Paid to play, forced to listen

Damn, we're still working our extra hours.
But the calls have dwindled down.
So here I am, twiddling my thumb up my ass because the calls are coming in at an amazingly slow pace.

*shakes head*
I dunno. Things were terribly hectic at the peak of our mailing exercise and we were all performing superhumanly. But this.... this was the kind of trickle I expect during my midnight "E" shifts. I am wondering if I should ask for something to work at, to keep me busy, but some of the staff would kill me for spoiling the market.

So things are quiet and I'm playing my mind-numbingly stupid Dynomite game to pass the time. I am slumping in my seat, hidden away in a back row, wondering what tohave for dinner, when a hyena's laugh breaks the quiet evening.

It's my dept head.

Wat da hell is this? What da hell is SMOR-GAS-BOT, ah??

This is the woman whom I had the intense misfortune to sit near to, when I was first transferred here. So loud and so ghastly are her shrieks that I had a CUSTOMER ask me on the phone "Your office sounds like fish market, eh?" I had never been so professionally embarressed in my life. But back to the braying laughter.

Admin asst mgr : Wat? Wat? Wat are you talking? What SMOR-GAS-BOT??
Dept head : What is this SMOR-GAS-BOT? He send me email, I never see before?!?!
AAM : Who send you? Who is using all this jargon word?
Dept : He, lah! Ask him to send me the ad text, he go and send me this kind of word!

They break out, lord knows, how many dictionaries, wax lyrical with horrible puns and tease each other about the thickness of dictionaries, shrieking all the while about THICKNES heh heh heh, complaning that they don't understand.

My co-worker and I look at each other. We roll our eyes in mutual silent misery. The 2 women are yelling across the partitioned work spaces as if they were in their own, private ... and, considering that it's a bloody call centre..... sound-proofed space.

We bloody know what smorgasbord is. We mouth our laughter across the partiions. But we're stuck listening to the maniacal laughter. Why so difficult? Can't he just say variety? We're set up as a co-op but the big bosses dream of us serving the white collar workings eventually. But we ain't making it if our middle managers are so rural.

Not for nothing is my company king of the village people.