Confessions of a Call Centre Worker

A small-town boy moves to the big city to get away from a government-job-obsessed family and live the good life. But it''s not easy being ''just another nightshift worker''. It was crisis time, and the call centre vets were not showing up. The managers too disappeared after their little show of solidarity. We were on our own. So we hunkered down and fought like soldiers at the frontline, stopping only for ten-minute breaks. When those gruelling forty-eight hours were over, we swore that we would never again take on a shift like that. The next day, it was business as usual. No one spoke about how bad the conditions had been-the stench in the break room, the rotten food, the insane workload. We only talked about contraceptives: the janitors had cleaned out the clogged toilets to find used condoms jamming up the works. Apparently, a lot of guys on the team had made good use of the lumpy ''break time'' couches the management had so kindly provided for us. I was pissed off about people fucking around like that. Then I shrugged. Why grudge people an office lay?