Calamity Call Center

The following is a guest submission by  Anthony Mastri. If you enjoy Anthony’s piece, check out more of his work at thevoidismyillusion.com.

*ring ring* *ring ring*

“Hello, thank you for calling. How may I assist you?”

“Will this even work? How do we know this is actually a real thing? Oh, yes hello. Do I have the right number? My family and I are trapped in our basement and the entire house has flooded. The water’s rising very fast; is there any way you can send someone out to help us?”

“I’ve pinpointed the location of your call using our satellites. Based on the distance from our nearest center to your house, you can expect help to arrive in roughly thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes?! We don’t have that long. The basement is already halfway filled with water and we don’t have a way out!”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Hopefully you and your family were blessed with strong lungs. Good day.”

I remove the gold phone resting on my shoulder and place it back on the receiver. As I let out a loud sigh, my fingers click the same keys on my keyboard that they do every day. The message “Disaster Avoided” appears on my monitor and gets saved under a file that I’ll turn in to my supervisor later in the evening.

I’m glad he’ll be the one keeping track of the numbers. As far as I’m concerned, my job only includes picking up the divine phone in front of me and briefly talking with someone whose life is in danger. After that, what happens to them isn’t my concern. They’ll probably be fine. Whether they are or not; my record says that tragedy was avoided.

Before I even manage to take a sip of the coffee on my desk that’s probably cold from neglect, the wonderfully annoying ringtone that haunts my dreams starts to go off. Look at that; another disaster happening to some random person in some random part of the world has earned the fantastic opportunity of having me be the one to come to their rescue. I may be just a voice over a phone, but to them I might as well be their supreme religious figure.

Yep. That’s the kind of job I come to every day of the week from five o’clock sharp to eight o’clock at night. We’re named the Calamity Call Center for reasons fairly obvious. Got a problem? House on fire? Zombie apocalypse not fitting your style? Perhaps a serial killer broke in and you ended up on the short end of the blade. We dispatch special agents stationed at different locations in almost every city in the world to aid the ones who send us a ring. Using the tens of thousands of satellites our company has floating in orbit, we can pinpoint a caller’s location almost instantly. Hooray for technology.

I guzzle down the poor taste of frozen coffee and manage to answer the emergency without choking in the process. I know it sounds like it should be my job to care about what happens to these people, but all they really do is fill my brain with unneeded noise. Take this guy for example:

“Can you hear me?” A maelstrom of static follows his voice.

“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

I swear customer service will be the death of me. I’ve never been of fan of using respectful nouns like “sir” or “ma’am” despite it being company policy. After all, customer service is about the only thing I get to do here.

“…you help…? A tornado is…my house…evacuation centers…” Between the man’s stuttering voice and the high winds surrounding him with noise, I can barely make out the message he’s trying to get across.

“I’ll try to send help as soon as I can.” My lax voice somehow makes it through to the man’s eardrums.

“But…getting closer…I don’t have…where can I…” His word chunks bore me by the syllable.

“I’m not sure why you’re wasting your time calling here when you could be seeking shelter. Get in a bathroom under a staircase, get in your basement; hell, even go to a school. There are plenty of productive options available to you. Good luck and good day.”

I hang up the phone and down the last bit of disgusting coffee that leaves an awful after taste lingering on my breath. At least the callers can’t smell that. If only they could, maybe it would turn them away…A man can only dream.

I hold down the control key on my keyboard and slide my index finer over to the “s” before shifting to “alt-f4” and being rid of the newest saved file citing my successful accomplishment. Perhaps I’m using the word “accomplishment” too loosely here. Perhaps I couldn’t care less. If I had the time to gamble, I’d bet on the latter.

The wheels on my uncomfortable rolling chair squeak as I lean back and stretch my lanky arms to the ceiling. I could use a break from this. I don’t only mean the repetitive life endangered dials I receive, but the people who come along with it. “Save me” they cry. “I need help.” They yell. “I’m going to die!” they weep. Congratulations, you now know what it’s like to feel mortal. Isn’t that just a wonderful sensation?

The damned phone starts ringing again. I lean forward in my seat and attempt to play heaven’s advocate once more. I slowly pick up the divine object in front of me and put the receiver to my ear.

“Please help me, oh my God!” a woman shrieks from the other side.

“If you were trying to dial God’s number, you missed it by a few sevens.”

I throw the phone down where it rests and type up the only two words that truly matter in this world. My twitching fingers tense up, then calmly head to the mouse on my right for file management. I close my eyes for what seems like hours before opening them at a turtle’s pace and yawning. Was I too quick to jump on that last call? If anything, I clarified any confusion that lady may have had. At least now she knows not to call us looking for spiritual advice next time. If there is a next time for her, that is. That alone warrants a job well done in my book.

Despite some questionable criticism here and there, my track record is on point. I’ve always told the higher ups that I have a one hundred percent success record. I don’t plan on that changing any time soon. Is it so disgusting that cheating my way through my job is preventing people from being saved? Maybe I help them find their own form of salvation.

I move the cursor on my screen across multiple icons and open folders embedded in more folders; all of them filled with countless spread sheets and files of my self-recorded “miracle work” that I never get anything out of. Honestly, the loud mouth, anxious, desperate, and confused voices over the phone all blend together after a while. Person A is in this jam while person B is potentially about to find out the mystery of whether or not we have an afterlife. I would continue to label them as such, but there aren’t enough letters or characters in all of the world’s languages to account for the number of voices I’ve heard screaming at me through the receiver.

Let’s pretend there were though, let’s pretend I could count every single nonsensical phone call as an individual symbol. Are these voices who beg for miracles so special that they deserve the honor of being remembered in my documents as something different than all the rest? I would say no. I would say that the voices pleading for calamity preventing technology are looking at me to play God. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes I get ahead of myself with this mystical phone of holy wonders sitting on my desk, but I’m not different than they are.

If you asked me how I felt about this whole company, this spectacle of divine intervention that causes the world to see how people just like the ones calling have the power to come to their rescue, I would die from a fit of laughter. The voices on the other end of the phone are angels, celestial bodies, aether taken form, to these callers; when in actuality I’m just sitting here as miserable as you. It astounds me how no one seems to understand that. We want beauty to breathe and disaster to die. We’re arrogant, we’re selfish, and above all else we’re sadly human; and nothing will change that.

I’ve made my peace with this ludicrous idea for now, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to end. Like any other person complaining about any other problem, I’m just blowing off steam that won’t matter even a little when I wake up tomorrow and drag my body of meat and liquid back to this Hell. Isn’t that a great comparison? It’s as if the company knew what th-

*ring ring* *ring ring*

*ring ring* *ring ring*

*ring ring* *ring ring*

*ring ring* *ring ring*

“Hello, thank you for calling. How may I assist you?”

Featured image taken by Vitor Lima and found via Creative Commons.