Tracy sighed when she heard the beep in her ear. Patiently, she
waited for the whisper to finish – it was a new one. She couldn’t
quite make out the words.
“Hello,” she began, as she’d done fifty times already that day.
“Thanks for ca-“
It was then that Tracy toppled from her chair and onto the floor,
blood streaming from her ear. The agent next to her – Vince –
began screaming. His manager, Sarah, came over and carefully
checked Tracy’s pulse.
“Auto in!” she snapped at Vince, who was gawking. It wasn’t
every day that the person next to you suddenly fell out of their
chair. Reluctantly, Vince took another call.
Beside him, and her fellow manager, David, quietly discussed what to
do. Sarah gently laid a coat over Tracy – who still hadn’t
moved, Vince noticed – while David walked away. Vince wondered if
he was calling an ambulance. This guess was confirmed when a couple
of paramedics arrived fifteen minutes later and took Tracy away.
Vince noticed that Tracy’s phone had somehow switched itself off;
she wasn’t just logged out, the phone was completely dark. That
was odd. Maybe the manager had unplugged it when he wasn’t
looking, but why would Sarah do that?
“What happened?” everyone whispered. Vince shrugged. He thought
about asking to go home early, but decided that was unlikely to be
allowed. Besides, it was raining and the thought of going
outside was just slightly more horrible than staying at work.
When Vince came back from his break, later that day, another agent
had disappeared.
“She just collapsed!” someone told him. “Exactly like Tracy
did!”
Vince was now spooked. He wondered if some sort of awful illness was
going around that was making people faint?
When the third person collapsed, an hour later, he was more than
spooked. It was Tariq, opposite him, and it happened exactly like
Tracy. A call came through, he started to speak, and then suddenly
he was never going to speak again. To satisfy his own curiosity, Vince had put himself
in natural and gone round to try plugging Tariq's phone back in, to try to get it working. It was
completely dead.
One co-worker had put herself in natural, gone off to have hysterics
in the ladies, and was refusing to go back on the phones.
Eventually, she was sent home sick. Wait times were increasing, as
everyone started spending more time in aftercall, discussing the
three agents who’d collapsed so far, wondering whether they were
dead or just ill.
It wasn’t long before another two people collapsed; an agent and
the manager who’d been listening to her calls, giving her side by
side coaching. Vince tried telling David about the weird way the
phones had gone down, and the fact that they’d all been listening
to calls when they’d fallen unconscious. With trepidation, David
opened their call listening program on his PC and started listening to one of
the calls on his earphones. He collapsed as well.
Vince took off his headset, put himself back in aftercall and refused
to take another call. Sarah finally agreed that something weird was
happening, and that getting them all off the phones was for the best.
With a sigh of relief, the remaining agents – only six of them,
since most people had gone home at 5pm – either put themselves in
aftercall or logged out. Vince watched as the last agent tried to
log out, but, without realising, put her phone on speakerphone
instead. The buttons were right next to each other.
With a feeling of dread, Vince to call out to her, to get her to turn
the phone off, to make sure no sounds would come through. He was too
late.
They
heard a beep, and then a grinding, whirring sound. It only lasted a
second, but seemed much longer. By the end of it, everyone in the
room was dead.
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