Idle Chatter
“How long can you spend sitting and staring at a monitor before you go insane?” I asked to nobody in particular. Of course, there were only two other people in the room so it wasn't that much of an audience.
“Well,” Andrew said. “If we knew that, they wouldn't have to run this little experiment, would they?” He spun his fancy little fidget-spinner for the fiftieth time this hour. Yes, I'd been keeping count.
“Wait, experiment, what?” Pico said, prying her head up and looking around blearily. She had the most amazing ability to not only sleep upright at her desk, but awake instantly when a call came to take care of. Which, unfortunately, had happened precisely zero times today.
“The great service desk fishbowl experiment, of course,” Andrew said, sweeping his arm to encompass the cramped office. “Designed specifically to test the edge of human endurance in the face of utmost boredom.”
“Oh, right,” Pico said. Her voice had an edge to it that suggested she wasn't happy being woken up for a trivial joke. She retaliated by putting her headphones back on, turning her back on us, and queuing up YouTube.
“Seriously,” I said. “Are the phone systems even working? I can't remember a day that was this dead since I started here.”
“Yeah, I called in myself on my cell just to check and the autobot is all in working order.” Andrew tossed his spinner into the air, failed miserably at catching it, then scrambled underneath his desk to find out where it had landed. “And there certainly have been dead times. I remember one week three years ago when we had only one call. One.”
“And the boss still wouldn't let you...” I started.“Entertain ourselves? Hardly. That man judges only on how much time you spend looking like you're on your computer. Hell, even call response times are secondary to the Almighty Look-Like-You're-Busy.” Andrew shrugged. “You get used to it.”
“I hate to jinx it, but... if we're so slow, why are there three of us?” I looked down at my call log for the week, knowing that the others couldn't have many more.
“Oh, God,” Andrew said, throwing his hands in the air. “Now you've done it. You're determined to summon another Hell Week, aren't you?”