Death by Customer Service

I can't do customer service. I'm really good at it with my people skills and math savvy. It's just that, after a while, I get too good at it, and it becomes more of a reflex action. When I'm on my game, I'm flawless. I'm polite, patient, optimistic, funny. Over the course of time, though, my mind gets bored, and it starts to wander.

I think of new, creative, fun ways to go out in style if I ever decided to quit.

Customer service, especially call center work, is office drama at its Maury Povich-est. The politics behind low-level management with an iron ceiling tend to be, to put it mildly, quite fucked up.

You've got trainers/overflow supervisors trying to keep cool with their call rep brethren while trying to choke man flesh (both men and women do this, yes) in order to snake their way into a cushy cubically-encased floor supervisor position. Then you have floor supervisors back stabbing call representatives, taking the reps' brilliant ideas as their own and highlighting customer complaints in order to keep them on that supervisor's team. And if it's an exceptionally bad rep, it is not uncommon for a would-be manager to pawn said rep off on a newer supervisor in order to pad his team's stats.

It would be ridiculously funny if I had only imagined it. But that kind of thing is out there, menacing our working class kids, taking away all hope while dangling the carrot just inches out of their reach. It saps the life blood from the soul, and it gets a little more interesting when there are people like me manning the post.

Me. The guy who uses sarcasm as his own form of Ebonics. The guy with the bad habit of drawing unwanted attention due to his background as a stage performer. The guy who was, at the time, in the midst of an "experimental phase." Oh, yes. I was quite creative at the time. And, as I said, when I'm bored, my mind wanders.

I show up at the center one day, strapped to the gills with semi-automatic small arms. I come in through the front, snagging as many Human Resources hot mamas as I can, the manager of said department being the hottest of them all, and the one who fired me. Yes, she HAS to come along.

I take them into the main call center, where the floor managers' and supervisors' offices are, and everyone who isn't smart enough to bolt for the emergency exit gets piled to the back of the room. It is a very large room, mind you, about the size of an American football field.

I like the idea of taking hostages because it affords me the opportunity to play God with these people's lives, just as many of them had done to me in my time as billing support representative. I shoot wildly into the air in all directions. No one is getting shot, because that would be wrong. I'm not into killing innocent people or attractive young women who might show their appreciation later with a sheet romp. Most of those girls go first.

A few stay behind for comfort reasons. No cop wants to shoot an attractive young woman, so I would feel pretty safe. Mostly, though, it's in order to best prepare for the inevitable Stockholm Syndrome. It might take a couple of days, so I wouldn't want to deny myself such a luxury.

Of course, any friends I had would be next. I don't want them hanging around and feeling like their lives are in danger. That would make it less fun. So I'd tell them to get up and get out.

I have this friend, Pete. A short, third generation Irish-American who just likes cool things. Stupid people piss him off just as much as they do to me, and he and I are usually working together in these work day Apocalyptic scenarios. I was working alone on this one, so Pete has to leave.

"Are you kidding? I don't want to miss this!" He'd say. "This is going to be the funniest shit I ever saw, and I'm staying right here and watching it."

"Pete, you're my friend. You'll see everything on the news."

"Man, you have no idea. Cops are going to bust in here, blow your head off, and I'm going to sit right here and see it all first hand," he smirks.

"Well. So long as you know what's coming. By all means, have a seat. Light if you got 'em."

This is the same Pete who pondered digging a hole next to his patio, about six feet deep. It wasn't a large area, so there wasn't room for a big hole, but there was room for a deep hole. Why? Just for the hell of it, of course. Then I mentioned that six feet is about deep enough for a man. And he said, "You wouldn't even have to chop him up."

We were thinking of the same person, of course.

So, although I am very good at customer service positions, it never seems to work out in the long run. I get bored. My mind wanders. I say things.

Sarcastic things.

I start thinking about how my hostage crisis will end. I know me. I get bored with the same old routine, so I know that eventually I will decide that a couple of people here aren't fit to walk the planet with the rest of us. Overweight attention seeker. Fruity ass kisser. Creepy floor supervisor who makes his female teammates extremely uncomfortable.

I might actually like some of them, but we have to draw the line somewhere. That's the fun of the whole idea - it is completely arbitrary.

This kind of thing happens all the time, and "experts" and loved ones are always looking for a reason, the method behind the madness.

The Columbine kids were outcasts, so they killed whoever ridiculed them, sparing the ones they felt were "cool".

The kid in Kentucky was the picked on fat kid, so his targets seemed rather obvious.

But my victims would never know why I chose them, like them or not, because it will all be over too soon for them to rationalize it. There will be people from different social and economic backgrounds going the way of Sharon Tate, and no one would figure out, until Pete comes forward, what those people had in common.

I am pretty sure that Pete wouldn't go for all this shooting people in the head thing, even if he could see my reasoning. The way I see it, I tell him that he should bring the police in the next time he comes back. And when he does, I would clear away from the hostages, tell Pete to get under a desk, then start firing away. There will be no Little Friend about it. Just a good, old fashioned suicide by cop.

Now THAT'S motivation to go to work.