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When I began working as a full-time CA, I thought I would be ideally suited for the night shift, which began at 4:30 p.m., and ended at one in the morning. I don’t sleep well, and I reasoned the traffic wouldn’t be as bad when I was driving to and from work. What I didn’t plan on was how utterly boring that shift would be. After about 10 p.m., the place was so quiet that you could almost forget you were at work, were it not for the constant dull glow of fluorescent lighting and the general sense of malaise radiating off the other employees. It would get so slow that sometimes I didn’t even mind doing fraud calls. And anyway, by that time of night, most of the businesses they were trying to scam were closed, so I had no problem dialing numbers that were never going to be answered. I remember one night a scammer had me dial 24 outgoing numbers before they finally gave up. By that time, two hours had passed, and it was time for me to go home.
Of course, there was always the off chance that one of the calls would be picked up, and then the even more unlikely possibility of a card going through. Whenever it happened I felt bad for the store, because it was usually a small business selling some random item that no one would ever want to buy. The fact that someone was calling them in the middle of the night wanting to buy not one but 50 pieces of their product must have seemed like a gift from God. “What’s that?” you could almost hear them thinking. “Someone wants to buy a gross of my velvet art paintings of Bob Marley? Oh lord, blessed by thy name!”
The first time that happened, I almost disconnected the call, but I was afraid that if I did, sirens would go off and I would be chased out of the building like Boris Karloff at the end of Frankenstein. So I didn’t disconnect it. For two months or so. The first time it happened was by accident, and when nothing came of it a week or so later, I began disconnecting the frauds regularly.
10 p.m. was also about the time the prank calls started up. I didn’t mind hanging up on them, either. It was usually a couple of fratboys who heard about our Internet service on Howard Stern, and decided to call and make the operators type and say embarrassing things. This often revolved around some form of homosexual sex, but fortunately most fratboys are too insecure with themselves to actually describe what such acts would entail, so it would usually revolve around something mild, like, “I’m gay. You make me so hot. Will you be my boyfriend?” Considering some of the legitimate doctor/patient, husband/wife, and occasionally, dominatrix/client calls I’d performed, the fratboy antics really weren’t so bad.
But I hung up on them, anyway. Not many other people did, though, and I’ll admit that it could be amusing to hear what some of them were forced to say. One of the greatest joys of my life was hearing my high school health teacher – who worked at the call center for a second job – utter the words, “Lick my balls.” She didn’t hang up, though. I’ve got to hand it to her. She had more stamina for the work than I did.
Come to think of it, most people seemed to. For a while there, I thought I was the only person who ever hung up on anybody. Then one night a woman sitting adjacent to me looked up and said in a conspiratorial tone, “I’m feeling really hangy-uppy tonight.”
She was gone a few weeks later, but I didn’t let that stop me.
Like I said before: I’m an idiot.
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There's still more to come, but I'm sure you can see where this is going. Thanks for reading.
- TJG
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