by Ember Flint
And do you want to know with how many raving lunatic asshats like you I’ve had to deal with today?
Take a fucking wild guess, moron.
Now let’s repeat step five, just to poke the beast some more…
I wonder how long before this jackass asks to speak with a manager.
Shit, if I ever come upon the idiot who wrote the fucking ‘steps to perfect customer service’ I’m gonna wring their neck till their eyes pop out.
“Sir, again, there’s no need to yell like this. If only you would tell me what you need, I—”
“That’s it! A fucking monkey could do this job better than you, slut! You’re probably good to be under a desk, not behind one… I want to speak with your manager right now!”
And now for the final blowout…
“I’m sorry, sir, unfortunately the managers are not allowed to deal with calls and—”
More obscenities leave his mouth, mostly four-letter words, as I try with all my might not to scream at him, burst into tears or a combination of the two.
Then the line goes dead and I exhale, pulling my headphones off and dropping my head over my arms, my entire body trembling in suppressed rage and stress.
I wish I could say this guy was my worst customer ever, but the truth is I’ve heard worse.
I rapidly chat that I’m taking a bathroom break and leave my little, uncomfortable swiveling chair —ergonomic my ass!— behind.
As I walk, I try not to listen to the buzz of all the phone calls going on around me.
I don’t even hear the words anymore, it’s all just noise.
I can hear someone quietly crying from one of the cubicles, but it’s difficult to say which one. The truth is it could be just about anybody, man or woman.
This job is harrowing and it really fucks up with your brain.
I hear ‘the’ ringtone go off and I jump in place, it’s not specific to this company, but because of its shrill, drilling quality it’s not one a sane person would use on their own phones, so every time my poor brain hears it even out of this fucking building it sends a clear message to my body that makes me tense up nervously in a fight-or-flight response that I rationally know it’s completely disproportioned to the stimulus, but still I can’t escape.
Shit, I’m so damn tired!
I slink down the hall, rubbing my itching eyes and slip in the restroom unnoticed, not because I don’t meet anyone that I know while I walk, or because I have no friends around here —I do—, but because everybody is looking at their shoes, depression and stress dogging every one of their steps as they wander slowly back to —or from— their cubicles, trying to make it last so they don’t have to pick up another damn call.
We don’t socialize much unless it’s lunch-time, that’s when we start to breathe again and act like people, before then, we are exactly what they treat us like: human answering machines repeating a broken record.
I walk up to the sink and splash my face with cold water, feeling a momentary sense of relief, then I push my back against the wall and just stand there.
I don’t need to pee. I just need to be in a place where no stupid phone goes off every two fucking seconds for five minutes.
In a different kind of office, doing a different kind of job, with the way I am — mom says I’ve never met a stranger in my life— I would be off somewhere speaking with my friends, drinking steaming cups of green tea when it’s cold and iced cans of lemon one in sweltering weather like this, but being a tech customer service consultant for this soulless huge multinational has sucked that kind of spontaneous reactions out of me and now until I’m out of here and even afterward, for at least a couple of hours, the last thing I want to do is talk to people.
Like I said, I hate this job and I’m actively searching for a new one. I’ve been here for less than six months and I’m already starting to burnout big time. I don’t want to think what being here long-term could do to me; this shit really takes its toll on people.
Sure, the pay is okay, but no kind of money is worth this much stress, thank you very much.
I don’t like being this jittery day in day out, let alone being this morose and sulky all the time.
The knowledge that this is an in-between job is the only thing that keeps me from really losing my shit.
Besides, this is not the kind of position I studied for.
I have an MBI, informatics used to be just a hobby for me and when I got this job I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.
Answer phone calls and deal with people that are far away and have technical issues that I was sure I would be more than well-trained to solve.
How difficult could that be, right?
It turns out, it’s pretty darn difficult all in all.
Most of the issues are in the customer’s head and for those that are actually real, the training was super lousy so us consultants can do jack about them, oh and then there’s my favorite part: being yelled at and insulted without the possibility to defend myself for eight hours straight, five days a week and sometimes even on the weekends.
I sigh, thinking back to my beloved PA job.
I got it after an internship I started during my last year of college and it was fantastic: great hours, great pay and an amazing boss who taught me everything that he knew and never tired of my incessant pestering of him with two-thousand questions a day.
Mr. Hudson was this grandfatherly type businessman that owned a gorgeous oceanside hotel here in Miami and I loved working with him, he treated me like a daughter more than a simple assistant and when he decided to retire last year and sold his hotel to a big five-star hospitality chain, he made stipulations for me to stay on in as close a capacity as possible.
It took my new boss, Mr. Saunders, all of two months to drive me to quit, not surprising, since he is widely known as ‘the leering pig bastard’.
After I left that position I worked for my brother’s company, Silver Constructions, for a while, but it didn’t work out.
