Dollars Per Hour Chapter 8

    And, of course, that’s what I do.

    I made the excuse that I was too hung over to go present myself for new employment. I slept in, went straight to work with no breakfast, and walked in ten minutes late. Kurt and Chloe were already there, and I was stuck with the same seat I had on Sunday, right next to my manager, Sarah, so I need to be cautious and watch what I say on every call, on the off chance she is listening.

    The day is uneventful prior to first break, the usual lot of casual complainers whom I dissuade by making my apathy as obvious as possible. The worst I get prior to break is an elderly man telling me about his life, and gets upset when I try to cut in or progress the conversation in any way.

    I get to break before Kurt or Chloe, and find Alicia reading Slaughterhouse 5 at one of the back tables. I take it upon myself to sit down with her. She looks up from the book and smiles. “Nice selection,” I say, tapping the cover.

    She closes the book and leans back in her chair.  “How are you today, Rubin?” she asks, brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes.

    “Oh, not bad. I had an exciting weekend of work, work, work, which seriously cut into my partying time, which, I suppose is a good thing, but I tend to disagree. But in the end, I survived.” I lean back and knit my fingers behind my head. “How’s your first day on the phones?”

    She sighs. “Not as bad as you set me up for, so I’m doing fine.” She giggles. “The people are so mean. I’m going to have to sharpen my wit or I won’t be able to survive.”

    “Just eat lots of red meat,” I say. “It sharpens that killer instinct, turns you into a remorseless predator. That’s my trick.”

    “Is that really true?” She is trying to sound sweet, naive, and serious, but I can’t miss the slight touch of sarcasm in her voice.

    “I have no idea, but it sounded good.” After Alicia laughs coyly, I shove all my guts into one sentence until the momentum is too great to turn back, and ask, “What do you say we go for a drink after work tonight?”

    She stops laughing, eyes narrowing slightly, a tiny puff of breath shoots out her lungs and her neck seems to droop a little bit. “A drink, yeah... Yeah, I think I would like that.” She stares at me for a second before the corners of her lips turn up in a tiny smile and she inflates just a hair. “That would be great.”

    I can’t repress a little sigh of unmistakable relief as I say, “Excellent.” I drum my hands on the table a few times and grin stupidly. “I know this great place downtown. They say it has the best juke box in town, anything you want to hear, it's on there. The place is called the Spot..."

    "I know the one," she says, grinning. "Four-dollar pitchers."

    "Cool," I drawl. "What do you say meet me there at 10:30."

    "Works for me."

    I'm done with break ten minutes later, and as I walk past her desk, Sarah glances up and waves her hand to stop me, lips pouting down in a doe-eyed scowl.  I'm pulling out my chair when she stands up and says, “Rubin, let’s go to the back room.” I read this very quickly. I’m not fired, because when you are fired, you are taken to the security office at the front of the building, so they can present the illusion that you can be easily controlled if you try to make a scene, and have one of the security guards throw a ring of keys or something intimidating like that. If they are taking you to the back room, you've done something bad, really bad, but not worthy of termination. I've probably got to listen to a call where I yawned, or told a customer to shut up, or something not really worth my having to listen to the sound of my own voice over again.

    To survive, you have to learn to recognize the subtle differences quickly. The managers assign disciplinary action based on the fear you emit. If you are worried that you might be fired, it means you have done something worthy of being fired for. The slightest twinge of guilt in my body language could send this entire misadventure swirling madly out of control.

    “I take it I’ve done something wrong,” I say nonchalantly as we walk between the rows of people chained to their seats, into the infernal shadow of the faux-oak door. "CONFERENCE ROOM 1" is emblazoned in white slightly above eye level to make you feel small.

    “Yeah, you did,” Sarah sighs, struggling to stay a half-step ahead of me, eyes fixed on the clipboard in her hand. “I feel horrible about this, Rubin, I really do.” She is unable to make eye contact with me. Without looking, she hands a packet of papers to me.

