The last hour of my shift is very hard to predict. Sometimes, it is god-awful. All the freaks seem to come scuttling out in the wee hours of the morning, dragging their twisted fantasies behind them like freshly butchered kills. These callers are usually brazen about what they want and they expect PSOs to be thrilled to talk to them. I think that they know that we are bored. Other times, I get argumentative drunks or Lazy Fuckers wanting a PSO to tell them a fantasy like it's a bedtime story. I have had callers tell me to start talking about their fantasy and warned me that they were going to fall asleep, hopefully, and to just keep talking. Okay. Personally, I would find it incredibly annoying to be listening to someone talk while I was trying to fall asleep but, if that is what they want, I'm game. I make sure they understand that I cannot disconnect the call on my end once they do fall asleep, it's against the rules. The call will end when they hang up or run out of time.
I have only had one caller complain about that policy. In fact, we spent his entire call time arguing about it. First, he said he didn't believe me. We bickered about that until I finally told him that I have no interest in what he 'believed', those were the rules as they were explained to me and I wasn't going to break them for him. He shifted into cajoling, telling me that he was a really nice guy and deserved a break. I rolled my eyes. Having worked customer service jobs before, this bullshit is nothing new to me. Why some people think that they can act like jerks and then ooze out a few phony compliments to get something extra is beyond me. In defense of customer service representatives everywhere, if they tell you it is a rule they cannot break, they are not kidding. They are not fucking with you for the hell of it. Customer service representatives can and do lose their jobs for breaking those rules and why the hell should they risk their survival for you? Because you're a nice guy? Stop being such an arrogant ass.
I explained to him that asking me to break the rules, just this one time, for him, because he is such a nice guy was a waste of time. It was not going to happen. First of all, I could lose my job, asshole. Are you going to pay my bills? No? Then, fuck off. Second of all, letting the caller go early literally costs me money. I get paid on a sliding scale depending on my call time average. I need as many long calls as I can get. Telling a caller a 'sexy bedtime story' until the time runs out is a long call and is how I make money. Trying to predict when the caller falls asleep and hanging up to save him a few minutes for his next phone sex call is counterproductive. He started calling me vile names and kept at it until his call time ran out. Not quite the bedtime story experience he was looking for.
Sometimes, the late evening callers are wonderful. Last night was one of those. The call started normally enough, basic exchange of information. I call it the 'get to know you chat'. Some callers really balk at this part, they don't want to waste their precious call time talking about things other than sex. Tough. It's part of the call guidelines I have to follow and, more importantly for me, it's how I get a lock on someone's voice so I can understand them. People don't realize how much a telephone distorts the sound of a human voice because we are too used to compensating for that distortion mentally. Until we speak to someone with an accent different than our own, we don't realize how often our brains fill in the blanks while we are listening to someone on the phone. Because the speech pattern is different from our own, we lose the ability to fill in the blanks, temporarily. I have a hard time understanding callers from the East coast and certain parts of the South until I get used to the sound of their voices by chatting with them.
During the getting to know you chat, I asked the caller his age. He gave me a number and then said "It's not the years, it's the mileage." I laughed and teased him about quoting Raiders of the Lost Ark to me. He was absolutely flabbergasted that I recognized the quote and could name the source. He told me that I was the first PSO he had spoken to who had been able to identify that quote. I asked how often he called. He answered 'a lot'. We talked about the movie John Carter of Mars and I admitted that I was reluctant to go see it because I had loved the Edgar Rice Burroughs books as a teenager and I was afraid to watch the story butchered in a film. He reviewed the movie for me. We discussed films, books, comic strips, comic book writers and artists for nearly the entire call. We have very similar tastes in entertainment and talking to him reminded me of all the wonderful stories I read as a teenager and how much I love science fiction and fantasy. Near the end of the call, he paid me the best compliment I have ever heard from a caller. He told me that our conversation was most emotionally satisfying experience that he had ever had with a PSO and that I had so far exceeded his expectations I left him breathless. He equated phone sex as about as sexually exciting as sneezing. It never crossed his mind that he would come across a PSO who shared his interests and could speak intelligently about them. He never knew what a turn on it could be. Well... surprise!
He also told me that my voice made him think of a velvet gloved hand stroking down his spine and
making him shiver with delight.
Yeah, that was nice, too.
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