The queue counter on the wallboard shows how many callers are waiting and the longest wait, and the longest wait is the number the client shouts about. After midnight it shows one caller waiting, and the longest wait is a number the board cannot show in minutes and shows in days, and the days come to sixteen years. The hold music is playing to that call. The agents can pick it up. The line is open, and somebody is there, and they have been waiting a long time, and they do not say what for.
I am a team leader on the night shift at a call centre and the queue is the number on the wall that I am judged on.
The queue.
Callers waiting, longest wait, on the wallboard. A call that waits more than two minutes is a failure and a call that waits more than ten is an incident, and the board goes red, and somebody's phone rings upstairs.
After midnight the board shows one caller waiting.
The longest wait, in the box where minutes go, is a number in days, because the board switches to days over a certain value, and the value is five thousand nine hundred and some, and it goes up by one every day, and it comes to a night in 2009.
The call.
It is in the system. It is a real call, on a real line, from a number that is withheld, that arrived at the queue at eleven minutes past one on a night in 2009 and has been in the queue since. The hold music is playing on it. I have checked. The system reports that the caller is hearing the hold music, and the hold music has been changed four times since 2009 and the caller has heard all of them.
The agents can pick it up. It is in the queue. An agent who is available gets offered it and, if they accept, the line opens.
What happens when it is picked up.
The line is open. There is the sound of a room. A quiet room, a home, at night, a clock somewhere. And breathing. A person, close to the phone, breathing, slowly, the way somebody breathes who has been on hold for a long time and has stopped expecting anything.
The agent says the greeting. The breathing does not change. The agent asks how they can help. Nothing. The agent, if they are good, waits. And after a while the breathing catches, the small catch of somebody who is about to say something, and does not, and the line goes back into the queue, not dropped, back in, at the same position, with the same wait, and the board shows one caller waiting.
What has been checked.
The system, with the vendor, who found the call, confirmed the timestamp, and said that a call could not stay in a queue for sixteen years because the system had been replaced twice in that time, and the call had come across both times, and they could not say how.
The number. Withheld. The vendor could see it and would not tell me and then, after listening to the call with me, did.
Who.
I rang it. From my own phone, in the car park, at two in the morning, which I should not have done. It rang. A woman answered. Elderly, awake, not surprised. I said who I was and where from and she said, oh, and then she said, is this about my husband.
He had rung us, she said, in 2009, one night, when he was not well, about something, she did not know what, a bill, a thing on the account, and he had been put on hold, and he had sat in the chair with the phone, and she had gone to bed, and in the morning he was in the chair with the phone still in his hand and the music still playing, and she had put the phone down for him, and she had never rung us to say, because what would she say.
She said she still heard the music sometimes, in the house, at night, from nowhere, and had thought it was her.
What is done about it.
The one caller waiting is on every night's report as a queue anomaly and the client, who is paid on wait times, has asked why our longest wait is sixteen years, and been told it is a data artefact, and has said that it is making their dashboard look terrible, which it is.
What I do.
I lead the night team.
I pick it up. Every night, at some point, when the board is quiet, I take the call myself. I say the greeting. I wait through the breathing. And then I do what nobody did in 2009, which is deal with it. I say, I'm sorry you've been waiting. I say, I've got your account here, which I have, because his wife gave me the number. I say, I can see what this is about, and I can, because it was a bill, a wrong one, forty pounds, and I say, I've sorted that for you, it's gone, you don't owe anything, is there anything else I can help you with tonight.
The breathing catches. And the first night I did it, he said, no, and it was a man's voice, tired, and glad, and the line closed, properly, with the tone, and the queue went to zero.
It is back the next night. One caller waiting. Sixteen years. I pick it up. I sort the bill. He says no. I have come to think that he does not remember from one night to the next, and that it does not matter, because I do, and the board goes to zero for the rest of the night, and the client's dashboard, for six hours, is the best in the business.