Justin Taylor: The Gospel of Anarchy

Iworked at the survey center in the Seagle Building, which stands eleven full stories on the north side of University Avenue, halfway between the eastern edge of campus and downtown. Excepting the Beaty Towers, a pair of Soviet bloc — style dorms built in the late ’60s, it was — and still is — the tallest building in all of Gainesville. Our offices were on the ground floor. We contracted with government programs and private insurers. We wore headsets, hooked into desktop computers; we felt the heat of the machines through our pant legs, even as their cooling fans keened louder, quickening their endless spin. We stared into boxy monitors with dull green screens, sat tucked behind half-height cubicle walls of coarse gray fabric flecked with colored bits like tiny festive mistakes.

The machines autodialed while we thumbed magazines. Junk stuff, mostly— Vogue, Spin, Esquire , maybe a Newsweek now and then, or Time . The magazines, page-worn and out of date, were supplied by the office, piled on a counter in the break room. Management didn’t want us reading books, or anything assigned. So no Norton Anthology, no sheaf of double-sided runoffs held together with a worry-bent staple. If you had a highlighter out, you were busted. (A dropout, none of this was a problem for me.) We had to be alert, poised, ready to get on the line and start talking to whoever answered the phone we’d dialed, or else cut the call off if a machine clicked on. We could not, therefore, afford the distraction of anything with depth.

It was a roomful of students and ex-students, managed by listless postgrads with timorous seniority. Our job was to wait for a live human voice and when we got one, to read to it the information on the screen. We were selling nothing, asking only for time and honesty.

We spoke to retirees, recovering addicts, people on the welfare rolls, on parole; recent hospital releases eager to rate their inpatient experience — seven, no, no, six, I guess, okay, is there a six and a half? I’m sorry, ma’am, but there is no six and a half. They asked us questions we could not answer, say, about the status of their claim, or what this information will be used for. Statistical purposes. We reassured them. We assuaged. Your anonymity is safe. We add your numbers to the great database.

We used a modulated tone, a cool-to-the-touch tone. The voice of condolences offered on behalf of an absent friend. We only had jobs because it was understood that these people would not take calls from robots. You hear an automated voice and assume someone is trying to get you into a timeshare, raise money for a congressman, sell tickets for a cruise. And also because someone had to log all the answers. The people, it was felt, could not be trusted to correctly punch in the numbers corresponding to their choices on their touchtone phones.

I didn’t read while I worked, not even the magazines. I just sat and watched — the screen, or the other callers. I peeked around my gray walls. I gazed and surveyed. Here was a girl with a Pantene-sleek ponytail that started high on her head and went halfway down her back; sorority Greek on a thin gold chain, the characters perfectly centered in the scoop neck of a pale pink shirt. A gangly freshman guy, acne-scarred, five eleven, perpetually anemic-seeming in black jeans like burnt sticks. The fat girl with Coke-bottle glasses and a torn blue windbreaker; she never brought anything to read, either. She just sat there, silent and still, Zening out on her green screen. I wondered what she did when she got a call through — if she could rouse herself from those green depths and actually speak — but I never sat close enough to listen. A whole roomful of us. Rooms, actually. There were three full rooms. You got a different station every time. Some people, I imagine, made friends.

If you don’t unmute the headset right when you hear the phone pick up, then the person you’ve called hears the little click of you clicking the unmute button and then that person thinks you are a robot whose recording has just clicked on. They played the same game with us that we played with their answering machines: if it sounds automatic, dump it.

The people we were calling didn’t have vacation days piling up. They did not wish to be selected for a special offer, four nights five days, continental breakfast, Disney World, whatever it was. They were looking for overtime, not time off. We had to let them know right away that quote this is not a sales call . We were people just like them, going about our business, collecting only that which we needed, and which was free to give, which is not to say it was often given freely.

People resented us, and rightly. We were wound-pokers, interlopers in their shattered lives, and the untone in which we probed was a compounding offense. We asked them about the last time they’d had steady work. How long since the coverage ran out? Your anonymity, we said, again, is assured, though if they’d thought about it they’d have realized that implicit in the set of questions and the fact of our calling was how much we already had on them. They were angry; they were outraged. They yelled at us, called us things.

We were forbidden to be provoked by them, or say anything at all not printed on our screens. Don’t get baited. Don’t engage. And some hung up, but these were relatively few. Surprisingly few, or maybe not so surprisingly. We spoke, after all, with a vague but convincing air of authority, and people suspected that we had no actual power over them (we didn’t), but they weren’t prepared to test that theory and be wrong. These were people who were behind on payments, who patronized check-cashing stores. Some were gracious, decent to us, even kind, maybe pleased to have been asked to share or just to have someone to talk to. These were also few. Everyone else said we were interrupting dinner. They said we had no business, no right. They sputtered and swore. And then they told us everything we asked.

At home there was no conversation. No back and forth. No feigned ease, no modulated voice. No voice, period. Silence reigned. Quiet clicks. The world opened up to me through a small bright window, my personal laptop computer, which was of course too heavy and ran too hot to actually keep on my lap, not that I wanted it there. I had to use a plug-in trackball mouse because I couldn’t get the hang of the touchpad thing. The laptop was barely a year old, still more or less state-of-the-art, and had pride of place on the desk in my living room, where I sat and surfed a wave that never crested, climbed a mountain that never peaked. Curved, oiled, chesty, slick, spread; sometimes I imagined the girls in a kind of march, an endless parade celebrating — what? Themselves, I guess, or me.