1
Britt
I am an empty shell.
I give until there is nothing left
And then I fade away.
I am nothing,
A tiny dot
In a sea of dots.
I fight
Against the current.
I struggle
Against the system.
I am not enough.
I sink back down
Where I belong.
“Britt! We gotta get to that damn ‘Team Enrichment’ meeting!” Tasha poked her head over the top of the partition that separated their desks.
Brittany jumped and slammed her notebook shut on the words she’d just been reading. She’d written the poem at 2 a.m. the night before. Her five-month-old daughter, Millie, had been asleep, but that sweet relief eluded Britt. Instead, anxiety had pried her eyes wide open and clenched a relentless fist around her heart.
She’d picked up the pen and notebook on her bedside table and scribbled her defeated poem, hoping that it would offer her some respite. She’d hoped that if she got the anxious feelings out of her head and onto paper, they would leave her alone and let her rest.
Eventually, she did drift off, but far too late. Brittany fell asleep an hour before her alarm sounded. She’d had the next two hours to get herself and her daughter ready, make the daycare drop-off, and then the thirty-five-minute commute to work. It was never enough time.
Now, Brittany sighed and stood to follow Tasha’s stout form into the conference room. These meetings were a joke. “Team Enrichment” was code for, “Lisa and Chris will publicly shame every team member for every mistake they’ve ever made in their lives for thirty minutes every other Monday.” Britt felt the granola bar she’d eaten for breakfast turn in her stomach.
“Good morning, team.” Chris’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Let’s take a few moments this morning to go over the past two weeks. Let’s reflect, improve, and get back out there and make our customers happy.”
Lisa leaned against the table at the front of the room, a sour look on her bland, round face. She held a sheet of paper in her hands and shifted to sit on the table’s edge. It groaned in protest under her weight. Lisa thought better of her plan and stood quickly instead. Her embarrassment flashed dangerously across her eyes. She was in one of her foul moods today.
“Okay, people, let’s get this over with.” Lisa’s gravelly voice filled the room. “Tasha,” she pointed at Britt’s desk-mate. “We’ve listened to your last twenty calls, and you’re mumbling. You need to enunciate because our customers can’t understand you. We’ve addressed this before; don’t make us do it again.” Tasha’s round brown eyes fell to the ground as she nodded.
“Brittany,” Lisa pointed to her next. “You were late three times in the last two weeks. If it happens one more time this month, you’re on probation. I don’t think I need to tell you what that means.”
Britt bit her lip and nodded. Probation meant graveyard instead of daytime shifts. She couldn’t be late again. No daycares were open in the middle of the night. Where would Millie go?
The meeting continued with criticism for each of the fifteen team members, and some false, cheery words about making a difference. They all shuffled back to their desks and donned their headsets, ready to be “the world’s best customer service team” for “the world’s best tabletop kitchen appliance company.”
$12.31 an hour wasn’t enough money for Britt to spend her days trying to calm angry customers with broken toasters. But she felt stuck. She was lucky to have gotten a job at all when Justin took off. No one wanted to hire nineteen-year-old single mothers.
The telephone on Britt’s desk blinked red, indicating an incoming call. She pulled herself out of her thoughts and answered, only to be immediately accosted by the stranger on the other line.
“You guys sell cheap-ass garbage toaster ovens! I used the thing once, and now it won’t heat up at all! I want my damn money back!”
“I’m so sorry to hear that, sir. It sounds like you might have received a defective unit. Would you mind trying a couple of things for me to confirm?”
Her words seemed to further incense the customer. “You callin’ me a liar?” he shouted. “The damn thing broke, and I don’t want it fixed, I want my damn money back!”
“I understand your frustration, sir,” Brittany followed the script on her computer screen. “Unfortunately we are unable to process refunds without confirmation that the unit is indeed defective. If you’d be willing to try a few things for me, we can get this sorted out for you, sir.”
“Fine.”
Britt rolled her eyes and forced the false cheeriness back into her voice. “Okay, the first step is to make sure it’s plugged in…”
The toaster oven appeared to resume operating magically, and the customer hung up the phone without so much as a “thank you.”
Brittany leaned over and peeked at Tasha. “This dumb-ass just yelled at me because he forgot to plug in his toaster oven.”
Tasha burst out laughing. “Girl, they do not pay us enough for that kinda stupid!”
“No joke.” Brittany sat back down, let out a sigh, and rubbed her temples while waiting for the next call to come through.
Thirty seconds later, she was on the phone with a little old lady that couldn’t understand why her stove wasn’t working. Brittany said, “I’m sorry, mam, we don’t sell stoves. We only sell tabletop appliances. It looks like you might have the wrong number.”
“No!” The old lady insisted. “I saw your advertisement on the television! It said to call Samson Appliances for all of my kitchen appliance needs! I wrote down the number!”
Brittany picked up a pen and tapped it against her forehead. Britt needed to lose this lady before she destroyed her average handle score. But she couldn’t be rude, either, because her calls were always recorded, and Lisa would rake her over the coals for being rude to a customer. “Okay, mam, we don’t sell stoves or large kitchen appliances. Do you need help with your toaster, toaster oven, coffee maker, anything like that? If so, I’m happy to help you today.”
“I already told you! It’s my stove! It won’t heat up when I press the buttons!”
Brittany gripped the pen in both hands and resisted the urge to hang up. “Mam, you need to call the company that makes the stove. That’s not us.”
“Well how am I supposed to know who makes it?”
Brittany held her breath for a moment, trying not to scream. “If you look at your stove, next to all of the dials and buttons, there should be a company name like Kitchenaide, GE, Whirlpool… They’re the ones you need to call.”
“Oh! I see! It says Whirlpool. Can you connect me to them?”
Would it be faster to explain to this woman that she couldn’t connect her and didn’t have the number? Or would it be faster just to look up the number for her? Brittany pulled up a browser on her computer and typed Whirlpool customer service.
She cleared her throat. “All right, I have the number here for Whirlpool customer service. Do you have a pen?”
“Well, let’s see. Now I just had one! Where did I put it?”