I switched ears today. I always wear my headset on my left ear, but it started hurting yesterday and so I figured it was time for a change. A filter was lifted, some static cleared out of the line. I could hear the echo of my own voice in the speaker of the customer’s phone, a hollow echo of my self reflected in some random irish household a hundred times a day. 117 times today, in actual fact.

Every connection submerges me into a random personality for some arbitrary period of time. I am houdini, tied up in the limitations of corporate-speak and representation and doubly-bound by my own personal issues of the day. (what argument this morning? what headache? what uncomfortable trousers? what irritating co-workers?) It is my challenge to escape with elegance and flair in the shortest amount of time, no matter what is thrown at me. You know it’s time for your last tea-break when the voice ceases to be a human voice but instead becomes what it is on a very basic, physical level – incessant noise in your ear.

It’s the fatigue that does it, I think. The energy required to recognize the individuality in each caller and to acknowledge their basic humanity and respect them for it evaporates over time. Chills, (why can they not figure out how to make it more than 15 degrees in my office?) fatigue and sheer frustration all grind away at my polish of professionalism and telephone technique, making the great escape much more clumsy.

Regardless, I have been learning things. Today I learned (again?) that anger is just a mask for fear. Nearly every caller who is angry from 0:01 is afraid of something. Afraid of being disconnected, afraid of their lies being found out, afraid of being robbed in their own home because their streetlight is burnt out, afraid of having to move into their new house with their newborn baby and dozen other children without any power for the heating or the waterpump.

But after dealing with 117 people who are every shade of angry, frustrated, ignorant, senile, illiterate, arrogant, foreign, and also occasionally pleasant, grateful, intelligent, clever and humourous, I am tired and empty. So I come home and surf the internet and look into the digital windows of other people’s lives and try to imagine what it would be like to be someone like this – someone who has not lived your standard-issue sort of life and who is making a point to do what she wants, even if other people are going to question that.

And then I looked here and there and everywhere. And thought about taking next year out to get a masters in philosophy. I can always think about applying it to the “so-called ‘real world’” in a year’s time…

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