The workforce system decides when every agent takes their breaks, to the minute, so the floor is never short. It shows, every night, a ten minute break at ten to four for an agent id it does not have on the roster. The break room door, which is on a badge, opens at ten to four for a badge that was cancelled. The kettle boils. A mug comes off the shelf. At four the door opens again, outward, and the mug is washed and on the shelf, and the agent is back on a phone that has no calls.
I am a workforce planner at a call centre, which means I am the person who decides when four hundred people are allowed to go to the toilet, and I do it with a system, and the system has one break in it that I did not put there.
The break.
Ten to four. Ten minutes. Agent id, a number that the system displays but that the roster does not contain, on a skill group that was retired, at a seat that is on the floor plan but not in use. The system logs the agent going into break state at ten to four and coming out of it at four, every night, and adherence, which is the measure of whether you took your break when told, is a hundred per cent, which nobody else on the floor has ever had.
The break room.
Badge on the door. The door logs a badge at ten to four, a number that HR cancelled, and opens. The camera in the break room shows the door open on nobody. The kettle switch goes down. It boils. A mug comes off the shelf, the third from the left, and goes to the counter, and the tea goes in, and the milk, and the mug goes to the table by the window, and sits there, steaming, and the steam goes, and at four the mug goes to the sink and is washed and dried and put back, third from the left, and the door opens, and the badge logs an exit.
Ten minutes. On the dot. I have never seen anybody take a break that exactly.
What has been checked.
The system, with the vendor, who found the break in the schedule and could not find who had scheduled it and could not delete it, because the system will not delete a break that has been taken, and it has been taken every night.
The break room, at ten to four, by me, at the table. The door opened. The kettle went on. The mug came down. I said, evening, because I would say that to anybody. Nothing said anything. The mug came to the table, to the other chair, and sat there steaming, and I sat with it for ten minutes, and it was the most companionable ten minutes I have had in this building, and at four it went to the sink.
Who.
The retired skill group was a night line for a client that left in 2016. The seat was on that floor. The badge number was on a list that the security company had kept, and it was a man's, and the man had worked the night line for the whole of the contract, five years, and had been, the team leader of the time told me on the phone, the most reliable agent she had ever had, who took his breaks to the second and never once was late back, and who had been made redundant with the contract and had, she said, not taken it well, and had died the year after.
He is still on shift. The contract ended and nobody told the system and nobody told him, and he takes his break at ten to four and goes back to his seat and waits for calls on a line that has not had a call since 2016.
What is done about it.
Adherence for the night shift is reported to the client with one agent at a hundred per cent, and the client has asked who it is, and been told he is a long serving member of the team, and has said they would like to give him an award, and we have said he does not like fuss.
What I do.
I plan the workforce.
The system will not delete a break that has been taken. It will, however, end a shift. There is a function for it, for when a contract closes and the agents are released, and it was never run for that skill group, because the person who should have run it was made redundant the same day.
I have not run it. I sat with my hand on the mouse at four one morning and I did not, because I do not know what it does. It might release him. It might just stop the break. It might be the thing that tells a man who has been going back to his seat every night for ten years that there is no seat, and I do not know if that is a kindness, and it is not mine to decide at four in the morning.
So I have done the other thing the system allows, which is to put a call on his line. A test call, from the system, at five past four, which is when the first calls used to come, a recorded message, and the message is me, saying, this is the end of the shift, you've done your hours, thank you, go home, and the system logs him taking the call, and handling it, and the wrap up, and then it logs him in break state again, and I think he thinks I am a customer, and I think I am going to have to learn to say it better.