    She's awful broken up for just a bad call. She loves this kind of thing. I've seen her sitting at her desk, rubbing her hands and salivating at the opportunity to take someone back here and make us listen to our mistakes over and over again. "Is this the right call? Was that you? Did they say what I thought? Here, let me rewind that." She doesn't feel horrible, she lives for it. 

    She throws the door open and bashes on the lights, falling into the giant, faux-leather captain’s chair with the spikes on the top and grotesque  arm rests. I step meekly in behind her and slid into the hard, sharp-angled faux oak chair in front of the waist-high faux mahogany shelf that wraps around two walls of the 5x5 room that acts as a desk for the computer and single black phone that adorns the conference room.

    Sarah leans back slowly, delicately knitting her hands in the lap of her ebony skirt and crosses her knees. Just a hint of a smile twitches at the corner of her mouth as she leans forward in the still-reclined chair. “Do you, by chance, remember talking to Chip York?”

    She always starts like this. Do I remember this person? Do I remember talking to one nondescript  asshole out of the 200 assholes I talk to every day? Give me some specifics on the call, what I said, what he said, not his fucking name. Tell me ‘man who threatened to find me and fight me,’ and I might remember. Tell me, ‘woman who said I must be black, because no white person could be so stupid.’ Tell me, ‘man who started singing about how much he hated me,’ and then, maybe then, I might just remember the call. Feed me a name, I don’t fucking remember the person.

    Except, of course, Chip York.

    Chip, who put his birth date on his account as a security measure, so I knew he was 35 years old, still needed his mommy to call in about his account. Chip and his mommy were upset SpectraCom had the audacity to place a block on his long distance when he couldn't remember to pay his bill for three months, because, it seems, his mommy wasn't there to remind him. Now, mommy was taking charge, and laying the law out for me, the one who was truly at fault here.  Much to her chagrin, Chip's mommy wasn’t listed on the account, and she couldn’t give me any of the verification I needed to talk to her, and even though little Chip was standing next to her, she refused to put him on the phone to give me permission to speak with her. Finally, when mommy told him it was all right to get on the phone, Chip insisted that his payment was in the mail, and he wanted his long distance back immediately. I effectively told him, ‘Too bad, you screwed up, now you have to wait.’ That may or may not have been my exact phrasing, depending on who I'm admitting this story to. Chip told me that since I embarrassed him in front of his mommy, he was going to “Get even with me,” and hung up. I took down his name, address, phone number, and social security number, and didn’t think about it again until today.

    “No,” I tell her. “I don’t remember him at all.” I accidentally drum my finger on the packet of papers in my hand, snapping her eyes open wide as they drop down to stare at my clenched hands in my lap, nervously rolling the paper into a tight tube. I freeze, eyes fixed on hers as they stare wickedly. "I, uh... have no idea who he is."

    “Well,” she says with a regretful sigh. “He remembered you.” She pulls some papers of the clipboard and lays them gently on the table. “You spoke with him on the twentieth, and he made a complaint about you to the management in Customer Service that...” She pauses to read one of the papers. “'You repeatedly told him that you didn't care whom he talked to, there was no magical fairy that could come and wave her wand to turn on his long distance.'" She looks up from the papers and purses her lips, eyes working me over for a few seconds before adding, "Then you told his mother to shut up."

    “That's not what I said!"

    “I thought you didn’t remember the call,” she whispers with a sneer, leaning back in the deep black faux leather, tilting the massive chair back, like the hand of Kong tilting away from me.

    “I... I’m just assuming that... That I would never say anything of the sort!”

    “You might want to rack your brain," she hisses. "SpectraCom’s upper management received this and sent down the order to have you immediately terminated.”

    “What?!” I cry.

    “They told me about it last night after you left," she says, spinning in the chair to bang a few letters on the keyboard. "I came in an hour early just to fight this one for you," she sings. 

    Nervously, I unroll the packet of papers and look down at the termination papers she handed me in the office. “I’m fired?!” I moan. "How the hell can they fire me?

