Aesia Lrae

Only if the Law Permits It (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Laura

It all started like the other shitty days that come and go in my life.

I'd had a shift where the customers had been particularly unbearableand that's saying something when you work in customer servicebut the invoices had arrived, and it was complaint after complaint, call after call. And as always, I looked at the clock in the bottom corner of my computer, and the hours just wouldn't go by.

The only thing that made those hours more bearable was doodling in my notebook. Once, these were ideas, sketches for future works; now, it was just a way to escape the shitty life I was leading.
Things weren't meant to be this way. I was an excellent student and had a great future ahead of me. But I wanted to be an artist, and artists don't have a great future, at least not while they're alive. And I didn't feel like committing suicide. I paid for Fine Arts at the most prestigious university in my city by working as a telemarketer, since my father decided I'd only be paid for a serious degree like my siblings', one an engineer and the other a lawyer. One was unemployed, and the other got married and doesn't practice, by the way.

Still, the unserious career was mine, according to them.

And here I am. I started working to pay for my studies at eighteen, I finished my degree at twenty-three, and now, twelve years later, I'm still putting up with thugs on the phone.

The truth is, I developed what we call telemarketer syndrome a while ago, a state of mind in which you might be yelled at and insulted, or even get a little smack talk, but I don't care. I'll just nod and ask the aforementioned person if I can help them with anything else. It's a self-defense weapon to be able to endure this day after day without throwing yourself out the window.

The truth is, they say hospital windows don't open to prevent suicides. I think they're also locked in call centers. I haven't tried it, but I'm sure it's true.

After graduating from university, I worked on a few projects, but it's clear that as an artist you have to support yourself. You know, study, materials, and although I've never lacked desire and ideas, there comes a time when you have to make a realistic decision: either be an artist and live off your parents until you're forty or have a temporary job to support your art. That's until you can sell a piece. If you do, of course. That's why at call center operators, no one is a call center operator as such. They're all musicians, film students, photographers, or artists in general, since you can fit it in with your work schedule and still make money. What they don't explain is that if you don't leave quickly, you'll be stuck there as office supplies for life.

I was sitting in my cubicle with the uncomfortable headphones on. It was already after 9 p.m., and it seemed that no matter how much work there was, it only ended when it was time to feed the children dinner. So I was listening to the conversation between my colleagues. I had them on either side of me, and to talk to each other, they had to shout and try to talk through me. I felt like the umpire in a tennis match. In these places, you know everyone superficially, through hello and goodbye, or through banal conversation when the calls go off. But I think out of all my colleagues, who number in the hundreds, I only know the names of a dozen at most. If you count those of us in the service, who work rotating schedules, knowing twelve isn't a large number.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: WHITEHEAD AESIA LRAE
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798232225360
• Artikelnr.: 75625171