Popped by Casey Truman

Chapter 1
    The call
monitor showed sixteen calls waiting to be answered and only four
agents logged on as ready or working . It was
unacceptable. There were twelve customer service agents on the
floor, and each one of them should have been on the phones, taking
calls. It was just this sort of behavior that led to a drop in
productivity, and I was determined to do something about it.
    Parker
Morrison seemed to be the focus of the malingering, so I stood up
and strode towards her desk. She was lounging half-on half-off her
chair, swivelling left and right as she faced her coterie of
admirers — all male, of course. I’d been
against hiring Parker to begin with, but was over-ruled by Adrian
and Stephen, my fellow Call Center managers — a pair of forty year old boys who thought with their
penises.
    Parker had a
body that she wasn’t afraid to flaunt. It wouldn’t have surprised
me if she’d been propositioned a time or two on the street going
home from work. That was just how she carried herself — all sex and availability. Today’s outfit was comprised
of a tight top that would have been more at home in a gym than an
office, and a pair of low hung jeans. Her thong was the icing on
the cake — visible to the entire office every
time she bent over her desk or reached into her handbag.
    “Parker,” I
said, stopping next to her desk. “Why aren’t you logged on? There
are calls waiting.”
    “Come on,
Clara,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It’s New Year’s Eve. We’ll be
closing in half an hour. Lighten up.” She threw a bright and cheery
smile at the young men who were lounging in chairs around her
desk.
    “We may very
well be closing in half an hour, but we’re open now, and there are
clients trying to get through.” It was insufferable the way she
ignored my authority.
    “Ok, Mom,” she
said, with an exasperated sigh, as if she were humoring a
delusional parent. “They’re probably just calling to wish us all a
Happy New Year.”
    “Just answer
your phone, Parker, and that goes for the rest of you too.”
    I turned and
began walking back to my desk when I heard her half whisper behind
me, “ Someone needs to get laid. ”
    “What was
that?” I said, turning to face the crowd.
    “What?” said
Parker. “I didn’t say anything. Did you say something, Bill?”
    “Nope,”
answered Bill Farris, a lifer who’d worked as a customer service
agent in the Call Center for seven years, “didn’t say a thing.”
    I glared at
them all before turning away and resuming the walk back to my desk.
“ Frigid little virgin ,” a different voice whispered, and
this time I chose to ignore it.
    It was so
infuriating. All I wanted was what was best for the company and the
clients, and all I got was disrespect and incompetence. To have
tarts like Parker insult me like that — in
front of everyone. Just because I chose not to make my private life
public, or to go out drinking and carousing after work, they all
felt entitled to make comments about my sex life. It just wasn’t
fair.
    I was thirty
one years old, and if I hadn’t had sex yet it was because I’d
chosen to wait for the right man, not because I was frigid .
I could go out and get laid any time I wanted to, but I preferred
to wait until the time was right. I even had a boyfriend; I’d met
Phillip Criddle just after my thirtieth birthday, when I was
feeling a little down, and we’d been seeing each other for nine
months. He was a very accomplished lecturer of Anthropology at
King’s College, and unlike so many of the sex crazed kids in the
Call Center, he was a grown man of forty three. Every week I had
dinner at his mother’s house, and we’d go for a walk afterwards. It
was civilized, the way respectable people behaved.
    We’d decided
to wait a while before consummating the relationship. Phillip had
said that in many cultures sexual relationships were different to
our own, and that just because it was the norm to have sex
immediately in our