by Glenn Diaz
The official rebuttal script was “This call is being monitored or recorded but only for quality assurance purposes” (page 3 under “Disclosure of Call Recording”). Our callers, bless them, would eventually shrug this off as Standard Operating Procedure, but at that time, with the attack on the World Trade Center rendered fresh by the Iraqi invasion, Americans were wary, suspicious, secretly terrified. Their feeling of invincibility shaken off its foundation.
We had also thought we were invincible. In our own skyscraper, half a world away from Lower Manhattan, we would coolly step into a well-worn elevator, unmindful of the metallic rattling at certain floors that stopped scaring us a long time ago. We would march into our stations and, with a bit of a psychosomatic yawn, put on our headsets then wait for the beep that would open the floodgates.
Beep.
“It’s a wonderful day here at UTelCo! My name is—”
“Hello?” the American on the line would say, already outraged.
They always had us at hello, the Americans. Even Brock, the bearish operations manager from Austin, would begin the direst news with an almost affectionate “Hello!” That night he walked over to our spine—“Hello, guys!”—and told us to gather around. A force of habit, he drummed his index fingers on a nearby desk. Eric, our supervisor, was absent, he said, so he’d taken the liberty to evaluate our team for call flow compliance, nothing special, you know, just a routine appraisal to make sure we’re always on top of things, let’s see here.
Some of us exchanged glances. We didn’t hear any echo on the line. Our ally at Quality Assurance hadn’t alerted us about any impromptu monitoring, or was that nonstop tubercular coughing supposed to be the signal? We worked for the first two hours of our shift but, unsupervised, of course we quickly transitioned to that thing that one did when the cat was away. Brock cleared his throat. “Let’s see here.”
Karen had been caught googling “insomnia+home+remedies” in the middle of a call. Philip, who sat next to her, was arguing with a bunch of tweens on an online forum for American Idol fans. Alvin, who was new and sat next to Philip, was browsing through half-naked torsos on a gay hook-up site. Down the line, Macky was on a website for women of a certain age who were looking for younger men to “take care.” And Sharon, the veteran who occupied the highly coveted window cubicle, was playing a spirited game of backgammon with someone from Lahore.
“Good job, guys,” lilted Mitch, the overachieving occupant of the other window cubicle. Some of us, like Mitch, routinely followed the call flow to a T. These people would arrive at the office forty-five minutes before shift and get to work right away, unlike the rest of us who would wait for the last possible nanosecond before logging in. For Halloween, they would decorate their stations with fake cobwebs and Styrofoam tombstones and dress up like Freddie Kruger or the White Lady of Balete Drive, unlike the rest of us who would call in sick then party somewhere else. They would cozy up to the Americans at the huge al fresco courtyard cum smoking area called the Lung Center, unlike the rest of us who would rather use the stairs to the thirty-second floor than share an elevator with the white guys.
“This one’s being an annoying fuck again, ’no?” whispered Sharon, prone to blurting out the obvious, which everyone ignored because she was a breast cancer survivor.
Anyway, Brock said, because of our infractions, they were installing Surf Control in all the computers. That, and we would all need to attend a Stress Management Workshop after shift.
“But we’re not stressed—” Philip said.
“Well it’s either that or suspension, so—” Brock said.
“—are we?” Philip looked at us, mortified.
Brock looked at him. “If there are no other questions—”
“How long will it take?” Macky asked.
“Will you run it?” Karen asked.
“Will there be games?” Sharon asked, sneaking to take a peek at the tiny board on her monitor.
“Is it safe to say,” Alvin whispered to the few within earshot, “that we’re stressing over a Stress Management Workshop?”
“I heard that,” Brock pointed out.
“Brock,” Mitch cooed, “do we have to be there or is it just the offenders?”
We glared at her, then looked at each other.
“Yes, Mitch,” Brock said. He cleared his throat, returning to formality. “OK? If there are no more questions, I’ll see you guys later.” He drummed his index fingers again, this time on a gray plastic spine that separated the cubicles. The staccato that punctuated his sentence was also our signal to disperse.
