Calls go to the next free agent. There is no way to ask for a desk. Every night at about nine a caller comes in from a withheld number and the system, which cannot do this, sends the call to desk 41, whoever is there, and skips agents who have been waiting longer. The caller is an old woman. She uses the agent's first name, which she has not been told. She asks if they have eaten. She has been ringing since before the agents were born.
I am an evening team leader at a call centre and desk 41 is the one the new starters get put at, because it was empty, and then because I understood.
The routing.
A call comes in, the system picks the agent who has been free the longest, and sends it. There is no way round that. Agents cannot be requested. Desks do not exist to the system, only agent ids, and an agent id is wherever the agent logs in.
At about nine a call comes in and goes to desk 41.
Not to the agent id. To the desk. Whoever is logged in there, new starter or veteran, on any id, gets it, and agents who have been free for four minutes longer are skipped, and the routing log shows the call going to the agent at 41 with a reason code that the vendor says is not one of theirs.
The caller.
An old woman. Withheld number. She says the agent's name. First name. Before the agent has said it. The agents on 41 have all told me the same thing: she said my name like she knew me, and I had never spoken to her, and I had not said it. Then she asks whether they have eaten. Whether they have had their tea. Whether they are warm enough in there, because she has heard it is cold. And then she says, well, I'll let you get on, love, and goes.
Two minutes, about. The recordings are there. The agents' voices on them go, over the two minutes, from the script voice to their own voice, which is a thing I have never seen a customer do to an agent in a career of listening.
What has been checked.
The routing, with the vendor, who found the reason code, which is one from an older version of the system that was retired, and could not explain why the current version was producing it, and offered a discount.
Desk 41, by me, logged in on my own id, at nine. The call came. She said my name. I have not said my name on a phone in this building in years. She asked if I had eaten and I said no, and she said, you should, and I said I would, and she said, well, I'll let you get on, and I sat there with the headset on for a while.
Who.
The desk numbers were the same before the floor was rebuilt, on this floor, because this floor was not rebuilt. 41 has been 41 since the building opened. And the woman who sat at it when it opened, the old hands on days say, was a supervisor, one of the first, who had come from the factory that was here before, and who had not really understood that this was not a factory, and had gone round the floor at nine every evening asking the young ones if they had eaten, because in the factory that was what a supervisor did, and the young ones had loved her for it, and she had retired, and the old hands did not know when she had died, only that she had.
She is doing her round. From wherever she is. One desk, her desk, the one she could reach, and whoever is at it is one of her young ones, and she asks.
What is done about it.
The call is on the log every night as a routing exception and the reason code is on a list of things the vendor is going to fix, and the agents on 41 have, over the years, without anybody telling them to, started keeping a sandwich in the drawer.
What I do.
I lead the evening team.
I put the new starters on 41. That is my decision and I stand by it. A new starter on their first evening on the phones is a frightened person with a script, and at nine a woman rings and says their name and asks if they have eaten, and it does something to them that no amount of training does, and they come off that call as a person, and they are better agents after it, every one.
I have started telling them about it. Not the whole thing. I tell them that at nine a regular will ring and ask if they have eaten and that the right answer is the true one, and that she is very old and has been ringing a long time, and that when she says she will let you get on you say, thank you, and you mean it.
The sandwich in the drawer has become a thing. The agent leaving 41 leaves one for the agent arriving. It has been going on for longer than I have been here and I did not start it and I do not know who did, and last week a new starter, on her first night, at nine, told the old woman she had just eaten a sandwich somebody had left her, and the old woman said, that'll be me, love, and I have listened to that recording nine times.