The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  Yasmin logged into the billing system, which was called Jupiter—for reasons nobody really understood. She accessed the call-logging system, which was named Tracker, and the system which connected the computer to the phone, which was called PhoneLink. After that, she logged into the online business encyclopedia, which was called Edison. She next logged into the company email system, and finally, she logged into a system which was like an email program, but about a million times slower and clunkier, which was used to send details of customer queries to other departments on especially formatted templates. This system was called NOM, or Net Object Management. Yasmin considered it a particularly crap piece of software, which was unfortunate because the job it did was absolutely crucial. But, there you go. Was that surprising? Not really. She counted down the seconds on the LCD screen of her telephone, took a deep breath and logged in just as the time hit 8:30.

  She immediately heard a beep in her earpiece, signifying a customer, and launched into her call opening.

  “Good morning, you’re though to Yasmin. Could I take your customer account number, please?”

  “What?” said the customer. She spoke with a Received Pronunciation kind of accent, but obviously had no manners.

  “Could I take your customer account number, please?” Yasmin repeated.

  “Where are you? Are you an Indian?” The customer’s tone was already curt.

  “No,” said Yasmin.

  “You don’t sound English.”

  “Do you have your account number there, please?”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  “This call center, you mean? It’s in Cumbria.”

  “Where’s that? Is that in England?”

  “Yes. You know where Sellafield is?”

  “Of course I do. Don’t you start patronizing me, young lady. I’ve read all about that terrible place.”

  “Well, that’s Cumbria.”

  “So you’re English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh good! I don’t want to waste my time trying to talk to those Pakis you people insist on employing.”

  “Please don’t use that kind of language or I’ll have to terminate the call.”

  “I see PC’s gone mad even up in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Do you have your account number or not?”

  “Yes! Just give me a chance to find it, if you don’t mind.” The customer tutted and huffed.

  After three or four calls, Yasmin started to get a feeling that she frequently experienced at work. It was the feeling that the fabric of this place was thin. Thinner than in other places. Part of it was down to the fact that inside the building you could really have been anywhere, because of the generic office accommodation—the bland décor, the horrible veneer-surfaced desks, the rows of humming computers. That always served to make Yasmin a little uneasy, because you weren’t anchored to anything solid or meaningful. The other major reason for the “thinness” was the nature of the work performed there. The baselessness of it. The sense of existing only at the end of a telephone. It made you feel a bit weird if you let it—if you thought about it for long enough. Yasmin always ended up thinking about the telephones. You ring somebody up, it doesn’t matter where they are, right, as long as they have a phone there with them. More so if you’re ringing a call center.

  The only people Yasmin and her colleagues ever really spoke to—the customers—couldn’t see them, so as far as the customers were concerned they were just voices coming through the wires. They weren’t living, breathing bodies in a town by the sea; they weren’t anywhere. They became almost nothing but words on the end of the line, for eight hours a day. Every fucking phone call is a kind of reduction, she thought. A reduction of me. The proportion of time I spend as just a voice is far too high. Every phone call tips that balance just a little bit—for me and for everybody else who works in these places.

  If you weren’t lucky enough to face the windows and be able to fix your eyes on something solid—the lighthouse was Yasmin’s favorite—then you could find yourself drifting in a susceptible state, and thus suffer a kind of vertiginous horror at the absence at the center of it all. You were somewhere in between. Between two companies. Between two phones. You could forget that you were here at all, she thought. And every phone call was a kind of puncture into your head. The beep that signified a new customer was a terrible sound, and it seemed to Yasmin to be the sound of something actually penetrating space; in its blunt, aural violence, it seemed to be indicating that a phone call was an invasion, was one place invading another. It was some kind of dart piercing the fabric. That’s why call centers are thin places, she thought. That’s why it feels thin. Because there are thousands of little needles arriving every day from other places, thousands of little needle voices, thrusting into our heads and into our lives and into our world. And they left holes just like pinpricks in a piece of paper. Letting the light through. Making it weak. This was something that she’d talked about with Arthur and Bony, on many hazy nights spent at the Vagabond. Arthur would always understand completely, nodding and grinning, and saying “Yes!” at various junctures, but Bony would just look blank. But then, that was Bony.

  “I’ve got two degrees,” said one customer who couldn’t understand her bill. “I doubt you’ve got any qualifications. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You stupid fucking bint,” said another caller, who didn’t seem to remember why he’d rung, or even whom he’d rung. “Fuck you.”

  The next call consisted of some kind of telephonic malfunction: it was another call adviser, assuming Yasmin was a customer, so both Yasmin and the other girl started following their scripts at the same time. A seagull flew into the window. The next call was another strange one. It was just static, really, but with a certain texture and depth that somehow made it a landscape of static. A difficult terrain of peaks and troughs and shadows. Somewhere in the distance there was a quiet voice—probably that of the customer—that sounded high and panicky, due to the bad line. It was slowly eclipsed by a high-pitched whistle of white noise that sounded like a train grinding to a halt. Yasmin winced and disconnected.

