Static

The phones had been ringing all morning. I remembered someone once describing a switchboard lighting up like a Christmas tree, and finally understood the truth of the metaphor when I saw the impatient calls blinking on and off seemingly randomly on my telephone. It was a good offer, on that everyone seemed agreed, except us, the staff, hanging on the lines with forced enthusiasm for the next call. I had emptied the contents of several crushed plastic cups littered across my desk in the last hour and was feeling alert but nauseous on a witch's brew of caffeine, nicotine, and sugar. My eyes were full of figures, my throat full of dust, my head full of static.

I signed off from another interminable call with what I hoped came somewhere near exhausted professionalism, and took off my headset. All around me were the spooky, echoing sounds of telephones ringing around the call centre. They sounded like birds, wheeling around and swooping on the headsets of my colleagues. I decided to take a break, and grabbing my cigarettes like a lifeline, headed for the exit.

I stumbled through the doors, my equilibrium affected by a throbbing pain in my right ear from the headset speaker, and rested against a wall, lighting the cigarette almost without noticing, and watching the cars in the street swish by. The sound of static was still advancing and receding like a wave in my eardrum. We didn't notice it at first, with a bad line, but the volume control would slowly creak up as we tried to understand the gabbled instructions from our customers. The end result was that we were temporarily, and possibly permanently, half deaf with electronic tinnitus...

May 1999