“Your custom is valuable to us. Please be patient and an operator will get back to you.” And you can have fun with this.
[AN: My dash looks like this right now. I’m sincerely hoping that this post is not similarly FUBAR’d. Appropriate prompt is hella appropriate]
The music stopped. She took a preparatory breath in. But there was no human on the other end of the line.
“Your call is important to us,” said the automated voice. “Customer satisfaction and service is our number one priority. Please hold the line and a representative will be with you shortly.”
Sandra Vristen III sighed and kept a note in her journal. She had her name from her Grandmother, who started the call. And who dutifully logged the complaint. The error was still there, of course. She checked daily.
And, because of the laws, she had to have the same name as the person who started the call. It was a global problem that was also in the list of complaints in her generational journal. It was in everyone’s generational journal.
And why, for the most part, history on this world had stopped.
There was the thin hope, every time the music stopped, that there would be a representative this time. That help would be coming.
And in the meantime, she performed the rest of her tasks and her life with her headset almost permanently attached to her ear. She had an app that would recognise an actual customer service representative and wake her up, should they come through while she was sleeping.
But she didn’t believe it would happen while she was alive. Which was why she combed her daughter’s hair. She was also Sandra Vristen. Just as her son also carried his father’s name. And it was also why she filled out a daily application to staff the customer representative job application for MegaGloboCorp. They had to need new hires.
It was almost as if the entire help section was empty.
*
“Another record year,” crowed the CEO of the only company on the planet. He toasted his board members and grinned. “One hundred percent usage, and zero complaints!”
“Yes sir,” said the shifty-eyed representative of the Customer Service division. Nobody else knew nor cared that his staff had been entirely imaginary for generations. All that mattered was the entry-level paycheques shunted around until they got to his bank account. He even used the names of the people who kept applying for non-existent jobs. For verisimilitude.
Not that anyone cared.
The money kept rolling in. And why not? They owned everything.
[Muse food remaining: 16. Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
