In an office of executive minimalism, painted to be holistically awash with an abundance of cooperate grey, a single telephone rang fourteen times before it was answered.
‘Welcome to the complaints department, how may I help you?’
‘He-hello? Complaints?’
‘Yes, my dear parrot, you are coming through quite clearly and with excellent resonance. Now, to whom may I be speaking?’
The voice was abruptly smooth in a way that caused a reel of apologies to be spun within the caller’s mind before they were able to lodge a complaint. The operator had this curious warble to their intonation, one that rolled along gently but suddenly dropped whenever they finished a sentence, it was equally disarming as it was disquieting, the operator managing to unsettle the caller and equally draw them into a place of open discussion.
‘Will this call remain anonymous?’ Stammered the caller, ‘I’ve not done this before, my name is…Peter.’
‘You’ve said Peter because I called you parrot just now, haven’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t I-‘
‘Anyway,’ the operator barrelled on, ‘you can find solace in knowing that your complaint will not leave this room.’
‘You mean my identity?’
‘Something like that, Mr. Parrot, we are an employee first company. Think of this call as like a sinking ship and know that I will do everything in my power to ensure that you are the first person overboard when the water rises, and that’s even before the rats jump. And speaking of rats, I believe that you had a complaint to lodge.’
Baffled by the operator’s use of a transitory simile, the caller took some moments to regain his composure but was quickly overwhelmed by the metronomic silence that pervaded from his desk phone.
A headstone’s worth of quiet lingered as an image in his mind and the tall fellow with the scythe behind it gestured for him to continue.
‘Yes, well, I’d like to complain about my colleagues. I work in quality assurance, and it appears that everyone else down here is dead.’
‘Dead you say,’ the operator commented with the tell-tale sounds of a form being filled out beginning to scratch away in the background, ‘have you mentioned this with them? What manner of dead are they? Tired, serious, to rights?’
‘I didn’t want to pry. I mean, how do you ask? But Clarence, a colleague from the next station over, he hasn’t moved for a week, and I think I saw a skeleton yesterday.’
‘Wandering around on company time, I see.’ said the operator, ‘I suppose this was on a registered break or on your way to the bathroom? You do realise it is against company policy to roam,’ they added with a polite tone intended to verbally gesture toward an axe that had been left on the table, adjusting it so delicately that Peter couldn’t miss its presence.
‘But the break room is just a cupboard and there’s no plug for the kettle!’ Peter protested, now worried enough that he had begun to raise his voice, ‘I’ve called human resources, multiple times, and they keep telling me that “they’ll look into it” but my whole department is dead! Dead-dead, gone, passed beyond the veil, did I mention that one is a skeleton!? What killed them? How have they been missed? How am I supposed to feel when all my co-workers are dead!’
Stopping for breath, Peter felt a sudden urge to jump from the conversation and take his chances in the sea but was shaken from his thoughts by the operator closing a heavy sounding book.
‘Ah, Mr. Peter, yes resources did lodge a complaint that you had been ringing them. They will look into it as soon as they are able. But in the meantime, if you would like to complain that you don’t know your colleagues well enough, I can email you a requisition for a departmental picnic if you’d like? A few sandwiches, some sun, great for morale.’
‘I don’t need a picnic, I need a mortician. Do you have a form for that?’ Peter quipped despite himself. His efforts to reason with the complaints department appearing as a lost battle.
There was a pause.
A long pause that didn’t contain any sense of lingering dread. Had the operator walked away? Nervous, Peter was unsure if he should hang up.
‘Hello?’ He tried in a whisper, feeling like he was holding a box over a space that might contain a very angry spider and was unsure if it was better to take a look or not.
‘I’m still here, Mr Peter if you would give me a moment.’ The curt reply of the operator sounded muffled, as if they had walked into an acoustically dead room.
‘Ha-ha!’ they called after some moments of frustrated shuffling, ‘requisition form T0-882: morticians and taxidermy. If you pop up to finance, you can fill this out and we will work through your request once it is approved.’
With a cheerful clip they mumbled most of the word “thank you” and quickly switched Peter over to the post-resolved call recording.
Thank you for calling, we hope that your call was important to us.
For further queries, please contact your manager. For information regarding your call, please apply for a recording to be delivered after 1 business day, or at our editing team’s convenience.
If you had any complaints, try internalizing them. If you had just lodged a complaint and it was resolved, you may resume work.
Thank you for calling-
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 