I'm on the phone!

There’s a new kid at work. Work being my second job, and “new” in a relative sense; he’s been with the company for about 2 or 3 weeks now. So he’s newer than me, but he’s not so new as not to know what to do.

We were closing the store, and as the evening hours climbed ever higher, his output got ever slower. Until by the end of the night, I really wanted to do something like smack him, or poke, or anything – just to get him moving.

I was wondering if he was the slowest worker I’d ever had the misfortune to be working with, until I remember an old Toys R Us colleague – who TRU paid to do nothing, literally.

This was back in the earlyish 90’s, and our TRU store had just got itself a new hands-free telephone answering system. It came with two phone packs, employees would wear these – a nice headset, and while you were working on the floor you could take calls. This was especially great for stock checks on the fly, when a customer HAD to know if you had one of the new Cabbage Patch Picnic Time kids in, or how many Megazords were left in stock.

The arrival was precipitous, as it was Christmas time, and the phones lines were red hot with inquiries and parents searching for the must have toy. Miranda was an Indian girl, she was hired during the Christmas rush – the managers weren’t too familiar with the new headsets – but wanted to get them out right away to relieve some of the hold time potential customers were experiencing. Miranda volunteered to wear one of the sets on her shifts.

Miranda could then be seen walking the aisles, purposefully looking for items and talking into the headset. You could hear her tell callers how many Pink Power Ranger figures were left in stock, what Super Soakers were available. Miranda was clearly on the phone, so customers actually in the store were never able to stop her and ask for assistance, as she was clearly already assisting someone else – on her headset phone.

If someone was wily enough to ask a question in-between her sporadic speech into the headset, she make her way to the stock room for a quick check of an item that we were out of on the floor – but would helpfully send the customer to the front desk for more assistance as she disappeared into the cavernous “employees only” back stock room.

This was her regular routine for a few weeks leading up to Christmas, and about this time we got a new manager in the regular TRU managerial rotation. This manager happened to notice that Miranda’s headset was never turned on – in the back.

So all those phone calls hadn’t really been phone calls at all. Miranda had been coming in for 8 – 12 hours a day (with overtime) and just been wandering the store, talking out loud to herself. She’d been taking breaks, her lunches, and then heading back out for more....talking to herself.

I was impressed with her ingenuity – the amount of time to actually come up with these one sided communications was well played. But, I can’t help thinking that it would have been more interesting to actually take the phone calls.