Calls Waiting

A vignette by Trevor Mendham

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives).

Calls Waiting

by Trevor Mendham

“And is there anything else I can help you with today? OK, thanks for calling this morning. Have a good day.”

As he reached for the disconnect button, Andy glanced up at the ‘Waiting Calls’ counter on the wall opposite his cubicle. It was showing sixteen, a nice small number. With twenty people manning the phones he might even get a few minutes of peace every now and then if it continued to be a quiet day. That was the advantage of working in a call centre for a relatively small company. In some of the bigger places you never stopped all day and they timed your toilet breaks. Here it was still hard work but at least things were more civilised. Even the shift supervisor, Derek, wasn’t too bad.

Andy pressed the button to connect him to the next caller and the ‘Waiting Calls’ number dropped down to fifteen. “Thank you for waiting, my name is Andy. How can I help you today?”

The voice on the other end was slow and muffled, a bit difficult to hear clearly. But Andy had been doing this job for a long while, understanding different accents and styles of speech was one of the skills you picked up. You had to be able to understand everybody from a confused Cornishman to an irate Aberdonian. Eyes half closed in concentration he listened.

Mentally cutting through the fluff of the customer’s long winded description he could tell it was the same problem as ninety per cent of callers — the guy couldn’t access his online account. It almost always ended up being a PICNIC situation — Problem In Chair, Not In Computer. Either the customers forgot their password or simply couldn’t type the keys in the correct order. Of course you couldn’t tell them they were idiots! You just expressed sympathy and initiated a quick password reset. Then they’d either grudgingly acknowledge everything was working or thank you so profusely it was embarrassing.

“I’m sorry to hear that Sir, I’m sure I can sort it out for you. If I can have your surname? Great. And the account number? Fantastic.”

He typed the details into his screen, pulled up the customer information details and frowned. Now that definitely wasn’t normal. He’d probably been given the wrong number, that happened sometimes. Once a customer had given his telephone number instead of the account number and then blamed Andy for the mistake!

“Sorry sir, can I just check the first line of your address?”

That checked out correct. No doubt about it, he was looking at the right customer screen. Well this was interesting; he hadn’t had this one before. Andy knew that if the customer was in a bad mood he could be in for an earful. Best try to keep the mood light and be apologetic from the start.

“I’m really sorry about this Sir, but it looks like a foul up with our computer system. According to this... well, your account’s been suspended because...” He paused but couldn’t think of any other way to put it: “Well, apparently you’re dead! In fact, the computer thinks you died six months ago! Obviously a problem at our end, I’m extremely sorry. The wonders of modern technology, eh?”

He listened to the response and frowned, then asked the customer to repeat himself again. It wasn’t that he hadn’t understood the customer’s words, just that those words made no sense.

“I see. Can you just bear with me one moment Sir? Thank you.”

Andy put the customer on hold then swivelled round in his seat and waved to Derek who was walking the floor. The supervisor wandered over.

“Andy? What’s the problem?”

“It’s a strange one. The customer is locked out of his account but it’s not an authentication failure. The system says he’s dead.”

“As long as he pays his bills on time I don’t really care, but I suppose we should sort it out. Database must be screwed up, someone probably entered the wrong status code. But you’ve been here long enough to know how to fix that.”

“Sure, but I don’t think that’s it. When I told him what was going on he said that the computer was right. He was dead, that’s why the account was closed. But now he’s not dead any more and he wants the account reactivated.”

Derek groaned. “Bloody jokers. Probably still drunk from last night and thinks this is hilarious. Don’t they know we’re trying to do a job here? Give me that, I’ll sort him out.” Derek put on the headset and reconnected the call. “Good morning Sir,” his voice switched into silky professional mode. “I’m Derek the Supervisor here. My colleague tells me there’s a slight problem with your account. Yes, I... Sorry? Could you speak a little more clearly? I couldn’t catch that?”

Derek turned to Andy and passed back the headset. “You’re better than me at understanding them. What’s he saying?”

Andy took the headset and listened for a few seconds. “Did you say... Hello? Hello?” He turned back to Derek. “He hung up. I’m not sure what he was on about, I thought he muttered something about brains.”

“Derek!” a voice called from another phone station across the room, “I’ve got a woman here who says she can’t get into her account because she’s been dead!”

“Same here!” called another operator.

Andy looked up at the Waiting Calls display. It was up to eighty five and climbing rapidly.

It was going to be a long day.

The End

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Author’s Notes:

This story first appeared in my self-published collection Rest In Fear.

I was just wondering how the zombie apocalypse - or at least, the dead rising - will affect people going about their daily lives without knowing it’s happening. A call centre seemed the best place to find people who were in constant contact with the rest of the world yet totally removed from it. Early titles for this story included ‘Call Zentre’ and ‘Customer Zero’, unfortunately both of those gave too much away.

Who will the dead guy call next? Maybe the local takeaway to order some brains…