Death in a Call Center
In Colombia, where I live, one of the worst words you can call someone is a malparido, which literally means “miscarried” or aborted. It’s a disgusting word and like most words we use to curse each other, it draws its power from misogyny and hatred. Here are the two times I’ve used it.
On a Friday evening I was waiting for a phone call from the real estate agency to confirm that I would be able to move into my new apartment on Monday. I received the call while I was in a meeting and told them to call later. I didn’t hear back for several hours so I called the number for the agency which took me to a call center. The first time I spoke to a representative, they told me to expect a call within the hour. The second time I called an hour later, they told me that they’d flag me as a priority. The third and fourth times I called, two hours apart, they told me to expect a call within the hour. Then I received two phone calls from the agency, both of which I picked up and both of which were dropped. The fifth and sixth time I called, a machine informed me that working hours were Monday through Friday from 8 until 5:30. It was 5:45.
My partner, who is Colombian, used to work in a call center for Fitbit and she told me that she was often subject to the verbal abuses of customers in Canada who would call her everything but a child of God to channel their frustration and anger at whatever problem they were facing with their wearable device, as if rage too burned calories.
It was to her that I recounted my own call center experience in Spanish. “Esos malparidos solo quieren hacer mi vida difícil,” which translates to These “malparidos” only want to make my life difficult. As a loving and empathetic partner, she agreed and heaped on several other insults in solidarity.
The second time I used the word “malparido,” I directed it towards a police officer. It was a gray, drizzling Saturday morning and I was awakened by the screams of what sounded like a woman being exorcised, from the street below. I jumped to my window to see a man with dark brown skin holding back a frail woman who was on the verge of diving into the bed of a garbage truck—they were both barefoot. One of the garbage truck workers had mistaken the couple’s few belongings, including their shoes, as waste and the couple, who I presumed to be homeless, was in a standoff with the garbage truck workers when a pair of police officers arrived. All of this I deduced from my fifth floor window.
At various points in their conversation, the garbage truck workers and the officers seemed conflicted about allowing the woman to rummage through the truck bed. One could even wonder if they were considering whether or not it was safe for her to do so. But one would disabuse themself of that notion when one of the officers began to aggressively shove the woman. The black man moved to stand between them, gesturing between her and the truck driver and the officers. At this point, the situation had turned into a scene and I could see the tops of heads peering out of the windows below me. And then wham.
One of the police officers brought his nightstick down on the man with all of his force. Wielding it like a hammer on his arms and his legs repeatedly until both he and the woman backed away from the garbage truck.
From the depths of my stomach, “malparido” bellowed out of me as I leaned out of the window and continued to hurl curses on him. It was the casual cruelty of the act, violence for a situation that called for pity and compassion, that conjured the ire within me. Did you ever read the one about Moses killing the Egyptian slave master for beating the Hebrew man? That’s how angry I was.
The couple, wounded, joined in the hate-filled chorus. The police sent the garbage truck on its way, unfazed by the maldiciones we heaped on top of them, and drove off. I rushed down to the street to find the couple, and did the only thing I felt the power to do, which was stuff a wad of money in the woman’s hand. When she saw what I had given her, she started weeping and then I started weeping. The rain began to pour on us.
I do not consider myself to be a violent or hateful person. When I was a child, a teacher once described me as the class peacemaker, which is why, after these few fits of rage I am left perplexed and asking: So...what was that? Where did that come from? Cursing people and wishing violence upon them wasn’t how I was raised nor how I operate in the world.
I don’t hate any person in particular. I don’t wish harm on the agency representatives from the call center any more than I can say that I hate any specific police officers; I have several family members who work in law enforcement. But I can say, with confidence, that I hate the call center apparatus in the same way that I hate the state-policing apparatus (find me on Twitter @j_taylorjones).
I think both are machines that are fueled by exploitation and disempowerment—the exploitation of low-level workers, the exploitation of vulnerable populations, and the disempowerment of those very workers to go and disempower the people they are supposed to serve. That both systems run on the abdication of responsibility and the removal of accountability for one’s actions is utterly enraging and at worst, violent. So where is that rage to go? Who should receive it?
What was I saying when I referred to these people as malparidos? I was consigning them to a kind of death—a death without life. Justified or not, what bothers me is who I became as a result of the words I deployed—-a murderer, a misogynist. King said: Don’t ever let someone pull you so low as to hate them.
But one’s height is easy to relinquish, especially if it means that that hatred is fueled by real hurt and suffering—neither of which I’m claiming by the way.
When I think about the words I was using to describe the call center workers, I thought about my partner who, at the age of 16, was called a ‘lazy c-word’ because her clients’ anger needed attention and direction. Do you know what I would say or do to the person that ever fixed their mouth to call my partner a “malparida”? Do you remember the one about Moses?
And then the great irony set in about love and hatred and violence, which is that violence, whether deployed out of hatred or love, still looks the same. Had I overheard my own conversation cursing the call center workers, and one of them happened to be my partner, then I would have responded with the wrath of an abusive police officer. And that’s just how it goes—love-fueled violence looks a lot like hate-filled violence.
Over the last several months, I watched as stacks of smoke hovered over the two countries that I call home, the United States and Colombia. I don't know what or who started the fires. I don’t if they were wildfires of reckless abandon or controlled burns for the sake of a healthier society. I do know that one doesn’t need to look far for examples of exploitation and disempowerment in both places to understand why someone would feel the need to rage against it.
In his seminal book of essays, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” It’s understandable to read this in terms of the hateful oppressor and victimized oppressed, but I think Saint Baldwin is getting at something a little more profound here, which is that sometimes one’s hatred or rage can be justified, hence the fire next time. But after the flames have consumed all in its path and we’re sitting in a pile of rubble, what we’re always left with is the pain we’ve caused and the pain we’ve been dealt.