As you may have guessed from the last paragraph of my last entry, I spent most of yesterday on a twelve-hour Twitter ban. Usually in these situations I avoid Twitter, but I was periodically checking in yesterday because a well-loved figure from one of the corners of that site I occupy, Rory/Ghostface Kafka/@thatkafkadude had gone missing after posting some concerning messages to his account. So periodically I would have a look at the app to see if there was any news.
That news finally arrived when I checked Twitter this morning and it wasn’t good. Rory killed himself. His last tweet before he checked out was one word. That word was ‘sorry’.
Which stuck with me for a simple reason: 'sorry' was the last word my mother spoke to me the night before she died. Looking back, it felt like she knew then. Like she knew that she was dying and was apologising for no longer being around to help me with my problems which, honestly, were nothing compared to her cancer but that was the kind of woman my mum was. Someone who cared about other people, who felt responsible for them, who had been raised to believe you should help others if you can.
The fact her last word was ‘sorry’ breaks my heart, because I want to tell her she had nothing to apologise for. But it - and the fact that ‘sorry’ was also Rory’s last word - makes me angry. And the reason for that is that for many years, I worked in a job which was dressed up in a bunch of different ways but which basically amounted to saying ‘sorry’ hundreds of times a day to the absolute worst people in the world, and sitting silent and stoic as they verbally abused me.
They always tell you at call centres that you should try and disassociate from the hatred you have hurled at you down the phone, but that’s bullshit. You can’t, not really. Human beings have evolved to react a certain way to other people raising their voices to us and all the mindfulness in the world doesn’t change that. But it sure puts a feelgood new-age cover on the slow decline into learned helplessness that call centre work inflicts on you. You can only sit and take it for so long when people abuse you before it starts taking a psychic toll. And the fact is that the bosses know this. They are well aware that they have employed you as an emotional punching bag to absorb the anger of the people who use the service they pretend to provide (because it is never the executives who provide the service itself, they just extract the profits). That you are there to soak up the shit customers will give the company about their own bad decisions. It is worth thinking about this: right now there exists an entire class of workers whose job it is to sit and take abuse and whose employers have erected an entire edifice of training and propaganda and acculturation to try and gaslight them into not knowing that fact.
Of course, the workers are all too aware that this is exactly what we’re there for. The amount of money spent on internal propaganda in modern corporations is staggering but I’ve met very few people working in call centres who believe it. The meetings in which new edicts are handed down, videos screened, and bullshit awards presented by some management scumbag who uses these captive audiences to make up for the fact that in all other contexts, including his failing marriage, other people find him chronically unlikable, are valued not for their informational content but because they represent an hour away from the phones, away from the abuse, and the screens displaying the number of other people queueing up to abuse you.
And sure, they say you can terminate calls if you feel people are getting too abusive but terminate too many and it’s going to be brought up during your performance review. As is your manner in dealing with these customers if you’re anything less than disgustingly subservient. And so, as a result, one of the things you spend a lot of time doing in call centres is saying sorry.
(Oh, and a special shout-out here to all the cuntstomers who react to those apologies with some variation on ‘well that doesn’t help me does it?’ I certainly don’t hope to one day find you in an alley and put you in a situation where I can piss all over your emotional responses - and, let’s be honest, your lovely posh clothes - to the same degree.)
To some extent, I’ve written about this before: what I call the ownership lie, the way in which power forces us to ‘own’ the problems created by the systems we are forced to work for, while the powerful themselves never take responsibility for a goddam thing. And this is where it ends up: with good people saying ‘sorry’ even when their bodies and minds can’t take it anymore, because we’ve been so socialised to think that is what we should say.
Because our so-called ‘betters’ certainly aren’t socialised to do that. Look at the pervert who was barely forced out of office a few weeks ago, a man whose career history is more accurately described as a string of offences, any one of which would have seen an ordinary member of the public strung up and gutted in the tabloids - this man was allowed to be Prime Minister! ‘First among equals’! Well I suppose in a Parliament full of landlords, racists and rapists it makes sense to give that accolade to the most corrupt man in the building, but it doesn’t make it any less disgusting to have to be governed by a man who ought to have been strangled with his mother’s chord by a kind and grandmotherly midwife.
(Does that last bit offend you? Do you think I’m being mean to lovable Boris? I’m glad. I intend to be mean to him. If someone had been meaner to that thick blonde cunt earlier in his career maybe so many good people wouldn’t be dead. Don’t expect an apology: you’ll grow old waiting to receive one from me.)
So I am angry this morning. I am angry that a good man is dead. I am still angry about the suffering my mother had to endure because the People Who Never Apologise have ran the NHS down to a point where it is barely functional so they can sell it to their disgusting spiv chums in the insurance firms, and I am angry that meant that her last stay in hospital was so unpleasant. I am angry that newspapers and TV regularly interview pampered, privileged little scions who are allowed to declare their mantra to be ‘never apologise, never explain’ because they’ve been taught from birth that apologies are for the little people. And I am angry that other people, who have internalised the ownership lie, who have not yet reached the level of sheer fucking disgust with this wretched comedy that I have, will read or see those interviews and feel an extra level of guilt when they are forced, by the circumstances of their job, to say sorry to another rich and triflingly inconvenienced piece of scum who in no way deserves an apology, because in the world the People Who Never Apologise have made the fact that you have to say sorry as part of your job becomes another stick to beat you with, another sign that you are less than they are. Another sign that we are little people.
Fuck that. I am not going to tell you to stop apologising, because I know that if you’re reading this you probably aren’t one of the People Who Never Apologise (and if you are, fuck off and stop reading this. It’s not for you, and it will only get more unpleasant for you the more you keep reading because I deliberately make use of a number of devices to Keep Out Scum).
What I am going to tell you to do is to start lying. The customers never believe our apologies anyway, they just want compensation and the feeling someone has had to crawl to them. So apologise as dishonestly as you can. Apologise in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. One thing I used to do was deliberately soften my voice when apologising to them, so I sounded like someone doing ASMR or phone sex. I found this really used to freak the fuckers out, especially when I hadn’t came out yet and was still answering calls under my deadname. That might not work for you, but find something. Find some saving gap of dishonesty you can dance in and tell these entitled bastards, metaphorically speaking, to go fuck themselves.
If your inclinations run toward the occult end of things, there’s another thing I used to do that you could try. While customers were on the phone to me, giving me shit, I would take the letters of their name and make a little sigil out of them, on one of the scraps of paper we all kept around because you weren’t allowed to take written material off the floor. And then, when I was done with the call, I would put my pen against the palm heel of my hand and stab it through the scrap of paper, destroying the sigil I’d made of their name. Now obviously the esoteric intent of this is what they call malefica, but it also makes great therapy. If you’ve just had to spend ten minutes apologising to some mollycoddled upper class freak, it’s nice to have a single simple gesture you can make to show your utter contempt for them.
And you are right to feel that contempt, by the way. There are too many of the People Who Never Apologise in this society, and that, one day, will need correcting. But while we wait and work towards that day of Épuration, nurture your contempt for them, feed your anger and let it sustain you.
Because like Rory, and like my mother, you have nothing to apologise for.
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