Call Center Blues
You’ve got to have a short attention span. You must. Much of the time, working your way through the day means working your way through these lists of names/phone numbers, and you can’t let yourself think too far ahead while doing that or you will just feel really, really lost and frustrated with lots of “This is My Life Oh god, no” thrown in for good measure.

You must incorporate a zen-feeling instead, a now-and-only-nowness, so that these call lists only really consist of a name, Phyllis Swenson of Greensboro, for example, and not 40 names, not an endlessly monotonous rabbit hole of sameness that only leads to more sameness and more. Phyllis Swenson, you are it. This moment is about you and me. Hi there, Phyllis Swenson of Greensboro; let’s try to make this real. Let’s try to be more than blank voices to each another. Please don’t hang up on me or be otherwise rude, Phyllis Swenson of Greensboro. Please don’t—oh, you don’t live there. Oh. It’s a number that’s been disconnected or is no longer in service. Oh. Phyllis Swenson. Perhaps you are no longer of Greensboro. Maybe you never existed at all. But what of you, Wanda Hart, of Wake County?
Always the falling, with no satisfying shock, no thwack, of landing.

When I get sucked into this horrible anxiety, it is usually when I’ve been at the Medical Center making outgoing calls for a couple of hours. I am completely convinced that the supervisor who hands me list after list must hate me, never more so than when, practically gasping, I hand her a list of 40 checked-off names, two hours’ or so worth of work. Without pause, she takes it and hands me a fresh one. Smiling. Smiling while saying, “Oh. Sisyphus. It’s you. Okay, well, all that work you just did? I am now wiping clean. Look. This new list has no checkmarks at all. Go do the same thing, now, for five more hours.” She smiles as she does this. Often she is on the phone with someone and it’s a sort of catch-all, distracted social-pleasantry kind of smile and it makes me irrationally angry. I take the list and I sit and I imagine some rash screaming, jumping-up-and-down-on-my-desk thing. I put my headset back on and crack my knuckles and dial.

Other days are different. On other days, I’m getting trained on new medical studies, which means I’m talking with real people and learning things, and whether or not these are actually things I’d ever choose to learn independently, it means my brain is being stimulated in a variety of ways that feel like actual Variety, compared to sitting there dialing numbers and making the same speech for seven hours. I swear I can feel the dried-out sections of brain being drizzled with sweet water. Or something like that; anyway, it’s good.

On these days, I’m taking inbound calls, which means I get to spend the day reading books I’ve brought in, between having a variety of conversations with interesting people with interesting medical problems. These days, I figure out that, wait! I’m actually a secret favorite of my supervisor. I forget—honestly, like, wiped from the slate—that I ever felt any other way. Now the two of us are on absolute par, walking around in the sunshine of Science, making a difference in the lives of people with Problems that Require Studying. I am a problem solver! On these days, I look around at the others who are working off call lists, at their pale little, unhappy ratlike visages, and I feel downright impatient with their stick-in-the-mud attitudes. They should really learn to lighten up, mainly because they’re bringing me down, slightly.