We didn’t know how we got here.
We were excitedly tossing our rolled up diplomas into the air one moment, the next we were arranged in modular stations, sipping stale vending machine coffee from company-issued spill-proof tumblers, and answering billing inquiries from Americans. Most of us didn’t imagine it would be as dull and unchallenging as this, although we did like the arctic temperature, the dressing up, the money. The money, especially; our daydreams invariably involved longingly counting down the days till either payday or the day we’d finally quit, which we’d promise ourselves was soon, really soon. Some of us liked the graveyard schedule, too—stepping into the shower just as the chicken adobo for dinner had started to settle in our stomachs, leaving the house as the parade of primetime telenovelas began, and encountering the exhausted home-bound populace aboard trudging jeepneys and buses.
After Brock’s huddle, for lunch some of us made a beeline to the condemned, unfinished high-rise in front of GT Tower a block away. The building, one of the many casualties of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, used to be dark and closed off by rusty, vine-swathed GI sheets, with a huge “NO TRESPASSING” sign up front. A group of enterprising individuals (who must have had access to the right people at city hall) cleared the debris on the first floor and set up some tables and chairs. Voila! Instant food market. It was a hit. Around midnight, the army of call center employees along Ayala Avenue flocked to the stalls that sold everything from your usual chargrilled quarter-pounders to mutton and paneer masala, an unwitting hat tip to our Indian competitors. Only Phoebe, who sold contraband sandwiches and pasta from a huge box under her desk, seemed to be among the few agents unhappy with this discovery.
After half an hour of waiting, a table was finally vacated.
“Anyone saw Jasmine’s performance last night?” Philip asked, tearing a chapatti with one hand and scooping a hefty chunk of rubbery mutton.
“Is she the Hawaiian with the stupid thing—” Karen asked, plucking an imaginary hibiscus petal from her right ear.
Philip’s jaw dropped open for a moment, then he shrugged. “Yep, that’s her.”
“What a god-awful performance,” Sharon said.
As vaguely racist company brochures and government propaganda put it, one strength of Filipino call center agents was our “cultural affinity with the west.” So of course we followed American Idol. We had all seen Jasmine’s abysmal performance. We looked at Philip to register the tediousness of this subject, and could he please leave us alone with lunch, which, for a change, wasn’t from our friendly neighborhood Subway on the third or the McDonald’s across the street. Tonight it was classic Filipino fare: tapsilog for Alvin, sisig for Karen, and San Mig Light and Marlboros for Macky. He took a furious drag at his cigarette, held his breath, coughed a little, then blew smoke that gingerly drifted to the open air.
There was a stony chill adrift all over the floor, around which call center people noisily loitered. The colorful parade of shirts and jeans was jarring against the drab grays, the chipped cement walls and pillars, the PVC pipes and steel bars that protruded in random spots, on which some shrewd vendors hang things like plastic bags and idle rags.
“Guys, guys,” Karen said, lip-pointing to the direction of a graffiti-covered wall dimly lit by far-off spotlights.
Mitch, the unflawed Madonna in our section, looked to be buying something from a manically undermanned dessert
stall, her neon ID lace bright amid the marbled smoke from the nearby barbecue grills. She dropped what appeared to be a slice of cake and erupted in giggles, hand darting to cover her mouth. She bent down and picked up the cake and handed it to the confused vendor, who had no choice but to receive the crumbled slice. In the hilarity, Mitch tilted her head and saw us, at which point she lifted a sticky hand for a chocolate-stained wave.
“Aren’t you batchmates?” someone asked.
Alvin nodded. “She’s OK,” he said. “Just really, well, happy.”
We waved back, in varying degrees of languor.
“Let’s go?” someone suggested. We pushed our chairs back and picked ourselves up.
“Jasmine wasn’t in her element,” Philip said, above the steady buzz of conversation at the Lung Center, the Pangaea where on-break agents amassed from all over the building. “Just imagine having to do disco when you’re used to doing ballads and Whitney Houston. I mean, she probably has too much Pinoy blood in her. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Somebody shut him up,” Sharon said, puffing smoke to her right.