  She looked out of the window at the lighthouse. I’m not here, she thought. I’m somewhere else. I’m sitting in a tree in Lothlorien. I am discovering intelligent life on another planet. I am impressing everybody with my elegantly pointed ears. One of these days, she thought, I am going to develop some kind of real-world ambition. One of these days.

  DEAD WEIGHT

  Artemis stood in the meeting room, his hands behind his back, and stared at the cream-colored wall. His nose was wrinkled. The wall was covered with small blue and gray spots where Blu-Tack had either left a stain or pulled some paint off with it when removed. The wall looked dirty. It looked diseased. It looked disgusting. What kind of place was this? There were tatty, torn posters as well, depicting stacks of pound coins. Something to do with this year’s company targets. No, last year’s company targets. Artemis snarled and ripped one of them down.

  The room was the closest thing the workplace had to a boardroom, in that it was quite spacious and contained a long table, but it also seemed to serve as something of a storage area. Three or four flipcharts—devoid of actual paper—leaned against one wall, and there was an ancient acetate projector gathering dust in the corner. Boxes full of old posters were stacked up on the windowsill. Artemis screwed up the poster from the wall and shoved it into one of the boxes, not being able to see a bin anywhere in the room. He then pulled out one of the older posters. It was advertising some employee incentive, something about collecting cash from customers, and it looked as if the incentive had been themed around a contemporary blockbuster film release. Artemis wondered, idly, if Outsourcing Unlimited had paid to use the copyrighted logos, images and slogans. He doubted it. Interext never did. He looked out of the window, which faced out to the front of the building. There was a young girl sitting, smoking, on the steps leading up to the entrance. You weren’t supposed to smoke d
own there. He thought about knocking on the window and making threatening gestures at her, but decided against it because he could see right down her top from where he stood.

  There was a loud bang behind him as the door of the room flew open and smashed against the wall.

  “Oops,” said Bracket, stepping through. “Sorry. I always do that.”

  “Learn to move more gracefully,” said Artemis, without turning around. “Please.”

  “Am I the first?” asked Bracket.

  “Work it out,” said Artemis, finally turning around. “There’s nobody else here. You look tired.”

  “I always look like this,” Bracket said, as he sat down and started playing with his tie. He thought about telling Artemis to stop being so fucking rude, but instead kept his mouth shut.

  “Where are all of the others?” Artemis said.

  “On their way, probably,” said Bracket.

  “Should get here early,” said Artemis. “Managers should at least be able to manage their own time.” He turned to look out of the window again.

  Behind Artemis’s back, Bracket shook his head and rolled his eyes.

  Once all of the team managers had arrived and were seated around the table, Artemis turned away from the window to face them.

  “As you are all probably aware,” he said, “my name is Artemis Black. Interext have taken over the management of this operation at the behest of Northern Water, and they have made me responsible for it.” He thought about explaining that Interext had always owned Northern Water anyway, but didn’t. They might be easily confused. “There are going to be some radical changes, both in the way we serve our customers, and the way this place is managed. To be frank, I get the impression that bad habits have been allowed to flourish here, while good practice has been allowed to slide, simply because it’s so fucking remote.”

  “I don’t know if—” started Sally, a relatively new team manager with long straight blond hair, large skittish brown eyes, and a small pointed chin.

  “I don’t care what you don’t know,” said Artemis, “and it probably doesn’t matter. You know what ‘I don’t know’ did? Pissed the bed and blamed the blanket, that’s what.”

  “I thought that was ‘thought,’” Bracket said.

  “Is that a joke?” Artemis snapped. He placed his fists on the table and glared at Bracket.

  “No,” said Bracket, “I just mean … that’s what Mom used to say.”

  “This is exactly the kind of bollocks that I’m talking about,” Artemis replied. “‘That’s what Mom used to say,’ for Christ’s sake.” He turned again to the window, while behind his back the team managers raised their eyebrows at each other and mouthed the word “wanker.”

  Bracket cleared his throat. “So what are we going to do?” he asked.

  “You’re going to deliver to me exactly what I require,” Artemis said quietly. “I will set the standards and you will meet them. Is that understood? Before we get into the specifics, do you all understand that I cannot accept any half-measures or twatting about?”

  The team managers nodded their heads and murmured assent. Bracket couldn’t quite work out if they were actually overawed or just quietly contemptuous. God knows they weren’t easily impressed. Their present inscrutability made him proud to be Cumbrian.

  “Firstly, I want to see the call quality-assessment criteria,” Artemis said. “Bracket, that’s you, yeah?”

  “Yep,” said Bracket, nodding. “That’s me.”

  “We’re going to go through them, you and me, and raise the game. We need cash. We need lots of cash. We need to collect cash at every opportunity, and we need to weight the quality-assessment criteria to reflect that. We also need to look at the consequences of failure. It has to matter. People have to know when they’ve fucked up, or when they’re just not good enough. OK?”

  “OK,” said Bracket.

