What do florists, nursing homes, newspaper editors, doctor's offices, and ambulance services all have in common?
They're all people you call when somebody dies.
I work in an answering service that largely services those kinds of accounts, atop the usual smattering of funeral directors. Funnily enough, I work third shift. Graveyard shift.
Now, while I do deal with plenty of other stuff, funerals and deaths are a big part of it. I've been here about ten years and I figure, at a rate of around twelve death calls a night (an average) where I had to talk to somebody about someone dying, I've been party to around twenty thousands deaths.
Twenty thousand. Funny thing. I've talked to grieving mothers and husbands who just watched their wives die. Dead babies are the worst. Still births make you feel like a shithead for every question you have to ask, but it's the same, night after night.
Name. Name of the deceased. Call back number. Place of death. Time.
You get that on basically every call. Some nights, you have to ask some funny questions.
'Is the body in one piece? Is the body still under the truck? What should we bring to cut him down?'
Some days it's really quiet. Some days it's crazy. You'd think more people would die around holidays, but that's actually a myth. More people die when it's cold, or right after the holiday, or at night. They just 'hang on' to see their family one last time.
I work alone, sitting in the office. No real call for multiple operators on third shift.
Now, it should be kept in mind, this is an old answering service. It's over thirty years old now. The last two people to do my job both had major psychotic episodes. One of them was found slumped over his desk with a brain aneurysm. He was alive, but I think he's in a home now. He was thirty five.
I've come close. I'm pretty stable, mind you. The thing is, you don't see the sun on third shift, especially during the winter, and that does something to people over a long enough period. Ten years and I've had to be rigorous with taking vitamins and getting sunlight.
Being alone and without sunlight still gives me hallucinations from time to time. People's voices, footsteps, crap like that. It's not real and I'm aware it's not real, but it's unsettling.
That's all beside the point, though.
About six months ago, we started getting some strange calls. Now, the office is used to this. Butt-dials are a daily thing. Pick up, determine nobody is on the other end, hang up. Simple, yeah?
I'm alone, so I don't get much information from what's going on in the office and they don't hear hardly anything that goes on at night.
I don't remember the first call, but I'm sure I dismissed it as another wrong number. It was just some soft guitar music; classical guitar, like my dad plays. The call came in on some random account, too, so it was easy to put out of my mind.
Over the next few nights, more of these calls came in. They were on all different kinds of accounts, none of them with consistent caller Id's. It was the same every time; some bit of guitar that played on and on. Nice, you know? Almost pleasant, considering all the idiots who call in banging on about their broken refrigerators.
In large part, I just ignored it and only took mental note.
That was when the arguing started.
Another call one night that sounded very much like a couple arguing in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, but it came in again and again, and each time I heard it, they sounded more and more agitated. After awhile, I stopped hanging up immediately and instead decided to try to get Google to translate what I was hearing. Google voice translate didn't work except on three words. 'te odio'. It means something like 'I hate you'.
Not long after that, a new phenomena developed that everyone in the office came to refer to as 'The Buzzer'. You'd pick up a line and someone would breathe out, like a sigh, then an ear-splitting racket would start up. It's not like a modem noise or fax noise or anything one could really replicate without hearing it.
The closest sound I can think of is a really old motor, except more tinny. It's loud enough to leave your ear ringing. Same as before, it wasn't on any specific accounts, but just about any time you could get hit by The Buzzer.
Most operators took to turning their volume down quickly before they took a call, then back up when they got a human. Management was trying to trace the calls, but there wasn't any rhyme or reason to which accounts it was coming in on, so it was impossible to block out.
Strange as it might sound, I found them interesting. There's not much to do late at night and I'm here alone, so if calls aren't coming in it can get real boring.
One night, about a month ago, I decided to see if one of these calls came in if I could get it to loop. At least then I'd know I was listening to a recording and it was some asshole robo-calling us.
Finally, the call came in on one of our funeral home accounts. There was the breath and I yanked my headset off before it could start. The noise was loud enough I was worried it might damage the headset speaker, but I turned it down as far as it would go.
I listened to the Buzzer. It was like static but deeper, throatier, more angry. It was like listening to a big cat roaring in pain, except it was some kind of tiger made of gears and sprockets. After a full minute, I began to hear variations in the noise. Some slower, some faster. They almost sounded like words.
'Fuck it', I thought. I'm alone, can't hurt, right?
I said, "Hello, this is such and such Funeral Home. Are you there?"
There was a sort of lull in the noise, then a slow, distorted sound, rising and falling. I listened for a moment, then said, "Hello? Is someone there?"
I listened again.
This time there was a distinct change in the noise. It was familiar, too; it was the sound was my own voice, slowed a bit and distorted a little, but definitely me.
It said, 'I hate you.'
I hung up immediately.
That was when every breaker in the building popped simultaneously, leaving me in dark for about two minutes before the back-ups kicked on. All of our lines were down for almost three hours while they tried to fix the servers and trace the problem.
I didn't tell anyone. What was I going to say? I haven't gotten the Buzzer, or the guitar music, or the Spanish couple since then.
I'm mostly laying this out to get myself some closure. It's silly this still gives me chills because I like my job. There are a million things it could be, right? I'm not superstitious or anything, but I talked to so many nursing home patients who died later the same night or later the same week.
How many died screaming, with only the beep and clatter of machines to comfort them? How many laid in the background, listening to their loved ones talk to me while I used that detached, pantomime voice of sympathy that I learned in my first year on the job to help them make final arrangements?
How many dead voices did we record in those voice-logging servers every year? A thousand? Ten thousand?
How many souls did I usher out of this world whose words were captured on our servers, erased and recorded over with another dead voice again and again?
I have this fear that won't leave me, because it comes back around to one possible answer which I can't ever completely dismiss.
Too many.
Submitted June 11, 2016 at 05:45PM by Chessiecat http://ift.tt/25TzTM2 nosleep
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