“It took a long time for people to realize that the most terrible place one can be banished for all time is not the hell of mythology – the hell Orpheus descended to in order to find his loved Eurydice – nor the hell of the Hebrews or of the Old Testament, nor the hell of Christianity, but the hell of humanity, the hell made by humans for other humans.” -- Jacinto Lageira

CALL CENTERS ARE HELL.

Working in one for DELSTAR bank almost killed me, literally. The last thing I remember is how embarrassed I felt while they were hauling my ass out on a gurney to a waiting ambulance. Never mind that I could hardly breathe and my heart was racing like a NASCAR dragster; people were looking at me… ruining their daily adherence just to stare at me! I believe a few of them were probably jealous of me because I was leaving the building and they had to get back on the phones...

At the hospital, the morphine they gave me was not helping. The muscle under my left breast was swept up in a waltz of spasms and my mother was blowing up my cellphone every five minutes. The gummy glue, from the stick-on electrodes they'd plastered me with in the ambulance earlier, was decimating my décolletage with glops of drying, chafing goo.

Who knew that answering one more call, from one more insatiable, discourteous, yapaholic customer would land me squat on a stretcher and in the Emergency Room – just in freaking time for a lukewarm, lime-jello lunch? Trust me – there was no fresh beef to be had, that afternoon; for I was wounded cattle. I had been corralled in the barn of a bank's regional call center; and I'd spent the past nine months of my life chewing on the cud of a living wage and grazing on the grass of shift-diffed pastures. At the end, I'd reduced my stock of personal pride and professional integrity to a stewed, unsavory, morphine-laced mutton – rolling the dough of my ass and the blood in my arteries into a confluence of coagulated fatty -- flavored with the remaining teaspoon of my self-esteem and the pungent spice of my jaded spirit.

You know -- not to get off the subject of my E.R. visit – but I know something that you probably don't:

I know why the caged bird drinks.

It's because he once flew (before his caged captivity) onto a sill, and peered through a random, plate-glass window at a DELSTAR bank call center.

If you’d like to read more, you can download the ebook edition, or purchase the print paperback of HANDLE TiME by LiNCOLN PARK at major online and offline booksellers! We would also LOVE to hear from you at handletimefan@yahoo.com

HANDLE TiME by LiNCOLN PARK
ISBN: 978-0-6152-1518-1