As a preface, I spent two years working in the call center of a company that sells K-12 STEM curriculum. The company acronym is PLTW. So this company is drowning in money. It’s a “non profit” that charges a 40% to 60% markup on the curriculum supplies it imports from China, so the call center was decked out. All kinds of art, automatic adjusting standing desks, free soda, big screens everywhere, a $28,000 white board the chief of staff raged over (story for a different time) that sort of stuff…basically it was not hard to get the company to spend money on stuff if you could halfway convince a manager it was remotely needed. I wanted a new headset to work with. I was tired of the crappy $10 wired one I had. Now my manager at the time was the best boss I ever worked for, and she was pretty sharp, but did not keep up with tech as much as she should have. So she had no idea the $200+ Turtle Beach wireless headset I convinced her to buy for me was a gaming item, she just knew I was “evaluating” it to determine if it became standard issue…the fact that it went home with me every night and weekend was incidental. This thing rocked. All kinds of options, crystal clear audio, broadcast range that allowed me to walk all over the place, and most importantly some super noise cancelling technology. When I put those things on, I was in what I called “headphone land” sort of oblivious to the outside world. I liked that, I could give the caller %100 of my attention, which made me good at the job. Also let me enjoy my video games a lot more as well. So I get a call from a teacher, nothing serious, just some curriculum questions that had some easy if lengthy answers I needed to explain. I was talking to the lady, and everything was going good, until this screeching sound started coming through the headset. This was not uncommon at all, at least 4 or 5 times a day a teacher would call me directly from the classroom, you could hear kids yelling, beating the shit out of each other, TV’s, school wide announcements and such. I just keep on trucking along, helping the teacher, but after about 10 seconds, it gets to be to much and I say “Ma’am, do you need to respond to that?”. Without missing a beat she says “That’s on your end.” I look up and people are fleeing the place, lights flashing, and as it turns out, the screech is our fire alarm. I say “Ohh shit, sorry, will call you back when I can.”. Drop the call, pull my computer out of its docking station, grab some other stuff off my desk, and get the hell out. I had sat there for 10 seconds ignoring the alarm because of the headset I had on. When I got outside, my coworkers were laughing at me and I was like “Thanks for letting me sit there, you fuckers.”. Turns out everything was fine, some construction workers accidently cut a bunch of wires connected to the alarm system, which made it go crazy. We just had to wait for the fire department to give us the official word we could go back in. So yeah, that teacher had to think I was a moron, and she was not wrong to do so.
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