The Business of Making Jokes

I used to work for an airline that rhymes with fourthpest but it merged with another company that rhymes with shmelta. I took phone calls from customers who wanted to purchase tickets or make changes to their flights or just ask some questions.

Most days, you deal with reasonable people with a good grasp of proper phone etiquette. Other days you are in a nightmare where there is only a full moon which drives people mad and the clocks in the building never make it past your eighth hour of work and all the bathroom cubicles are locked and your bladder is about to burst and no matter the number of coffees you've inhaled you're only still half awake and there's been a bank error and you are never getting paid and your supervisor keeps walking behind your desk and look! He has a tail and goat hooves and high heels! On his hooves! Someone wake me up!!! Noooo! I didn't just dream the last six months where I finally left that job did I?

Okay. Calm down. Wow. Those memories are potent. I still recall the occasional yawn in my ear from a customer. I let that slide. Even the burp, I ignored that. The one where the caller says, "where can I go that's cheap? Tell me where to go," okay, that made the veins in my forehead throb a little but that's all right, we can talk. The TV in the background or the radio blasting? I worked through it. The dirty jokes? That's all right because I enjoyed hanging up on those pervs. The toilet flushing? I gagged silently and pretended that didn't happen. The excessive chitchat? The extended how-are-you-how's-the-weather? Fine. I'd choose friendly over short anytime.

But what really raised my blood pressure, what used to drive me over the edge was after I answered whatever question they asked and the response I got was, "are you kidding?" Or they would change it up a bit and say, "are you joking?" Or, "is that a joke?" Or, "are you serious?"

Yeah. That was the worst. I can't even explain why it drove me mad. It's such a common, offhand response. And I get that my answer might not have been what they had hoped for. And yet, and yet it made me want to break my keyboard over the monitor and then pull the phone and toss it out the window. And that's after I tell them that I am not in the business of making jokes. And that I believe they did not dial 1-800-JOKETIME. And that it's too bad their lives are lacking in laughs and that they're looking for LOLz in all the wrong places. And that I'm sorry that the Clown and Co. hotline was busy BUT WOULD THEY MIND TRYING AGAIN LATER?!?!



And since I've put myself in a ranting mood. I would like to give a shout out to one of the bosses of the office whose shoes were always tight. Look, it's bad enough that your eyes glazed over when we asked serious questions but to have to deal with the flesh spilling over the straps of your outdated maryjanes was just too much. Hey, Boss, how are you? Just kidding! I don't really want to know!