This morning during my leisurely drive to work, I heard them utter on the radio about a new technology regarding sensing anxious support calls and automatically forwarding them to the supervisor. Well, this reminded me of the days when I slaved away as a phone operator for National Dispatch Center back in the college days in San Diego.
It was a neat experience because all the cast of the show 90210 back then were on alphanumeric pagers, and so were many basketball players. All the operators knew that Michael Jordan’s alias was “Chris Blackman”. One time I actually received a call for Chris Blackman, and the caller left the message “Scottie won’t be at the camp Monday. Call xxx-xxxx.”. The only Scottie I knew on the Bulls was Scottie Pippen, but to this day I cannot verify the authenticity of this mystery character. His impression of me wasn’t the best, as he kept calling me “Ma’am”, perhaps because my voice didn’t matured enough back then. After that call I lowered my voice to a much lower register to circumvent these type of misunderstandings.
I wasn’t exactly the model operator either. One time when I received a call when someone nicely asked me to send the rhyming message “Where the **** is my truck?” I innocently sent it and immediately got a friendly visit from my supervisor, who wasn’t exactly thrilled about… the word being on the banned list. How was I supposed to know? Did the supervisor expect me to go through the training manual the size of the yellow pages?!
But the most interesting message I’ve received was when this lady left the message, “Left my underwear under your bed. Get it before your wife comes home!”
dude.. i’d give you more than 2 eProps if i could! that scottie story is rich! I love it! and the underwear… HA! sounds like someone could write a book about dispatching messsages. it’d be a good coffee table (or bathroom) book 🙂
Good thing you have more bass now… 😉
We won’t mistake your gender – promise! Besides, I don’t think any of us has legs like Erick-AH!