Dreadful Nonsense

Today, for my own amusement, because Big Brother updates don’t have the fervour they had yesterday (and because the official BB site is offline so I can’t even read the official boring, Teflon coated spin on recent events), I have been answering the phone in a variety of stupid voices.

When I had decided to go back to work, I had been immediately offered two positions – one as a receptionist / typist at an accountants, and one as a full time receptionist in an office where they didn’t specify their nature of business, at least not to me on the first job run through. I’d talked this over with Mrs D, and we’d decided that, of all admin and secretarial style jobs, receptionist is the most fun and the most stupid. As a secretary, you get a lot of rubbish things to do, like faxing, photocopying, typing, filing and occasionally making coffee for people you don’t like. As a PA, it’s much the same, but with more pressure and occasionally having to talk to clients. As a receptionist, you don’t do any of that. As a receptionist, what you do is transfer calls, make calls and tell people to sit down. Most of the time, you don’t even have to offer them coffee.

I love being a receptionist – it’s like being in a play. You can be delightfully – sometimes to the point of sarcasm - nice to everyone you encounter all day, because generally they’re not the people you’re working with. You tend to just see people who come in for appointments or interviews, and the only prolonged conversation you’ll ever have with anyone will be with a courier coming to collect or deliver a package, and generally that’s just about the weather and lasts less than 30 seconds. All the while, you sit in front of a computer that’s been given to you for no reason at all, because for the most part receptionists don’t do typing. I think it’s to take up space on the desk, and so you can email friends in other firms to talk about how shocked you were at Jason’s apparently out of character behaviour last night, and didn’t Dan do so well trying to calm everyone down, and I wonder when Emma will be let out of the bedsit again.

I didn’t get the receptionist job though. I got the accountant typist/receptionist one, which means all the typing and photocopying of one job combined with the false smiling and the that’s-no-problem-at-all-ing. But it’s actually been quite great, there’s been fuck all to do, and I’m out of here in two and a half hours. It doesn’t half get boring though.

I’m trying to restrict myself to visiting only a few sites while here, so I’m limiting myself to the BB Digital Spy site, Popbitch, eBay and my three email accounts. I’ve also been reading Dave Egger’s new work in progress on Salon. Between all of that, I’m trying to stay off line as much as possible and so to make my own entertainment have begun answering the phone in a number of stupid voices.

Mrs D, while we were having the abovementioned discussion, pointed out this source of fun that had surprisingly never occurred to me before. Mrs D, because she is a dirty whore with the tarnished soul of one condemned to eternal damnation, explained that while answering and transferring calls – particularly when speaking to gentlemen callers, although this works equally well for either gender persuasion – one should speak in the manner of a phone sex worker. Apparently this distracts and entertains both caller and answerer in equal level, and occasionally makes the gentlemen callers forget why they were calling in the first place. Although this does sound tremendous, I’ve not headed down that dirt track just yet (although the day is still young). I’ve instead been answering the phone in the tone of my god daughter, who is seven and answers the phone at home as if any day now the call will be for her.

This kind of never ending enthusiasm seems to buoy up the callers, who seem to want to ask me more questions and give me more information than when I was talking like someone in a call centre in Glasgow – although this approach can be tremendous fun too. I’m sure that the people on the 11811 or 118118 lines (feel free to insert your own directory enquiries numbers here) speak so rudely and sound so bored only because it entertains them to cut people off mid-sentence and give them the wrong number 2 out of 3 times. I know that’s exactly the way I’d be if I worked there, and therefore I hold nothing against them and their minimum wage sources of amusement.

The point I’m making – and there isn’t one, so I’m not sure why I’m trying to round up this post in a neat manner – is that I’m bored with nothing to do.

This entry was posted on 18 June 2004 at 11:34 am. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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