Cole and I are very close, Monica-and-Ross-as-adults kinda close, and I love him just as much as he loves me, but damn the guy is so protective that he is practically half a step from being suffocating!
He was driving me insane while I was his PA being a ‘helicopter-brother’ and threatening every poor man that happened to give me a look that lasted more than three seconds flat.
And good luck to me every time I tried to explain to him that with a place crawling in construction workers needing to speak with the big kahuna there were bound to be men coming over to my desk to speak with me since I was his PA, but no, for my brother I’m still five-year-old when it comes to guys and protecting me from them.
Ugh.
He is the same with our mom and no matter how much we tried, we haven’t managed to get him to take his well-intentioned nose out of our businesses yet.
Cole takes his role of protector very seriously, always has and probably always will.
Our father was a cop and he died on the line of duty when my brother was only eight and I was just a newborn baby. Mom told me that the last thing daddy did was name me, Elliot, like his best buddy who had saved his life and lost his own a few years back. He and mom had one of those love stories for the ages and marrying again was never an option for her, so Cole has been the ‘man of the house’ since he was a child.
When I was eight and big meanies pulled my hair it was cool to have him come to my defense and scare the crap out of the bullies, now that I’m twenty-four it’s not that cool — or that cute.
Still, I love him and he is the best brother ever, so I did the only thing that I could when I started to feel like I was going to lose my shit and end up strangling him: I quit and one month later, when all of my savings went to fix the Mesozoic-old A/C in my tiny apartment —my brother, as always, offered to pay for the repair, but I refused—, this gem of a job in customer service was the only thing I could find in such short notice.
I step away from the wall and slowly walk to the door, I barely manage to open it before my cell starts to vibrate in my pocket.
I fish it out and look at the screen.
I smile when I see I have a text from my BFF, Cali.
Cali: “R U busy? I need 2 talk 2 you.”
I take a look at the time and decide to call her instead of texting. It will save me some time.
She answers on the first ring.
“Hon, you’re never going to believe this!”
There’s a happy smile in her voice that immediately pulls at my own lips and they stretch in my first genuine grin of the day.
“What? And please tell me it’s good news. I need some good news, babes.”
She sighs, her voice darkening. “Did some asshole scream at you again?”
“Yeah,” I grumble.
“Well, this will help then, ‘cause I don’t have good news…”
I frown. “Uh?”
“I have great news, potentially wonderful news even! Guess what?! I just heard about an opening for a PA position here on the Key that would be just perfect for you!”
My heart picks up speed at that, my smile growing bigger by the second.
Keep your feet on the ground, Ellie.
“Is there?” I ask, barely managing to contain my hope.
“Yeah. You would be a personal assistant to one of the resort’s executives… some guy from New York who’s coming over to Puesta del Sol. Something about checking that everything runs smoothly…”
Cali works as an assistant decorator in this beautiful ritzy resort that belongs to some huge multinational chain of hotels –Broderick, I think it’s called.
They have buckets of money and own the entire island where the resort stands.
My best friend has been there for the last eight months or so and she loves it there, both professionally and personally; the way she talks about the place makes it sound like some summer getaway from a fairytale.
I sigh shakily in excitement. “Oh my God, Cali, that would be like my dream job!”
And I could get it!
My former employer was in the same type of business, after all. So not only I have experience as a PA, but I know one thing or two about the workings of a hotel.
“I know! I figured you would be perfect! Especially if you get a letter from Mr. Hudson, that old dude loved you!”
I jump in place a little, feeling the stress of the day slide off. “Do you know anything more about this position?”
“Plenty! First of all, you would start right away. It’s a temp position but—”
“Oh…”
My smile falls a little, still even a temp job in freaking paradise is better than working here anyway…
“No need to ‘oh’, El, listen: this exec guy will be spending the next three months on site, so you would be working up until November in the office of this person, then he would go back to New York and for the three following months your role would transfer to an office manager capacity while you work with the exec from afar.”
“So it’s a six month’s position, not bad,” I muse out loud.
“It gets better! If the exec likes you — and why wouldn’t he, babe?!— your position as office manager will turn permanent…”
“That would be awesome, Cal!”
“Yup, but even if he turns out to be a jerk and doesn’t like you—”
I nod along as she talks and finish for her. “I would still have had a better job than my current one for six months…”
“Exactly! And you haven’t heard the best part yet! This PA job not only comes with a better pay and benefits than what you told me you have in that rotten place, but it also comes with living arrangements and utilities included, just like mine!”
Meaning I not only would be able to ditch my over-priced, pint-sized home in Miami —I used to share it with Cali before she moved to the Key to work at the resort and I have been reluctant to search for another roommate, but living alone has started to be very costly lately—, but I also would get to live on this stunning island and spend time with my two best friends in the whole world, Cali and her sister Fay, since they both work there.
