Call Centers, Cockroaches and Broken Elevators

After a couple of meetings outside the office yesterday, my officemate and I arrived at our office building lobby to find several security personnel buzzing over elevator car no. 7 (or was it 8?).

Lo and behold, the car got stuck right upon “take off” from the ground floor. Apparently, an extra couple of over-indulgent call center ‘agents” crammed themselves into the lift and succeeded in further torturing a piece of industrial equipment to the point of surrender.
It seems that despite all the training to adapt American accents, idioms, and affections, these eager-beaver glorified phone operators cannot understand a simple note that says MAXIMUM CAPACITY: 17. Unless they are as dense as I think they are and they think that stands for 17 TONS. But no, I don’t think they are familiar with more than one unit of weight measurement.

The lifts at our poor, beleaguered office building have been going on the blink ever since these call centers started filling up the upper floors. Sometimes, the high-rise side has only two working lifts. The most common cause is extreme wear due to overweight in the cars (please see above description of perceived reading problem.) But see here, these pseudo-English-wet-market-carnival-barkers do not worry about elevator cables breaking, and them falling down the shafts into their unpremature deaths. The simple fact is that they can survive a nuclear explosion and hold off evolution. They only look human, but they are really bugs.

Giant, inconsiderate, directionless bugs.