My words are: call center ~ furniture ~ Black Friday ~ turkey ~ rolls
It was submitted by: https://www.writersarahnolan.blogspot.com/
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Working in a call center on Black Friday wasn’t as bad as it sounded. She got paid by the hour, so she didn’t depend on commissions to make money. It was really just a day of listening to the phone ring and looking forward to the leftover turkey and rolls she packed for lunch. Actually talking to people? That was the worst. Snowy days when people stayed in as much as possible were the hardest. So Black Friday? It was sort of like getting paid for a vacation.
She settled into her cubicle, wrapped up in her shawl because the place was always an icebox, and sipped her first peppermint mocha coffee of the season while her terminal booted up. It was going to be a good day she kept telling herself. She never went Black Friday shopping being the kind of person who avoided crowds, so she wasn’t actually missing out on anything even though most of her friends were already posting about the deals they’d snagged.
Nope, not for me, she reminded herself as her coworkers began to drag in. Black Fridays were a bit of a skeleton shift. Most got the day off, and it was supposedly a lottery of who was chosen to do it, but she’d gotten picked the last 3 years, so…she was pretty sure the powers that be were using it as some kind of passive aggressive punishment. Well, fuck them. She was not so easily perturbed.
She sipped more of her coffee while she waited on the clock to hit exactly 9 a.m. so she wouldn’t get in trouble for being “too motivated” yet again this quarter and stared at the decorations around her desk that always made her smile. She had a Hey! Arnold figure, photos of her cats, a plush toy of Garnet from Steven Universe, and some odds and ends Happy Meal toys she picked up when she forgot to pack her lunch. She was here enough…she might as well make it more like home. Everyone else had photos of kids and spouses and vacations and always gave her weird looks at her little toy collection, but fact is, no one had to grow up entirely, and she probably never would, so they’d have to get over it or be salty. Not her problem.
She was lost in that train of thought when her phone rang.
Odd.
The phone didn’t really ring here all that much. This wasn’t like some IT help desk place or anything. She sold shit no one really wanted or needed or at least didn’t think they needed until they heard from her how awesome this set of silicone baking dishes were and made an impulse buy to get maybe one or two molecules of dopamine that might boost their mood for awhile. She didn’t leave voicemails or answering machine messages. They weren’t supposed to…just call and hope for the best. So the chances of someone actually calling her without being prompted were slim to none on a typical day.
“Thank you for calling Advanced Commercial Solutions! This is Bethany speaking. How may I help you today?”
She heard fast, shallow breathing on the other end for a moment, then a feminine voice said, “linda? Is that you? Something’s been moving the furniture again. Everything’s out of place. I don’t know what to do! I’m not crazy…please. Can you please come over?”
She was about to tell the person on the other end of the line that she had the wrong number when there was a piercing scream on the other end and a click. The caller was gone.
It has to be a prank, she thought. It sounded real. The caller sounded terrified. But moved furniture? That was fucking absurd. No, it had to be a joke….right?
She went about her morning making calls, listening to the ring, and satisfactorily ending the call when no one gave two shits to answer the phone. Call after call after call ending the exact same way. Not a single answer for her entire first hour which was certainly something to celebrate. It surely beat the screaming and yelling when she interrupted someone watching Good Morning America who didn’t want to be bothered but answered for unknown reasons anyway.
But then the phone rang again. And when she answered, it was a word for word replay of the call she’d taken before.
“linda? Is that you? Something’s been moving the furniture again. Everything’s out of place. I don’t know what to do! I’m not crazy…please. Can you please come over?”
And just like before, it ended with a scream and a click.
She still wasn’t really unnerved. In fact, the repeat performance made her even more sure it was a prank. It had to be a recording otherwise no one could have gotten it so eerily perfect down to the breathing and the sound of the scream. Not a chance. She chuckled to herself about how good this story would be when she told it to her friends over the weekend. They might be enjoying the sales, but she’d have the best story of the bunch by far.
She got up for a quick break to grab another cup of coffee and use the restroom. Prank or not, her heart was beating like mad, and she needed a moment to collect herself before making another round of calls.
By the time she got back to her desk after drinking her coffee and chatting up Jamir in the breakroom, almost half an hour had passed. As soon as she put on her headset and opened up her script, the phone rang again.
And again it was the same exact thing as before: “linda? Is that you? Something’s been moving the furniture again. Everything’s out of place. I don’t know what to do! I’m not crazy…please. Can you please come over?”