My smile gets so big it hurts my face.
“That’s fantastic!”
“We can put the gang back together!”
“Yay!”
We haven’t been all in the same place for years.
Cali and I have been best friends for the last six years, since we were randomly assigned to share a room in our dorm in college. She was studying interior design and I was studying business, two more different girls couldn’t exist, but we became inseparable from the start, she is my sister from another mister, and when I met her younger sister a year later, I felt the same about her.
Four years ago, we even tried to make the ‘sister thing’ official.
My mom hasn’t dated at all since daddy died and Cali’s mom passed away when she and Fay were kids after a long sickness and their dad, Lucas, has been alone ever since, so we threw this Christmas party with the sole purpose of getting them together.
I mean, they’re both widowers, they are roughly the same age and they both teach —mom, third-grade math, and Mr. Willson, science in high school— so we figured they would be perfect for each other, but they didn’t hit it off, not as a couple at least. Still, our attempt at matchmaking wasn’t a complete failure, because those two really have a lot in common and since that night have become the best of friends and always spend time together, so we did manage to get them to be less lonely and keep each other’s company, only not in a way that could make us ‘sisters’.
Cali and I were roommates all through college and for more than a year after graduation, but then she got the job on Puesta del Sol and moved there.
For a few months Fay lived with us after she finished high school early, but then she moved to Daytona Beach to study veterinary and she’s been there for the last four years so we don’t get to see each other much.
Fay’s about to start her post-grad degree and needed some money ‘cause she doesn’t want to live in a dorm anymore and Calista got her this temp job as a beautician and aromatherapist in the spa of the resort. She’s gonna be there until mid-September when she will have to move to Gainesville to start school again.
If I get this job, it would be the first time ever the three of us are firmly in the same place for more than a few days in years.
“I haven’t told you the bestest part yet,” Cali says, a laugh in her voice.
“Wasn’t it what you just said?”
“Nope. The bestest part is that the person who’s doing the hiring is a friend of Adele, my boss, that’s how I found out about the job in the first place…”
“And?” I ask, my voice sounding a little bit like Theodore the Chipmunk in my impatient hope.
“And she’s this super-cool old lady, Regina. She’s some kind of exec from the Big Apple as well, but she’s very friendly and down-to-earth and she’s always nice to me, so I actually talked about you with her and well— I can’t promise anything, but she really seemed to like what I said. You’re scheduled for an interview tomorrow afternoon and I will be texting you an email shortly so that you can send Regina your résumé and all your qualifications and whatnot…”
“Oh, Cal, I can’t believe you did that! You’re the best! Thank you so much!”
“No need to thank me, sweetie. You would have done the same for me.”
She’s absolutely right: there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for her.
“This is so amazing!”
“It is, now you have a reason not to let those bastards get to you today, hon. Every time they yell shit at you, you go up in your head and scream: ‘I’m almost done with this bullshit, sucker!’ Or better yet, just accidentally on purpose drop the fucking call!”
We both laugh at that.
I
hope she’s right.
I really, really hope, she’s right: I’ll go postal if I have to spend another month here.
—*—
“And you’re sure it’s legit?” my brother asks.
I snort into the phone. “Paranoid much?! Of course it’s legit. I got the interview through Calista, besides we’re talking the Broderick Conglomerate here, not some shady little crook business,” I whisper, looking around, still in awe of my surroundings.
I think my jaw has been doing little but hanging since I stepped out of the bus. This place is beyond-words-stunning.
“And you’d be the PA of whom exactly?”
I shrug and take a sip of my iced lemon tea. “Don’t know yet, some hotshot exec from New York.”
Cole grumbles. “I don’t know about this, Sis…”
I roll my eyes, lowering the glass back on the counter of the bar. “You never know about anything, Cole, that’s your thing. If it were up to you, I would be still at home playing with dolls under mom’s supervision.”
He chuckles. “You never played with dolls, you little monster. You’ve been giving me fits since you were three and already trying to climb trees.”
I giggle. “Only because I was trying to follow you up there, Brother dear.”
“When is this interview anyway?”
“In ten minutes or so. I was a bit early. Cole, seriously: can you try to be happy for me and stop being overprotective for five minutes?”
“Sure… to the first part, not in this life time, to the second, little mite.”
“You’re such a big lug,” I grouse, but I’m smiling.
I give him shit about always sticking his nose in my business, but the truth is that the knowledge that he’ll always have my back is a great comfort to me. He doesn’t need to know it, though.
“Can’t you be positive for a minute?! I’m very excited about this, Cole. Think of what getting this job could mean to me. First of all, I wouldn’t have to answer three-thousand phone calls per day like a robot anymore, then I’d get to spend time with my friends in a picture-perfect summer resort.”