The above is a picture of telephone customer service representatives writhing in agony. It’s okay that they’re not dressed because they work from the comfort of their own homes. This is a collage. They’re not really all together in the same room.
I’ve actually only been told to go to hell a handful of times in my life. Having never compared these statistics with anyone else my age, I’m unable to judge if that’s about the same number of times as most other people or not. You might be able to help me out with that. However, judging by the degree of excruciating torment inherent in my former job as a telephone customer service representative, which seemed all the more eternal for its repetitive banality, I can only conclude that a lot of people must have said it under their breath.
Dante himself, author of The Inferno, would have been hard-pressed to surpass this degree of hellishness. In fact, he couldn’t have. Why? Because Dante had an imagination, which this particular hell has a complete and utter lack of, which is one of its most qualifying features. It came complete with shrieking harpies, threatening demons, and somehow, the Tower of Babel story was worked in for good measure. That meant that I first had to mentally translate the verbally abusive phrases being heaped upon me in broken English before I could understand that I was being eternally cursed. Our managers, able to morph from giddy cheerleaders into brutal overseers in the blink of an eye, added just the right touch of surrealism. One minute we were told “You’re the A team! You do anything”. (They meant anything except take a bathroom break or not make your per-hour quota of email responses.) I ended up with frozen shoulder and medical expenses that, I can assure you, the meager wages they paid did not cover.
I’m pretty sure the owner was at least a distant relative of Satan himself. The one plus was that I didn’t have to get dressed or drive to that job, but could be abused in my very own home! But you know me, always looking for that silver lining—and I found it! No matter how much bad karma I’d accumulated, including during any and all past lives—that job wiped my slate completely clean. Even a sentence of eternal damnation is bound to be lessened by time served.
How was YOUR day at work?
The Big Picture 