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The |
Disclaimer: These works are the
product of an immature CALCUTTA Clutching the x9 and wishing he had something with a higher rate of fire or larger profile, even knowing his ammunition was down to only three darts anyway, he sighed. He had reached Calcutta. Others made pilgrimages here, not for any spiritual quest but mainly to realize how much worse it could get. He did not like to come here though. It was, however, the safest way home. So he crept past the half-sized cubicles, some of those doubled-up with workstations and equipment. During the day, agents, engineers and technical support representatives would be stacked into the cubes like sardines. Now, it was just the only route to the door that would by-pass the Soup-Pit. The Soup-Pit, a more wretched hive of villainy and treachery one could not imagine. As home cube space to supervisors, mentors and coaches, the Soup-Pit had developed the reputation for being both a paradise and a place of danger. As a haven for anyone seeking time off the phones, the Soup-Pit had attracted not only the truly creative but also the whiney. From here they dispensed 360-degree feedback, technical guidance and (shudder) quality initiatives. However, they also found enough project time to perfect the art of diorama building, rubber-band shooting and dart-gun collecting. Which was more likely (alt: dangerous), feedback or a barrage of Nerf-brand projectiles, varied daily and by 30-minute interval. But the 15:00 shift overlap, with the resulting low occupancy rate, usually saw one or the other. Tonight, The Pit was on the warpath. The CTI~ had gone down and no calls were routed into the call center. Management had decided to use the downtown to implement the latest Quality initiative. Accepting responsibility for the caller's satisfaction with an outsourced and inferior product as a measure of success had not gone over well. When the switch finally came back up, and with a vengeance, the typical agent's already low moral was crushed under the weight of 256 calls in queue. Collectively they, the agents in real seats and real queues, decided to kill the messenger and began throwing insults and nasty stares at the Soup-Pit. Soon they were hurtling actual objects: paper balls consisting of incentive memos and HR hand-outs, the occasional headset, or even Happy Meal (r) toys. Soon the Pit fought back. It did not help that they had recently found plans for a rapid fire Lego (r) machine gun . It was only a matter of time before mace, pepper-spray, and legal-in-Texas concealed handguns became involved. Still, like you would expect in a middle-school game of capture the flag, reactions to lethality varied irrationally and most confused agents would still flinch away from a menacingly brandished Nerf(r) gun. So he still felt safe with his x9 and its three soft-tipped darts. But the stairwell was still a dozen cubes away...
Mediocre or mediaokra - you be
the judge. |
