Jamie King, from "In the Call Centre"

"Shift is starting. It is seven forty eight AM. You are dabbing with an inadequate paper napkin at the acrid coffee you have splashed semi-deliberately onto your lap. You have been dabbing at the coffee on your trousers for almost two and a half minutes now, because you know that the best chance for a system crash is if you log in at around 8am. Much later or earlier and the chances are that you will be able to start work straight away.

Seven fifty one AM.

A crash will eat five to seven minutes of your working day, depending on the load on the network. Five to seven minutes is a considerable achievement in terms of calls you do not have to take. It might mean one call, it might mean more.

Seven fifty two AM, and thirty seconds.

While you are dabbing at the coffee with the napkin, which is now autoshredding itself against your inner thigh, the grinning hyena who is your Team Leader comes sneaking up behind you and slides the stats from yesterday’s work onto your keyboard: the amount of calls you took; their duration; your total idle time, your total time in ‘ready’ mode, your total time in ‘after-call’ mode … on and on, over a while page of A4. The Team-Leader-Hyena is standing there grinning at you and at the piece of paper. You attempt to ignore both him and it. You put the paper aside and try to look busy with your beverage mishap.

The Team-Leader-Hyena never stops grinning, because this is how it has been taught. It has evolved the ability to communicate its wishes via subtle variegations of the permagrin. Now the Hyean switches the grin’s direction to the coffee stain on your lap flecked with the pieces of decimated napkin you are massaging into it. The grin becomes somewhat more insipid. This indicates you should stop massaging napkin into your crotch, boot your computer and get on with your work.

Thus at seven fifty three AM you are forced to press the power button on your computer. It is not going to crash, and you will not gain five to seven minutes in which you could chat to the person sitting at the partioned desk next to you, smoke a cigarette, or go to the toilet. Any moment now the first call of the morning is going to come rattling through your headset into your brain.

Meeeeeep.

And then you know there’s a caller on the other end of the phone, expecting you to say something.

This is the miracle of Automated Call Distribution."

The rest of the article here, pdf  (Ephemera 4:4)