We looked elsewhere.
“Dibidi, dibidi?” Macky said in his always-handy Indian accent, a horrible imitation of one of the many Indians peddling pirated DVDs in pop-up stalls in Greenhills and Quiapo or weaving through public markets astride beat-up Suzukis to collect 5–6 loan payments. In one corner of the Lung Center, Himmat was smoking on his own by the ATM terminals, back turned away from the multicolored glare of bank logos. He managed the airline reservation account next to our area; his patch of ceiling was crowded with 747s and A320s dangling from strings like piñatas. He wore a gray turban with his gray suit, coordinated and dapper; the turban, however, tragically conformed to the bumbay stereotype that our parents had used to scare us as kids. “Come here and eat,” they would hiss, trying to pry us from Dragon Ball Z and Power Rangers , “sige, the bumbay will get you, you’ll see.”
“Por gibs, por gibs,” Philip said.
The racist indoctrination obviously worked.
UTelCo had centers in Bangalore, New Delhi, and Ahmedabad, wherever that was; it wasn’t uncommon for us to get a call from someone who sounded unambiguously Indian introducing herself as “Chloe Smith.” “How are you doing today?” Indian Chloe would ask, then explain that she had a customer on the line who had been routed to their site by mistake. Without thinking, we would imagine someone in a colorful sari, who resembled Miss Universe ’94 Sushmita Sen, only darker, less statuesque, so different from us and our mixed Chinese and Malay blood, our acid-washed Levis and fake Lacoste shirts, but who, like us, had read the same ring-bound Manual for UTelCo Customer Care Associates and memorized the same spiels.
“I wonder what’s underneath the turban,” Karen said.
“I have a wild guess,” Alvin said, giving her the side eye.
Himmat flung his cigarette butt into a nearby trash bin and made his way back to the building. We took that to be our cue to wrap up our own post-meal cigarettes, and we followed him across the lobby to the elevator.
“I just knew that disco would be her Achilles’ heel,” Philip said, as we stepped inside the elevator. “I knew it. But she can’t be eliminated, right? I mean, we always win these stupid popularity contests.”
Thirty-second—our floor—was already pressed and lit when a leather shoe stopped the doors from closing.
“You need a US phone line to vote,” Karen said. “Our loyal armies of bored housewives and unemployed druggies can’t just—”
“What needs a US phone line?” Brock asked, wedging his torso in between the mishmash of bodies. He took a sip from his Starbucks cup and nodded at Himmat, his question hanging in the air as the car started its ascent.
“The druggies are not unemployed,” Sharon pointed out. “They’re part of the informal economy, hello.” She paused. “I took up pol sci, so I know.”
We wondered if the elevator’s thorough sluggishness was only in our imagination.
When we got to our floor, Philip pulled us to one side.
“Listen,” Philip whispered. He just remembered something, he said. A long time ago, he discovered a way to log off from the system without being detected. After a call, instead of hitting Next onscreen, as call flow demanded, he pressed the plunger of the physical phone and got a dial tone. “In the system, it would say Wrapping, not Logged Off.”
“What are you suggesting?” we asked.
Philip checked his surroundings. “Well, there’s five of us and four more hours left in our shift—”
We disengaged from the mutinous huddle and started walking back to our stations.
“Hey—” Philip called out, trying to keep up.
We kept walking. Back at our stations, prompted by the family photos that decorated our bays, some of us remembered the younger brother in college, the overdue life insurance premium, the parents in a faraway hometown by the sea.
“Log in now, guys,” Brock called out from his temporary station near our spine. “We’re queuing—”
That was our signal to steel ourselves, not so much for One of Those Callers that dependably lurked in the queue—we could always handle those—but for the simple truth that anything short of Lucifer calling in to inquire about our long-distance rates was probably not enough to make us quit.