That scream seemed so real. She wondered where the recording had come from. It was haunting, joke or not. For a moment she thought about reporting it to the supervisor Kyle, but he’d been here a long time, didn’t care at all about the employees unless they weren’t making sales, and actually yelled at her the last time she had an issue with a problem customer. The guy had been obviously jerking off on the phone, so she hung up on him only it was one of her recorded QA calls, and she got chewed out by Kyle for it. He’d told her he didn’t care if the customer was shitting onto their receiver—she had to finish the call and try and get a sale. So much for no sexual harassment in the workplace, eh?
She really had to start looking for another job.
She hoped whoever it was had gotten a life somehow, and the whole thing would be over. She wasn’t laughing anymore. You can’t hear a scream like that and not be affected by it.
3 calls down with another several dozen to go, she got another call. Only about 15 minutes had passed this time. It was the same exact drill. The same words and the scream. 10 minutes later she got another one. And then another 5 minutes after that. And another a couple minutes later and a minute after that, and then they started coming in as soon as she hung up the phone. One after another after another.
She finally broke down crying and went for Kyle.
Maybe the tears worked on him when her usually stoic façade did not, but he seemed sympathetic as she explained. You could hear the shrill ring of her direct line all the way to his office, so he knew at the very least she was getting the calls, but he assumed, like she had, they were pranks especially after he played back the recordings for her call log and heard, like she had, the exact same words down to the breathing and the tone of the scream. It was eerie.
He went and picked up the line at her desk as it started to ring again and before anything was said, he shouted into the headset, “listen here you little shits. This isn’t funny. It was never funny. You’ve wasted an entire day of your life being absolute wastes of oxygen, and I swear to all that is holy in this world I will find you, and I will make sure you see consequences.” He hung up himself sure that would be the end of things, but when he started to put the headset down, the line rang again. He disconnected the call. It started again. Over and over he would put a stop to the call, and it would ring again until finally he answered.
It wasn’t the recording.
It was a scream so loud and so terrifying that he snatched the headset and threw it but not before it was completely and utterly damaged unable to handle whatever was being put out on the other end.
He looked shaken for a moment, but that turned to rage in a hurry. He would not be made a fool of. She could hear him saying it. He stalked back to his office mumbling about the cops. Of course he would call the cops on some kids playing a prank.
At least she hoped this was still some kind of prank.
A couple cops did show up. She’d gotten a replacement headset and was having to make calls from a different cubicle because her line never quit ringing. They listened to the calls themselves and seemed to think it wasn’t a big deal, but in order to get them stopped, they’d try to figure out where they were coming from and go have a talk with the kids involved. They were positive it was just some kids on Thanksgiving break who were bored and didn’t have any supervision. They took a digital copy of the recordings, the phone number that popped up on the caller i.d. for the computer and said they’d get back to us—Kyle really—later in the day.
It was barely lunch time. The thought of eating her leftovers now turned her stomach in knots.
Kyle powered down the computer at her desk, but the moment he did, another line began to ring. He tried again turning the next one off only to have another one start. He’d gone through every computer in the office before it was all said and done because for whatever reason he couldn’t “let them win.” He should have just let one ring the rest of the day instead with the sound turned down to begin with, but eventually he saw the light on that and turned them all back on figuring they’d pick one and stick with it until the police tracked them down.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
They all rang. Every single line in the office. Every cubicle. No one could get any work done, and Kyle called the number on the card the two cops left to tell them things had escalated. We all gathered in the break room everyone with a theory on what was going on, of course, but no one could have possibly banked on the truth.
Well, we still don’t really know the truth. All we know is the little bit of info the cops gave Kyle on that phone call. He came back to the breakroom, pale with widened eyes. He looked like he was in shock, so we all held our collective breath waiting to see what he might have to say. He stammered, paused, took a deep breath, and started again, “so, uh, the cops traced that number back to a line that hasn’t been used in a few years. Uh. Ok. Well. The last time it was active, it was the account of a woman—someone named Marge--who disappeared around this time of the year not far from here actually. It’s still an open case, so it wasn’t hard for them to get ahold of the info or whatever, and what we’re hearing is basically what her sister Linda reported as their last contact. It was the last time anyone heard from her, but there was never any recording made of the call that Linda knew of. They have no explanation, but someone’s coming by to try to listen in and see if they can get any evidence, I guess.”
Marge is still missing. And Bethany found a new job.
She settled into her cubicle, wrapped up in her shawl because the place was always an icebox, and sipped her first peppermint mocha coffee of the season while her terminal booted up. It was going to be a good day she kept telling herself. She never went Black Friday shopping being the kind of person who avoided crowds, so she wasn’t actually missing out on anything even though most of her friends were already posting about the deals they’d snagged.
