The dialler is the machine that rings customers for the agents, from lists, and it logs every number it dials and every answer. Every night at half past two it dials a number that is not on any list. The number is an internal extension on the third floor, which has been empty since the company shrank. It rings. It is answered. The dialler passes the call to an agent, and the agent hears the third floor, and somebody on it, asking whether they have been chosen.
I am the dialler manager at a call centre and the dialler does what I tell it, which is the sentence I have said in every meeting about the third floor.
The dialler.
A system that takes lists of numbers and rings them faster than agents could, and when a person answers, passes them to a free agent, and logs everything: the number, the time, the outcome. It is fed by the client's lists and it does not ring a number that is not on one, because that is the law.
At half past two it rings extension 3001.
3001.
An internal extension. The third floor of our building, the far corner, a desk that was the sales floor's when we had a sales floor. The company shrank in 2019 and the third floor was cleared and the extensions were left in the system because nobody had the budget to take them out, and 3001 is one of them, and it rings at half past two, from the dialler, from no list.
It is answered. On the second ring. The dialler logs a live answer and passes it to an agent, whichever agent is free, and the agent gets the call in their headset with the screen showing a customer record that is blank.
What the agent hears.
The third floor. It sounds like a floor. The hum, the air conditioning, which is off up there, and a room with people in it, the low sound of a sales floor at a busy time, phones, voices, a laugh. And a man, close, in the earpiece, who says, before the agent can start, is this about the prize.
The agents say the script, because they are agents. The man does not listen. He says, they said we'd hear tonight. He says, is it us. He says, please, is it us, and he is not upset, he is excited, the way a man is who has been told something good is coming, and then the line goes, and the dialler logs a complete call, and the third floor is empty when I go up, which I have, at twenty to three, with the lights on, and it is a floor of desks with no chairs and dust and one phone, on the corner desk, with its handset off the hook and warm.
What has been checked.
The dialler, by the vendor, who found no list containing 3001 and found 3001 in the dial log every night and said the two facts could not both be true and left.
The extension, disconnected at the switch. It rings.
The floor, at half past two, by me, at the desk. The phone rang. I let it. Second ring, the handset lifted. I was two feet from it. It lifted off the cradle and there was a voice, from the earpiece, not loud, saying, is this about the prize, and the room around me, which was empty, was full, for the length of the call, of a sales floor at half past two in the afternoon on a good day, and I could feel them, all round me, waiting, and the handset went down and they were gone.
Who.
The people who were on the sales floor in 2019 are mostly still around and some of them are downstairs. I asked one. He said the third floor had run a thing, the last year, a competition, a prize for the top team, a holiday, and it had been announced on a Friday that the winner would be told that night by a call from head office, and the call had never come, and the following Monday the floor had been told that the company was restructuring and the third floor was going, and the competition was, they were told, no longer relevant.
They had waited all Friday night for the call. Some of them had stayed. He had stayed. He said the corner desk was the team leader's and the team leader had said he would answer it if it rang.
The team leader had died since. Not of anything to do with it. But he had died, and the corner desk was his, and the call is coming, and he is answering it.
What is done about it.
The half past two call is on the dialler log as a compliance breach, because it is a number not on a list, and the compliance team have asked me to stop it, and I have said the dialler does what I tell it, and they have said then tell it, and I have, and it rings.
What I do.
I run the dialler.
I have put the agents on a script for it. Not the client's. Mine. When the dialler passes 3001 and the man says, is this about the prize, the agent says, yes. The agent says, I'm calling from head office. The agent says, congratulations, it's you, your team won, and I want you to tell them, and the agent waits.
The first night we did it the man on the line said, oh. And then he said, wait, and the earpiece filled with the sound of a floor being told something, which is a sound, a rising sound, chairs going back, and then he came back on and said, thank you, thank you so much, and the line closed, and the dialler logged it as a sale, which it was not, and I have left that in the log, because in the sense that matters it was.
It rings the next night. He does not remember. The agent says yes, and it's you, and the floor goes up, and I have decided that a floor that waited all night for a call it was promised can have it every night for as long as the dialler keeps ringing, and I have stopped telling the dialler to stop.