Eight desks, eight headsets, eight licences. The wallboard has shown nine logged in on the night shift since 2019, and the ninth takes calls.
I supervise the overnight team on a contact centre for a utility. Faults and emergencies, eleven at night to seven in the morning.
It is a small team because nights are quiet. Eight agents.
Eight means four separate things in this building and all four have to agree, so here they are.
Eight desks in the room, which I can see from where I sit.
Eight headsets, which are asset tagged and signed for.
Eight concurrent licences on the telephony platform, which is what we pay for. The platform refuses a ninth login with a licence error. That is not a policy, it is a hard limit, and I have seen it refuse a trainer who tried to log in during a day shift at full occupancy.
And eight names on my rota.
The wallboard shows nine.
The wallboard is the screen on the end wall that shows the state of the queue: calls waiting, longest wait, and agents by status. Available, on a call, wrap up, break.
Since the platform was upgraded in 2019 the night shift shows nine logged in. Eight with names on them and one more.
The ninth has an agent ID, and the ID is not in the format the others use. Ours are four digits. This one is four digits with a letter in front of it, and the letter is an S.
What the ninth does.
It takes calls. That is the part I could not get anybody to take seriously for two years, because a phantom agent sitting at Available forever is a configuration ghost and every contact centre has a few.
This one moves. It goes Available, then On Call, then Wrap Up, then Available. It takes between four and eleven calls a night.
And here is the thing a call centre can say with complete certainty: a call that is answered is a call that left the queue.
Our nightly figures reconcile. Calls offered, calls answered, calls abandoned. If the ninth agent were imaginary, the calls it answers would still be in the queue and would either be answered by a real agent or abandoned, and our abandon rate would be four to eleven calls a night worse than it is.
It is not. The queue is emptied by nine agents and the reports balance on nine.
The calls themselves.
Every call is recorded, because we are a utility handling emergencies and that is a regulatory requirement. Recordings are kept six years and tagged with the agent ID.
I have listened to eleven of the ninth agent's calls.
There is nothing on them. Not silence with a line hum, which is what a recording of a dead channel sounds like, and I know that because I have heard plenty. These are about the right length for the call they are logged as, between two and six minutes, and the file is there and the file has content.
What is on them is a room. You can hear a room: a faint movement, something that might be a chair, a sort of depth to it. No voice, no keyboard, no breath that I could swear to.
And at the end of each one, about three seconds before the recording stops, a sound like a handset being put down on a desk, which is a sound nobody has made in this building since 2019, because we are all on headsets and there is not a single desk telephone on the floor.
What was done, through proper channels, over four years.
Our telephony supplier investigated twice. The first time they removed an orphaned agent record from a legacy table, which was a real thing they found and which was a good fix for a different problem.
The second time, in 2022, their engineer was on a call with me looking at the live platform while the wallboard showed nine, and the platform's own admin view showed eight.
He said that in that case my wallboard was wrong, and I said the reports balance on nine, and he pulled the reports while we were talking, and they balanced on nine.
He escalated it. The answer that came back, in writing, is that the licence count is enforced at login and is correct at eight, that the reporting figures are derived from call detail records, and that a call detail record exists for every call in the reports, and that they could not explain the additional agent identifier and recommended a full platform migration.
We migrated in 2023. Different data centre, fresh configuration, every agent re-created by hand.
The first night shift on the new platform showed nine.
The licence.
This is the detail that I think about when it is quiet, which on a night shift is most of the time.
We pay for eight. The platform enforces eight. A ninth login is refused.
So whatever is logged in as S-something did not log in.
I have asked our billing contact whether we have ever been invoiced for nine, half hoping we had, because a billing error would at least be a kind of explanation.
Eight, every month, since 2016.
What I have done, which is nothing anybody would call management.
The ninth agent is excluded from the individual performance reports, because there is nothing to report on and the report looks broken with a row of blanks in it. I set up that exclusion myself in 2020 and it is documented as a legacy test account.
It is in the team totals, because the team totals are the queue and the queue is real.
And once, in the November, at about twenty past four, with six agents on calls and two on break, the wallboard showed the ninth go from Wrap Up to Available, and then every one of the eight real statuses changed to On Call within about nine seconds, which happens when a batch of calls arrives, which does happen at twenty past four.
And the ninth went On Call too. Nine agents, nine calls, nobody waiting.
I stood up and looked at the room, which I did not need to do, because I can see the whole room sitting down.
Eight people, all of them talking.