The Thing on the Shore (9 page)

Anyway, Yasmin's pad of paper didn't have any information on it at all. It was for doodling only. It wasn't that Yasmin didn't pay attention to customers speaking on the phone, or didn't make sure to remember what they were telling her. Her doodling was completely automatic, and required none of her pretty formidable brainpower, so she was able to focus all of that on the customer at hand. About sixty percent of the customer advisers working there doodled like this, too. Most of Yasmin's doodles ended up full of ears and mouths and wires. Pointed ears, that is, and impossibly plump lips, and thick black biro wires that snaked out all over the page. About halfway through each shift, she'd find the outer edges of her hands leaving big smudges across her desk, and see that they were covered in ink from leaning on the densely populated paper. A lot of the other customer advisers would, without thinking about it, draw ships and sea monsters.

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.

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 down 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.”