Common Decency as Radical Resistance

This stock art shows how companies want us to think their call centers
run: orderly, efficient, and generally positive in mood

My co-worker loves receiving robocalls. Seriously. When he receives a robocall at work, he takes great pleasure in putting the call on speaker and finding ways to antagonize and provoke the poor minimum wage earner on the other end. It can be pretty funny to watch him prod the poor, hapless human operator… if you forget the worker, who probably needs the job pretty badly.

Back in the 1990s, when landlines still mattered, I spent a year working in a call center. That work is handy for desperate people, because it's one of the few remaining jobs where you can apply, get hired, and start training, on the same day. But it also makes you massively unpopular with customers. I had strangers compare me to a pickpocket, a prostitute, and Lt. William Calley.

In my day, most insults directed at telemarketers were class-based, attacking us for being poor. Nowadays, as advanced technology let's calls travel cheaply from places like Lahore and Mumbai, my co-worker has shown me an added component of telemarketer hatred: racism. My co-worker regularly dumps on callers for being brown, living outside America, and having an accent. That's where things get especially cringey.

Though I admit these insult comedy shows have their moments, I can't ignore that he's dumping on poor, off-white, and international workers for not resembling him. It's racist, classist, and ethnocentric. Worst of all, while reducing his targets to impotent rage (most aren't allowed to hang up; some don't even have a disconnect button), he isn't hurting the people who profit from this commercial-grade annoyance.

Then I remember Eunice.

More than twenty years later, I don't remember whether Eunice was even her name. Maybe I’m imputing that upon her. I remember her voice sounded old, even slightly frail, when I called her, which was relatively late in my shift. Because of the two-hour time zone difference, I probably reached her approaching sundown in her area. After all this time, I only clearly remember one thing:

She engaged me in a conversation running nearly ninety minutes.

Let me emphasize that, lest you miss the importance. An aged woman named (possibly) Eunice kept me talking, in a friendly and convivial but completely aimless manner, for nearly an hour and a half. I don’t know whether Eunice was lonely.  Maybe she hadn’t had a meaningful, low-pressure conversation in weeks. Maybe I was the first person to talk like a friend in ages.

As the conversation wound down, about fifteen minutes before my shift ended, Eunice said the one thing I remember most clearly: “Thank you, sir. You seem like a nice young man. I hope you find what you’re looking for.” Of course, at that moment, I wasn’t looking for anything besides my paycheck. But looking back, I suspect Eunice knew something about life’s arc that I had yet to learn.

In real life, call centers are chaotic places. Emotional breakdowns are common.

My co-worker thinks he’s performing some bizarre kind of resistance against robocalls by antagonizing the human operators who eventually pick up. In my telemarketing days, potential customers I called thought they did likewise by calling me insulting names or slinging vulgarities. Yet none of these loud, angry demonstrations even registered with managers who pressured us to perform or risk returning to unemployment.

Eunice, by contrast, actively stopped the system for ninety minutes. Did Eunice know I was forbidden, by company policy and FCC regulation, to hang up before she did? Probably not. But she knew, if she kept me talking, I wasn’t making more calls, annoying more people, running up profits for management. For ninety minutes, Eunice successfully lowered my stress level, while running up costs for management.

That, friends, is positive resistance. Eunice transformed a routine call, an annoyance for her and a drudgery of late capitalism for me, and transformed it into a humane connection. She didn’t shout, unload, or act boorish. She didn’t attack me for needing a paycheck. She simply hijacked an impersonal action of cube-farm enterprise, and turned it into a moment of pure, unadulterated humanity.

I didn’t realize Eunice performed an act of resistance for nearly fifteen years. Only looking back later did I realize how radical, anti-capitalist, and anti-establishmentarian an act it was for her to have an unscripted conversation with a stranger. My need for money allowed me, under company guidance, to turn her into a commodity… and myself into a machine. She turned me back into a human. Then she let me do likewise for her.

Only years later could I recognize how revolutionary that really was.