2024-09-23 06:38:38
from production Not in the office. Italian Vogue 2018. Art: Craig Hemming. Photo: Saskia Lawson
In the early 1990s, after I was released from prison and went to the East, I worked at Beeper.
Last week I discovered that almost all girls my age use pagers. In the early 1990s, my impression was that you either had a pager or you worked on a pager. Or you were once a boy. Do men work at pagers? I don’t remember.
Here are ten things I remember:
01 The center is located on Yarakon Street, with windows on the west overlooking the sea (later the center moved to the stock market area of Ramat Gan, which greatly reduced my enthusiasm).
02 We passed on a lot of exciting messages, but since I tend to remember myself as the heroine of my own life, I obviously didn’t remember any of it.
03 Sometimes, there are many operators in the call center and I am not the only operator. This was the first time in my life that I was in a place with another human being. Not just mine, but mine is also very beautiful. My nightmare at the time was that one person would say “Me and my watch” to someone else and the second person would ask “Which one is mine, pretty?” and the first person would answer “No”.
04 We are trained to write as short and as fast as possible: “Imagine the bottleneck of the message. The shorter the message, the faster it will travel.” Every week or month, a table is posted on the wall with each of our scores. A score composed of call time and number of characters. I’m one of those people who significantly improved the center average. Are my contributions to the team appreciated? Well, no. My conversations were so brief and my note-taking stinginess so severe that I was occasionally invited to do scold calls, during which taped conversations were played recording my every effort to wrap up the conversation.
05 While working at Beeper, I was a student at Tel Aviv University (I was trying to get accepted into design school). If I remember correctly (I did), they called it multidisciplinary art. I studied a little bit of film, a little bit of drama, a little bit of television, a little bit of literature, a little bit of translation. In an introductory translation course, the instructor displays a makeshift map on the wall. The map shows some streets in an ordinary city: a traffic light, a stop sign, a crosswalk, a cat, a mailbox, a laundromat. The task was to write down the route from a point on the map to the laundromat on a piece of paper. The purpose of the exercise: to show that the same thing can be expressed in different ways. We all wrote our own versions of arrival instructions on sticky notes. For the remainder of the course, the instructor read two carefully chosen notes illustrating extreme cases. The first note has detailed instructions (instructor: written by someone eager to connect), the second note is my note. It says: Second traffic light on the right (Lecturer: This is a man trying to end a conversation he’s gotten into.
06 At the top of the keyboard we use are keyboard shortcuts designed to help us quickly type and save characters (FYI, a space is also a character). Instead of typing “call to” (seven characters), press a key that says “call to” (only four characters). More keys: thank you. please. Next. Peace when you can.
07 At the beginning of each conversation we were asked to say: buzzer, your name, hello – and then smile when heard. Most callers are men. That’s how I learned that if you say your name next to the word “hello” and dare to smile, the man on the other end will think you’re in love.
08 My favorite shift is the night shift. The kind where you earn 150%, you rarely have to interrupt yourself in the process of delivering the message, and you can arrange to pass it on to friends, which turns the event into a paid slumber party.
09 The callers I hate are the ones who text a lot and respect the word. Those who know me try to shorten their messages. “I have a long message to read,” the anonymous person on the phone would warn me. “I’ll ask you to read the last bit to make sure you didn’t change the comma.” Are you going to take away the little fun I have while on duty? My friend at the call center waits the entire shift for drama, secrets, and romance type messages. I’m not here for free content. I’m not a pager operator, I’m a laconic Jedi.
10 To this day, I remember the person who asked to send this message to her husband on Friday morning: On the way home, when you have finished your errands, you will stop at Moses’ house and take Black, White, and Salted peanuts, cashews, pistachios. Basically bring whatever you want. The distilled text I sent was the highlight of my two years of work: The Next Crack.
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To people who tell me I’m the type to go out of their way to end a conversation, I say:
I’m beautiful in my way
Because God makes no mistakes
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