a wrong direction again. My leg started shaking, with the knee hitting the inside of the adjustable computer desk. When I noticed that the vibration was affecting the next cubicle, I stopped, and focused on what the customer was requesting:  “In fact, can I have someone who speaks English?”
 “You are listening to English, sir,” I said. “I even have a degree in English.”
 “Please. Just transfer me back to America.”
 "Sir!" I said, intending to swoop down on him like the mighty American Eagle.
 "What?" He even sounded like a scared chicken, upon seeing the shadow of the eagle.
 "Consider yourself fortunate to have heard this quality of English. You would have a heart attack if you woke up one day and spoke half of it."  I lowered  my voice so my neighbors would not hear me, but one of them had heard already, so she nodded in agreement. That was Leticia, who always told me, "You Jason, you speak proper."
 The man laughed—one boom after another.
  When he went quiet, I said, "Are you done?"
 He did not reply, perhaps just refusing to speak on my command, so I resumed my explanation: "Like I was saying, I speak the kind of English that you can only speak in dreams. So before you get too excited, you might as well tell me why you called , who you are, who you work for, and why you are still on my fuckin' line!"
“Ah!” he said and  then he went silent.
 This was he first time I had ever used the f-word to a customer. I began to think that probably there was something wrong with me, that maybe I was losing my mind, like some people had already done in this call center. My mind briefly lingered on the subject of my ancestral spirits; maybe they were angry at me. These were the kinds of thoughts I tended to have when I thought things were going wrong for me in this country. But I was not dealing with a regular customer here; in fact, with his past-due account, he barely was our customer. Maybe he was going to hang up since hang up, so I didn’t say anything more.
Of course he bounced back: "Are you even allowed to say that to customers?"
 I did not answer him because a ball of anger was working its way through my throat.
 "I asked you another question and you are not answering. Is that how they train you to treat your customer?"
 "No, not our customers, but idiots like you!" I said, pushing my chair back.
 "What did you call me?” he shouted. “Bin Laden, I asked you a question.”
 Now, why did he have to go there? My head begun to spin and when I spoke again I did not care what would happen after that call, even if it meant Quality Assurance or my supervisor, she was in her office now, was listening. Even the call center director himself would not dare say anything to me about this; the customer had crossed the line. I managed to compose myself enough to say, “Listen man, I will give you thirty seconds!”
“Really? For what?
“To decide if you want my help, then I will terminate this call.”
“You know you can’t do something that, stupid terrorist!”
“Guess what, I can, to your abusive ass as lesson."
 He burst out laughing again. "You guys in India are crazy!"
 "Shut the fuck up!" I said. People around me started to stand up. 
 "You know,” he said, softly, “I really didn't know you people cussed."
 I brought my finger closer to the END key on the Rockwell phone pad. "You have five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One." Beep! I clenched my teeth as I retracted the finger after it cut the call, and, although too late, I said, "I am in Stockton, you idiot!"
 I threw the head phones on the desk, rolled my chair back, and hit something. I turned and found my supervisor looking down at me. She had a deadly frown, but when our eyes met, she gave one of her fake smiles and said, "Do you need some help, Tari? Do you need to go home?"
 I didn't answer her. Instead, I sprung up, pushed the chair back in the desk and marched away. But I didn't want anyone to think I was quitting. I wasn’t that type. To be upset was allowed, and walking away was already better than having a seizure or grabbing someone’s throat in rage. Quitting was out of the question.
 I didn’t remember why I had left my desk, so I came to a sudden stop in the middle of the center. Perhaps they were all now looking at me, and I knew some of them were thinking that the African had gone wild. I must have stood there for one minute, then turned and started walking back, looking straight ahead, trying not to feel anything.  Just I sat at my desk, I saw the supervisor putting her phone down. She signaled me to come to her office. Of course, I didn’t mind talking with her at all. She was a person, I was a person. We could talk person to person. I entered the office and sat down. I looked straight in her eyes.
 “That customer,” she said. “We have to call him back.” She titled her head and gave me one of the squinted looks that were meant to show concern for my wellbeing.
 I opened my mouth, but then I didn’t know what to say, so I closed it.
  “I listened to that call, and man, what was that all about?” She went silent, as if she wanted me to speak, although we both knew that no explanation I gave would be useful since she had listened to the call, or a large part of it. “So, yes, we are required to call the customer back.”
 “But—.”
 “I understand. Just do your best to apologize.” She paused and swallowed, but the intense look in her eyes worried me. In a lower voice, as if she didn’t want the other representatives to hear, she said, “I found an alternative call-back number on his account, so we have a way to reach him before he calls back to escalate to a manager.”
 “But he’s delinquent,” I said, and then realized by her look that really I couldn’t say that. “Sorry. I’ll call him right away.” As I walked from the office I had to gain balance to walk successfully to my desk. My stomach growled, but I hoped that neither she nor the other employees could see my creeping fear and a stinging sense of regret. Already I was feeling that if I lost my job because of this incident, I would hate myself. There were no jobs in Zimbabwe and here I was acting up like a brat.
  I took the piece of paper with the number and I walked back to my desk. I avoided eye contact with the other representatives. My neighbor was concentrating on her call, making notes as her customer spoke.
 Before I made the call I took a deep breath, then I thought of how I was going to start the conversation. If he had a caller ID he would only see a toll-free number, so the call could be from a call center anywhere in the world. I wasn’t going to change my story about where we were located, but after I apologized, if he still wanted to speak to a supervisor, I would get one for him. Good afternoon, sir, could I please speak to Mr. Johnston? That was going to be my first line. I looked at my supervisor’s office and she was looking in my direction, as if to say. “Yes, you can.”
 Fine, I am doing this, I told myself. I put the headphones in place, and breathing in deeply and releasing heavily, I dialed the alternative call-back number. It went straight to a recording: “The number you have dialed is not longer in service or has been disconnected. If you have reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again. Message 404.”   I wanted to jump and say, “Yes!”, but I looked at the paper again and redialed the number just to make sure I had not made a mistake. And I smiled as the same message played again. Even if he would call back, chances of his call coming to our center were slim. I stretched and yawned loudly. My neighbor, whose call had ended, looked at me, and this time we could laugh if she wanted.
 “Tough day, huh?” she said.
 “One of those,” I said.
I typed remarks on the customer’s account: “Attempted to reach customer twice. No response. Contact number out of service or disconnected.” Then I went back to the office, but the supervisor quickly said, “I know. I know. Please log on and help other customers. We have 50 calls in queue.”
I rushed back to my desk and before I took the next call, I whispered, “That was close.”