    “No," she sighs. "You’re not fired, that was what they told me to do, but I got them to reconsider. You’ve been making my team make our goals since you started. I’m not about to let you go that easily." She spins the captains chair around and leans forward, looking down on me like a raptor. "You owe me big for all I’ve done today,” she says with a chuckle. “I went to top management, brought out your whole record, your exemplary attendance, your high marks on all your monitoring, your amazing dollars per hour. They wanted you fired, and I got them to reconsider.”

    “I’m touched,” I say, still somewhat shocked. That, of course, means no unemployment for me, still have to work to get paid.

    “You should be. I was supposed to catch you before you even came through the door this morning and take your badge. I pulled out all the stops and talked them down to a verbal warning, and that’s it." She sinks back in the chair and it reclines gently. "However, if any further incidents are reported, you will face official disciplinary action and maybe even termination." Her lips twist up into a cruel smile. "We don't need to worry about that though, do we, Rubin?" She touches her fingertips together in a steeple on her lap.  “I told them I would personally work with you to make sure this never happens again, and I'm sure we won't." She tips the chair forward a few inches without moving her body. "We both know that most of the time these people are just lying to get you in trouble, don't we? I have the utmost confidence that when upper management is monitoring you, they will see that everything they have been told about you is completely untrue. But...” she says, leaning forward until she is almost touching me, “If anything happens, if you feel like any call is getting out of hand, put that person on hold and get your hand in the air. If I have to, I’ll take every one of your supervisor calls just to play it safe. You’re too good for us to lose, so I want to do everything in my power to keep you from getting fired.”

    I snort. “But I’m just a step away from the edge.”

    She sits motionless a moment, eyes set on mine, fingers entwined on her thighs, right corner of her lip twisted up in a dreadful sneer. “Don’t worry, Rubin, this isn’t that big of a deal, we’ll work through this and get everything improved."

    When you spend eight hours a day being told you are an asshole, being told you are a prick, being told you are a piece of shit, being told you are a fag, being told you are a cocksucker, being told you are a fucking dick, being told you are the bottom of the barrel, being told you are the scum of the Earth, being told you are the most vile thing alive, being told you deserve death, being told you're shit, being told that someone will be waiting outside for you after work, being told you're stupid, being told you're ignorant, being told you are a white piece of shit, being told you are a worthless nigger, being told you are just a slope, being told you are a spic, being told that a person you’ve never met hopes you die over something they did, being told your mother is a whore, being told your father is all of the above and below, being told you are going to Hell, being told you are worthless, being told the world hates you, being told your mother hates you, being told you are ugly, being told you are vermin, being told you are the lowest form of life, being told you are a bottom-feeder, being told you will be killed as soon as you walk out the door, being told you are a criminal, being told you are hundreds of other things every day, do you really want to work through this? Do you really want to treat people better? Do you really want to treat any customer with any respect if they aren’t spitting out their credit card number immediately? After deep consideration in those two seconds before I answer, I decide that no, no I don’t want to treat them like human beings, no I don’t want to be nice to them... no I don’t want to reform.

    “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I will get better. We'll work through this.”

    “That’s good, Rubin,” she says with a sigh, laying her hand on my shoulder. “You’re the best on my team and I don’t want to let you go. I’m glad you’re with me on this.”

    I leave the meeting with a profound sense of disgust for having gone this far, for letting myself sink to this abysmally low level of self-deprecation. Now, though, knowing that they have their eye on me, knowing that after six months of abuse that passed from the management to me to the customer, finally, I have spread enough pain to bring their attention to me.

    And this is not the end, either. They presented one thing against me. ‘Caution yourself, Rubin,’ they said to me today. Tomorrow, there will be something new, and suddenly, this will be a big deal, and the next day, my head will be on the chopping block. They think I’m stupid, they think I haven’t watched this happen.

    “What happened?” Kurt asks me when I sit back down. “What’s going on?”

    “The beginning of the end,” I say, draping my headset around my neck. I flip through the notebook on my desk and find Chip York’s address and phone number near the beginning. “The beginning of the end,” I repeat.

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