The Thing on the Shore by Tom Fletcher

Most of Yasmin’s doodles ended up full of ears and mouths and wires. Pointed ears, that is, and impossibly plump lips, and thick black biro wires that snaked out all over the page. About halfway through each shift, she’d find the outer edges of her hands leaving big smudges across her desk, and see that they were covered in ink from leaning on the densely populated paper. A lot of the other customer advisers would, without thinking about it, draw ships and sea monsters.
    Yasmin logged into the billing system, which was called Jupiter—for reasons nobody really understood. She accessed the call-logging system, which was named Tracker,and the system which connected the computer to the phone, which was called PhoneLink. After that, she logged into the online business encyclopedia, which was called Edison. She next logged into the company email system, and finally, she logged into a system which was like an email program, but about a million times slower and clunkier, which was used to send details of customer queries to other departments on especially formatted templates. This system was called NOM, or Net Object Management. Yasmin considered it a particularly crap piece of software, which was unfortunate because the job it did was absolutely crucial. But, there you go. Was that surprising? Not really. She counted down the seconds on the LCD screen of her telephone, took a deep breath and logged in just as the time hit 8:30.
    She immediately heard a
beep
in her earpiece, signifying a customer, and launched into her call opening.
    â€œGood morning, you’re though to Yasmin. Could I take your customer account number, please?”
    â€œWhat?” said the customer. She spoke with a Received Pronunciation kind of accent, but obviously had no manners.
    â€œCould I take your customer account number, please?” Yasmin repeated.
    â€œWhere are you? Are you an Indian?” The customer’s tone was already curt.
    â€œNo,” said Yasmin.
    â€œYou don’t sound English.”
    â€œDo you have your account number there, please?”
    â€œTell me where you are.”
    â€œThis call center, you mean? It’s in Cumbria.”
    â€œWhere’s that? Is that in England?”
    â€œYes. You know where Sellafield is?”
    â€œOf course I do. Don’t you start patronizing me, young lady. I’ve read all about that terrible place.”
    â€œWell, that’s Cumbria.”
    â€œSo you’re English?”
    â€œ
Yes
.”
    â€œOh good! I don’t want to waste my time trying to talk to those Pakis you people insist on employing.”
    â€œPlease don’t use that kind of language or I’ll have to terminate the call.”
    â€œI see PC’s gone mad even up in the middle of nowhere.”
    â€œDo you have your account number or not?”
    â€œYes! Just give me a chance to find it, if you don’t mind.” The customer tutted and huffed.
    After three or four calls, Yasmin started to get a feeling that she frequently experienced at work. It was the feeling that the fabric of this place was
thin.
Thinner than in other places. Part of it was down to the fact that inside the building you could really have been anywhere, because of the generic office accommodation—the bland décor, the horrible veneer-surfaced desks, the rows of humming computers. That always served to make Yasmin a little uneasy, because you weren’t anchored to anything solid or meaningful. The other major reason for the “thinness” was the nature of the work performed there. The
baselessness
of it. The sense of existing only at the end of a telephone. It made you feel a bit weird if you let it—if you thought about it for long enough. Yasmin always ended up thinking about the telephones. You ring somebody up, it doesn’t matter where they are, right, as long as they have a phone there with them. More so if you’re ringing a call center.
    The only