The inner secrets of working in a call centre

If you don’t die of boredom. the talking will do you in


Don’t let BBC3’s documentary, The Call Centre, fool you into thinking call centre jobs are all fun and games. Believe me, I fell for it as well. The truth is, the act of sitting in a chair. Staring at your computer screen and waiting for someone to pick up the phone is undeniably the most boring thing you can do (I know, shocker). There isn’t any of the stuff you see on the TV show. No hilarious banter that lasts the whole shift, hardly any fun incentives to make you hit your targets and certainly no tea lady learning to become a masseuse so she can give everyone a massage while they work. But you might see some of these things: 

The relief of knowing your shift is over

When you see people walking through the door, and you see the look of dread on their face because they’re just starting their shift, as mean as it sounds, you can’t help but grin and become the happiest person in the room because you know your long shift is finally nearly over. Miraculously, your voice on the phone becomes bubblier, more polite and extremely excited. Even when a customer is rude af or you call someone and they tell you to ‘fuck off you twat’, you’ll still keep that positive tone and thank them for their time.

But, it’s not always happiness that comes alongside the end of a shift. If you’re one of 0.000001 per cent who experience bad luck in every aspect of their lives (me), then you’ll almost always get stuck with a call in the last minute of the shift, incidentally keeping you longer than necessary.

The endless attempts to stop the boredom

From my experience, the ways to pass the time since I started working in a call centre have become more and more adventurous and carefully designed than ever before. When I first started, the usual eyespy or grabbing a piece of scrap paper and drawing on it would usually do the trick. But when winter came and the days got shorter and darker, that would not be enough to ignore that you went to work in the dark and left in the dark. Now, I see people covering the time on their computer screens, walking around their desks whilst on a call and writing notes about absolutely nothing (or maybe they’re writing a novel). I even witnessed a couple of people coming in with a colouring book and a pile of felt tips, and I have to say that it was a very inspirational move and I’ll be doing the same.

‘The system is down. You can go home if you want’

Seeing ‘ready’ on your computer screen and not hearing a ringing sound from your headset is probably one of the best feelings in the world. Of course, you start to pray that the system can’t start up again so they can send you home. The feeling is so overwhelming that even though you booked so many shifts that week because you’re in dire need of money, knowing you can go home makes you forget about all that and happily accept the early finish. But, when that office phone shrills and the supervisor utters ‘okay thank you so much’, you just know that the forces weren’t on your side that day. No feeling matches that of knowing there was a possibility to go home and not being able to.

So, as you can tell, working in a call centre isn’t an easy job. Not because it requires any special sort of skills but because you need some sort of motivation to sit there at a desk and answer calls for the whole day. The optimists try to make the best of the job, the pessimists complain all day and the pragmatists find the most creative ways to pass the time.