When You’re a Female Telephone Agent and Phone Sex Happens
By: Andrew Jazprose Hill
Tags: Life, Discrimination, Women, Sex, Customer Service

WOMEN | LIFE | SEXUALITY

When You’re a Female Telephone Agent and Phone Sex Happens

Photo via Creative Commons

If a man answers, they hang up.

“Hi, this is Donna.”

That’s what they’re looking for. Or Heather, Tracy, Nancy, Janelle.

“Thank you for calling. This is Maggie. How may I help you?”

Any of these female voices will do. All trained from day one to smile as they speak. Be cheerful, submissive. Accommodating. Never argumentative. Never disagreeable. Only with a woman can the caller’s personal movie begin. Here comes the canine panting into the mouthpiece, the kind that can only mean one thing.

This is what you put up with in the underbelly of call-center life, where nearly seventy-five percent of the phone agents are women. If a man answers, heavy breathers need not press redial too often before they get what they’re listening for.

Soprano, sotto voce. That’s the ticket. How may I help you?

The psychology that turns the telephone into a sex toy is lost on me. But I do see the benefit of an audience in certain situations. Clearly, this is one of them.

We only get four or five of these guys during any given season. But they call the toll-free number with surprising regularity. We don’t know their names, but we recognize them easily enough. When I worked in talk-radio, we recorded repeat callers and labeled the cartridges: The John Bircher, The Screaming Christian Woman, The Stutterer, etc.

Here we record nothing. It’s part of the confidentiality our legitimate callers depend on. But we’re not oblivious to the obvious. Heavy breathers always use the same toll-free incoming line, the same identifiable voice, the same modus operandi.

Telephone agents can get fired for turning calls away. So, the unlucky women who land these guys just sit there and take it until the precise nature of the call becomes clear. Only then are they permitted to hang up. Usually, it’s safe to press the release button when talking stops and hyperventilation begins.

The official name for this unwanted phone sex is telephone scatologia.

It’s a psychosexual disorder, one that’s easy to spot in these huff-and-puff boys, but more difficult to pin down in related cases. Like the guy who calls from eight thousand miles away. On another continent. A nondisclosure agreement prevents me from saying where.

He never wants to speak with men, either. Always has some variation on the same theme, which he wants to spell out in great detail — to women only.

“One day, I was on my way out of the building,” he says in a throaty half-whisper, “and I noticed a hole in the bathroom wall. When I stopped to see what was going on, I saw a man and a woman inside, and they were…”

The call center where I work at this time before COVID operates a 24/7 whistleblower hotline for reporting sexual harassment. Other things too — like fraud, bribery, discrimination, embezzlement — but unwanted sexual advances rank high on the list of bad things that happen at work.

For one thing, the legal costs for defending a sexual harassment lawsuit, even if there’s been no wrongdoing, can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why the women who get stuck with these calls must treat them as legit. You never know for sure that it’s an OPC (obscene phone call) until the caller tips his hand, so to speak.

Unlike the heavy breathers who might telephone any call center, this other type knows enough about what we do to have prepared a story. They know that names must be given. Dates and places. How the caller knows about it. Whether there were witnesses.

The fact that a woman must listen to this. Write down every word. Ask questions about it. These are necessary parts of the transaction. They make her an unwitting participant in the drama.

Most female phone agents are disgusted when the caller’s perversity shines through. A few think it’s pathetic. For others, it’s hilarious. Wankers. Tossers. Creeps.

Photo via Needpix

The Sound and the Fury

Then there’s the former English teacher, still working past retirement to get the medical insurance she cannot afford without an employer-based plan. She is a smart, detail-oriented woman with wavy gray hair. Sometimes she temps as a tech editor to make ends meet.

It’s been decades since she left her birthplace in Oxford, Mississippi, but she’s never been able to cut loose its twangy sing-song drawl. I like talking to her, though it requires effort to separate that accent from the segregationist stereotypes I associate with it.

Like the train conductors who called my father “boy” well into his forties and fifties. Or the pasty-faced drivers in aviator sunglasses — their wide butts spilling over cracked vinyl seats — who made us move to the back of the bus.

My English teacher co-worker is also not like that damn fool restaurant owner in Atlanta who used an axe handle to chase black folks away from his establishment after the Civil Rights Bill passed. She’s nothing like any of those people.

But her accent triggers a past that’s supposed to be over, one I wish were also dead within me, though I fear it has only mutated like dinosaur-era cockroaches and penicillin-resistant bacteria.

Between calls she talks to me of Faulkner, whose work I would not be able to appreciate had I not recently returned to grad school. Sometimes she reminisces about the North Beach coffee shops where she and her husband began their courtship. I know the neighborhood well because I leased a flat on Telegraph Hill during my first days as a TV reporter in San Francisco. This call-center gig is not the first rodeo for either of us, though we have traveled here by different routes.

The English teacher is not thrown by OPCs. If you can make it through Light in August or The Sound and the Fury, it will take more than an obscene phone call to unseat you. Unfazed, she allows the foreign-accented caller to continue. Lurid details pile up as his whacked imagination spins out a tale lifted, apparently, from a porno flick or Game of Thrones. But before he reaches the climax, she interrupts him with a schoolteacher-scold disguised as a question.

“Excuse me, sir, but just how long were you standing out there looking at all this?” With her Yoknapatawpha accent, she sounds like Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies.

Clearly, this is not the response the caller hoped for. The line goes dead. To protect her job, the English teacher logs the incident as a nuisance call. Any conversation that does not result in a report must be accounted for. Or else.

I witness this little exchange because it’s my job to eavesdrop on telephone agents to make sure they’re doing what they’re paid to do. Writing a complete version of what’s been said during the call. Not being rude. Not hanging up. It’s a dicey gig that could easily lead to resentments.

But fortunately, I’ve been spared any detectable hostility. My snooping is offset by the call-control and report-writing I teach. I’m here to help, not accuse, attack, or punish.

While the English teacher sits waiting for her next incoming call, I make my way to her cubicle.

“Were you listening just now?” she asks.

“Yes. Did he upset you?”

“Upset? By that tale told by an idiot?” she says. “How could I be upset by that?”

“You fooled him. I think he was expecting a shrinking violet.”

“Maybe so,” she says. “But from the way he hung up, he’s the one who did all the shrinking.”

“He’ll call back, you know. They always do.”

She looks at me and smiles. I know what she’s thinking. She’s been added to the heavy breather’s filter. If a man answers, hang up. And the same goes for English teachers with a Southern drawl.

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