  “We also need to make sure the calls don’t last too long. The shorter the calls, the more customers we speak to, the more cash-collection opportunities we have. So we need to hammer them on average handling time. Kat—is that you?”

  “I’m the duty manager,” Kat said, uncertainly. Kat was short with a dark ponytail and glasses. She was pale, and had a limp.

  “You watch call volumes and can see the status of all of the phones, yeah?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you’re doing the hammering,” Artemis said, and scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Of course, we can’t forget about C-sat.”

  “C-sat?” Kat queried.

  “Yes,” said Artemis, and he looked up at the ceiling. He still held one of his massive hands by his throat. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what see-sat is.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “C-sat,” Artemis said, “as you all know, is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction—or C-sat—is an essential measure of our performance. We can’t forget about customer satisfaction.”

  “So the advisers here are simultaneously pushing for payment, keeping their calls as short as possible, and trying to ensure that all the customers are satisfied?” Bracket asked.

  “Yes,” said Artemis. “Don’t you think they’re capable? Are you telling me that they don’t have the right attitude? Actually, speaking of advisers, we need to lose a few—to save money.”

  “We’ve always focused on the … on the C-sat,” said Bracket. “In the past, we’ve found that the shorter the call, the less likely the customer is to be satisfied, because the issue won’t have been investigated thoroughly.”

  “To me that implies that the advisers are not of a high enough caliber,” said Artemis, staring down at Bracket.

  “They’re of a very high caliber,” said Bracket, feeling flushed. “But it doesn’t matter how high a caliber they are if they’re to be set two contradictory objectives. It just won’t work.”

  Artemis stared at Bracket for a moment longer. “We’ll take this offline,” he said abruptly. “We’ll park it. I want to see you after the meeting, Bracket. Just drop it for now. OK?”

  Bracket nodded. Suddenly ashamed of losing his temper, he couldn’t bear to make eye contact with anybody, so dropped his gaze to the table.

  “Did you say something about redundancies?” Kat asked Artemis.

  “Yes,” Artemis said. “Yes, I did. There will have to be redundancies. This ship is simply carrying too much weight, and some of it is dead. We have to dump that dead weight or we will sink. It is very simple.”

  “How will it be decided? And how many will have to go?”

  “I will decide,” Artemis replied, “based upon performance metrics. In two months’ time, the lowest-scoring twenty percent of the workforce will be dropped.”

  “Twenty percent?” Sally repeated faintly.

  “Yes,” Artemis confirmed.

  Bracket didn’t really want to hear any more. He found himself looking out of the window, his awareness of the meeting around him turned down to nothing. When, completely unexpectedly, the bright white sky started hurling raindrops like ball-bearings against the glass and Artemis jumped away from it and swore, Bracket reached a decision. He would just keep his mouth shut and do what he was told. He would stop caring about whether or not it worked. He would stop worrying. He would stop thinking altogether. These hours were not his, so why pretend otherwise?

  THE WAVERLEY

  Artemis waited at the call center for the rain to stop before making a break for it and heading back to the hotel. The night was cold and a sharp breeze blew in from the sea, causing the yachts in the marina to chatter and clack like loosely-boned skeletons.

  The Waverley Hotel was a 300-year-old building with an impressive Georgian façade that had been painted an unfortunate shade of beige. Artemis stood on the opposite side of Tangier Street and looked up at all four stories, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his long black coat. Some of the large rectangular windows were lit up, and the place looked extraordinarily welcoming beneath the rolling waves
of black cloud that broke across the dull silver of the sky above. He crossed the road and entered the lobby, barely glancing at the tall, sleek young woman on reception, and headed straight through to the bar.

  The carpet in both lobby and bar was red, mostly, featuring a busy pattern of large, interlocking diamonds. The chairs and bar stools were upholstered in red velvety stuff. The curtains were also red. The lower parts of the walls were paneled in some kind of dark wood, above which there was beige wallpaper. The bar was an almost perfectly square booth located right in the center of the square room. The gray-haired, smartly dressed man behind the bar nodded to Artemis.

  “A Midori and lemonade,” said Artemis. “A double Midori, actually.”

  The barman didn’t say anything as he prepared the drink. Apart from the two of them, the room was empty. Artemis counted out his change and placed it on the bar while he waited. Once his drink was ready, he picked it up and went and sat in a corner, placing his mobile phone on the table in front of him. He drank up quickly, wishing he’d thought to ask for a stirrer. By the time his phone rang, he’d nearly finished it but the thick liqueur was still mostly lying in the bottom of the glass, not having had the chance to affect him in the slightest. They were ringing him earlier than he expected. He had planned to be secure in the privacy of his hotel room. He measured his breathing, cleared his throat, then picked up his phone and answered it.

  “Artemis speaking,” he said.

  “Artemis,” responded the voice at the other end of the line. The voice was distorted by faint clicks and beeps, which sounded like the noises dial-up modems make when connecting. It was an old, phlegmy voice—not just croaky but rough and animalistic. “We believe we are communicating with the Interstice. Expect contact.”