Nope, not for me, she reminded herself as her coworkers began to drag in. Black Fridays were a bit of a skeleton shift. Most got the day off, and it was supposedly a lottery of who was chosen to do it, but she’d gotten picked the last 3 years, so…she was pretty sure the powers that be were using it as some kind of passive aggressive punishment. Well, fuck them. She was not so easily perturbed.
She sipped more of her coffee while she waited on the clock to hit exactly 9 a.m. so she wouldn’t get in trouble for being “too motivated” yet again this quarter and stared at the decorations around her desk that always made her smile. She had a Hey! Arnold figure, photos of her cats, a plush toy of Garnet from Steven Universe, and some odds and ends Happy Meal toys she picked up when she forgot to pack her lunch. She was here enough…she might as well make it more like home. Everyone else had photos of kids and spouses and vacations and always gave her weird looks at her little toy collection, but fact is, no one had to grow up entirely, and she probably never would, so they’d have to get over it or be salty. Not her problem.
She was lost in that train of thought when her phone rang.
Odd.
The phone didn’t really ring here all that much. This wasn’t like some IT help desk place or anything. She sold shit no one really wanted or needed or at least didn’t think they needed until they heard from her how awesome this set of silicone baking dishes were and made an impulse buy to get maybe one or two molecules of dopamine that might boost their mood for awhile. She didn’t leave voicemails or answering machine messages. They weren’t supposed to…just call and hope for the best. So the chances of someone actually calling her without being prompted were slim to none on a typical day.
“Thank you for calling Advanced Commercial Solutions! This is Bethany speaking. How may I help you today?”
She heard fast, shallow breathing on the other end for a moment, then a feminine voice said, “linda? Is that you? Something’s been moving the furniture again. Everything’s out of place. I don’t know what to do! I’m not crazy…please. Can you please come over?”
She was about to tell the person on the other end of the line that she had the wrong number when there was a piercing scream on the other end and a click. The caller was gone.
It has to be a prank, she thought. It sounded real. The caller sounded terrified. But moved furniture? That was fucking absurd. No, it had to be a joke….right?
She went about her morning making calls, listening to the ring, and satisfactorily ending the call when no one gave two shits to answer the phone. Call after call after call ending the exact same way. Not a single answer for her entire first hour which was certainly something to celebrate. It surely beat the screaming and yelling when she interrupted someone watching Good Morning America who didn’t want to be bothered but answered for unknown reasons anyway.
But then the phone rang again. And when she answered, it was a word for word replay of the call she’d taken before.
“linda? Is that you? Something’s been moving the furniture again. Everything’s out of place. I don’t know what to do! I’m not crazy…please. Can you please come over?”
And just like before, it ended with a scream and a click.
She still wasn’t really unnerved. In fact, the repeat performance made her even more sure it was a prank. It had to be a recording otherwise no one could have gotten it so eerily perfect down to the breathing and the sound of the scream. Not a chance. She chuckled to herself about how good this story would be when she told it to her friends over the weekend. They might be enjoying the sales, but she’d have the best story of the bunch by far.
She got up for a quick break to grab another cup of coffee and use the restroom. Prank or not, her heart was beating like mad, and she needed a moment to collect herself before making another round of calls.
By the time she got back to her desk after drinking her coffee and chatting up Jamir in the breakroom, almost half an hour had passed. As soon as she put on her headset and opened up her script, the phone rang again.
And again it was the same exact thing as before: “linda? Is that you? Something’s been moving the furniture again. Everything’s out of place. I don’t know what to do! I’m not crazy…please. Can you please come over?”
That scream seemed so real. She wondered where the recording had come from. It was haunting, joke or not. For a moment she thought about reporting it to the supervisor Kyle, but he’d been here a long time, didn’t care at all about the employees unless they weren’t making sales, and actually yelled at her the last time she had an issue with a problem customer. The guy had been obviously jerking off on the phone, so she hung up on him only it was one of her recorded QA calls, and she got chewed out by Kyle for it. He’d told her he didn’t care if the customer was shitting onto their receiver—she had to finish the call and try and get a sale. So much for no sexual harassment in the workplace, eh?
She really had to start looking for another job.
She hoped whoever it was had gotten a life somehow, and the whole thing would be over. She wasn’t laughing anymore. You can’t hear a scream like that and not be affected by it.
3 calls down with another several dozen to go, she got another call. Only about 15 minutes had passed this time. It was the same exact drill. The same words and the scream. 10 minutes later she got another one. And then another 5 minutes after that. And another a couple minutes later and a minute after that, and then they started coming in as soon as she hung up the phone. One after another after another.
She finally broke down crying and went for Kyle.
