Bad Managers - The Rumour Mill

Call Centers are like a "black hole" from which no energy can escape

20 December 2001, 12:37 GMT

The Crab Nebula gets sucked dry by a nearby Call Center

When you speak to a call center or help desk operator, anything you say is converted to sound waves, which are then transported via the traditional telephone system into the Call Center (or "black hole").

The real peculiarity, Call Center watchdog CallCenterDog spokesman Reg Dowling explains, is that every time you call a support desk or Call Center, you must explain your entire situation from scratch. If it's an ongoing saga, you know that next time you call them back, you will have to do the same - start all over again, explaining the entire godforsaken saga. There is no persistence of state between requests.

"HTTP"

"It's as if these Call Center operators are acting out the HTTP protocol using the medium of curt politeness," groaned Dowling.

Similarly, you can ask them to call you back with an answer to your question, but of course nothing further ever happens. Your simple request apparently just disappears into the void. But the truth is that a small part of your life force has been sucked into the Call Center's energy repository, where it sits unnoticed in a small dark room, doomed to an eternity of repudiated solitude.

It's not all doom and gloom though. In fact, researchers from the North Dakota Institute of Physics and well-Intentionalism (N-DIPI) are launching a new research project that will examine the possible real-world applications of such a system.

"If we could just discover what makes these places tick..."

"Call centers are subject to an entirely unique set of physical laws," chief scientist Ronnie Sway explains. "They can consume energy and cause it to simply disappear without a trace. If we could discover what makes these places tick, at a sub-atomic level, then we could maybe reverse the process and create a way of actually producing energy from nothing. The implications are incredible: FREE ENERGY FOR ALL!!"

Other researchers in the newly formed team are worried, however. These researchers wished to remain anonymous (although we can reveal that it was the entire team).

"A severe depletion of matter in the Universe"

We spoke to one of them seperately, and he confided his fears: "Well, I shouldn't be telling you this, but we suspect that maybe these call centers are leading to a severe depletion of matter in the Universe. Matter and energy are basically the same thing, so if these energy hives are sucking in matter and causing it to disappear, then we could see an effect similar to the much-feared Universal Entropy Gradient. We might suddenly see the stars flicker and die out for no apparent reason."

"But I can tell you exactly why," he added in a hushed, conspiratorial tone. "It's because of the damned Call Centers. Could you imagine? Looking up at the night's sky and not seeing anything - just a massive expanse of inky blackness. No beautiful twinkling stars, no waxy shining moon, nothing. And in the so-called daytime - even less. Just an endless, perpetual dark night, for ever and ever. And for this demonic, inevitable fate, we can of course thank the energy-sucking abyss that we quaintly term Call Centers."