Speaking of the devil, we watched Mitch reposition her mic and massage her neck, talking in the same firm voice that neither shook nor cracked even when her caller shouted and called her names. Every now and then, she would nod gravely, as if the person from across the Pacific could see her dogged earnestness.
Four hours later, at 8 AM sharp—5 PM in California—Brock walked over to the middle of the floor and, with a couple of claps, called out, “Last call, everyone! Last call!” There was sporadic applause, some mechanical utterances of joy and relief. He then walked over to our spine. “As for you guys,” he said, “please head over to Training Room B, thanks.”
25
I f this were Survivor ,” Philip said as we made our way to the training room across the floor, “we can just vote Mitch off the island.” His voice then hiked to a falsetto. “‘Do we have to be there, Brock, or is it just the offenders?’ What a big cu—”
“Instead of snuffing her torch,” Macky said, “someone can break her headset in half.”
“I like that,” Philip said.
“Why not vote Brock off the island?” Alvin asked.
“Brock is Jeff Probst,” Karen said.
“Brock is CBS,” Philip said.
Brock walked in just then. We looked at each other, straightening up in the hard plastic seats. If the company couldn’t afford a trainer, moving its business back to Naperville couldn’t be far behind, could it? We hated our jobs, sure, but a client pull-out was not the way to go. Pull-outs were scary. They were embarrassing. They spoke ill of our talent, the God-given gift of the blessed Filipino race.
“Fack,” Sharon whispered.
“You’re doing the workshop, Brock?” Mitch asked.
“Uh huh,” Brock said. “Is there a problem?” He clicked on the link to his presentation once, twice, but his desktop remained frozen on the white screen. The series of clicks soon turned into violent abuse of office property, first as his index finger went amuck on the helpless mouse, then later as the helpless mouse was repeatedly smashed against the helpless desk.
“So, stress,” Brock began above the din, “sometimes we become so used to it—”
“Should we call IT?” Philip asked.
“Nope,” Brock said. He stopped and loudly exhaled. “Karen,” he called out, “can you take a look at this? How did you, like last time—”
Karen, as far we knew, was a biochemistry graduate who typed five words per minute using two maltreated index fingers. She came to Brock’s side and leaned in to look at the laptop monitor. She typed something on the keyboard, her breasts, we noticed, just ever so slightly touching the American’s shoulder. It was the function of
our mute, routine-bound lives that we were attracted to the slightest indiscretion so some of us maliciously narrowed our eyes, vowing to ask Karen later if this was part of her scheme and to applaud her if it was.
Were they downsizing the IT department as well, the overwrought among us wondered, as Brock looked up from his laptop to share a private joke with Karen. The computer acquiesced moments later, and the PowerPoint file burst into the screen. “There you go,” he said with a sigh. “Thanks, Karen.”
“You bet,” Karen said, walking back to her seat, unbothered by our searing glares.
Brock cleared his throat. “We start off with a useful acronym—”
Onscreen, set against a blood-red template, floated the letters P-E-R-A. Money .
We chuckled. No, we howled. For when were we less stressed than on the two days a month when, in the wee hours of the morning, raucous cheering erupted from some corner of the floor, bearing news that our above-minimum-wage pay had been credited to our payroll accounts?
Paydays and American Holidays. Our favorite Carpenters song.
“Settle down,” Brock called out. “OK, so P is for ‘Prepare.’ There are factors that make you more susceptible to stress that are under your control. For example, your attitude—”
Brock had gotten to “A” for “Adjust” an hour later when Alvin felt a tap on his shoulder. Mitch, who was sitting next to him, lowered her head and leaned closer. She showed him the supple underside of her arm, skin so pale the veins looked like fossilized worms. “Can you?” she whispered. “I’m not going to make it.”
The whites of Mitch’s eyes, Alvin saw, were red and watery.
“Again?” he asked. “You sure?”
She nodded.
Alvin ran a hand down her arm, squeezing gently here and there, until he picked a spot somewhere in the middle and, with a nervous force, pinched an inch of skin.