Maybe the tears worked on him when her usually stoic façade did not, but he seemed sympathetic as she explained. You could hear the shrill ring of her direct line all the way to his office, so he knew at the very least she was getting the calls, but he assumed, like she had, they were pranks especially after he played back the recordings for her call log and heard, like she had, the exact same words down to the breathing and the tone of the scream. It was eerie.
He went and picked up the line at her desk as it started to ring again and before anything was said, he shouted into the headset, “listen here you little shits. This isn’t funny. It was never funny. You’ve wasted an entire day of your life being absolute wastes of oxygen, and I swear to all that is holy in this world I will find you, and I will make sure you see consequences.” He hung up himself sure that would be the end of things, but when he started to put the headset down, the line rang again. He disconnected the call. It started again. Over and over he would put a stop to the call, and it would ring again until finally he answered.
It wasn’t the recording.
It was a scream so loud and so terrifying that he snatched the headset and threw it but not before it was completely and utterly damaged unable to handle whatever was being put out on the other end.
He looked shaken for a moment, but that turned to rage in a hurry. He would not be made a fool of. She could hear him saying it. He stalked back to his office mumbling about the cops. Of course he would call the cops on some kids playing a prank.
At least she hoped this was still some kind of prank.
A couple cops did show up. She’d gotten a replacement headset and was having to make calls from a different cubicle because her line never quit ringing. They listened to the calls themselves and seemed to think it wasn’t a big deal, but in order to get them stopped, they’d try to figure out where they were coming from and go have a talk with the kids involved. They were positive it was just some kids on Thanksgiving break who were bored and didn’t have any supervision. They took a digital copy of the recordings, the phone number that popped up on the caller i.d. for the computer and said they’d get back to us—Kyle really—later in the day.
It was barely lunch time. The thought of eating her leftovers now turned her stomach in knots.
Kyle powered down the computer at her desk, but the moment he did, another line began to ring. He tried again turning the next one off only to have another one start. He’d gone through every computer in the office before it was all said and done because for whatever reason he couldn’t “let them win.” He should have just let one ring the rest of the day instead with the sound turned down to begin with, but eventually he saw the light on that and turned them all back on figuring they’d pick one and stick with it until the police tracked them down.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
They all rang. Every single line in the office. Every cubicle. No one could get any work done, and Kyle called the number on the card the two cops left to tell them things had escalated. We all gathered in the break room everyone with a theory on what was going on, of course, but no one could have possibly banked on the truth.
Well, we still don’t really know the truth. All we know is the little bit of info the cops gave Kyle on that phone call. He came back to the breakroom, pale with widened eyes. He looked like he was in shock, so we all held our collective breath waiting to see what he might have to say. He stammered, paused, took a deep breath, and started again, “so, uh, the cops traced that number back to a line that hasn’t been used in a few years. Uh. Ok. Well. The last time it was active, it was the account of a woman—someone named Marge--who disappeared around this time of the year not far from here actually. It’s still an open case, so it wasn’t hard for them to get ahold of the info or whatever, and what we’re hearing is basically what her sister Linda reported as their last contact. It was the last time anyone heard from her, but there was never any recording made of the call that Linda knew of. They have no explanation, but someone’s coming by to try to listen in and see if they can get any evidence, I guess.”
Marge is still missing. And Bethany found a new job.
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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:
Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/2019/11/its-time-use-your-words.html
Wandering Web Designer https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog
Spatulas on Parade https://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/2019/11/split-pea-and-ham-soup-uyw-november-post.html
On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/2019/11/normal.html
Follow Me Home https://followmehome.shellybean.com
Sarah Nolan https://www.writersarahnolan.blogspot.com/
Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2019/11/use-your-words-free-range-vs-no.html
I worked at a call center and I had some pretty crazy calls but this would have given me nightmares for years.
ReplyDeleteA day that starts with a peppermint mocha should not end with a creepy missing person mystery - or should it...?
ReplyDeleteGreat story!
Good for Bethany! LOL> And good for me for reading this in the morning and not before bed. Love your writing, Jenniy. Stop by the blog if you can. I got your words!!
ReplyDeleteThis. Is. AWESOME! I absolutely love a good mystery. And when you can effectively mix it in with a bit of creepy, dark fiction, even better!
ReplyDeleteWell done!
None of my comments seem to be registering! I'm trying again. And if it appears twice, just choose the best one! ;)
ReplyDeleteI LOVE THIS! I love a good mystery. And when it's mixed with a little bit of the creepy macabre? PERFECT! Very well done!
Oh wow! Great use of the words. I don't blame Bethany I'd be getting the hell out of there too! (Rena)
ReplyDelete