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I’ve been working in call centers a long time, I’ve seen it all at this point. People angry over something petty? Screaming at me, making unreasonable demands? That’s just a Tuesday to me. But this one call is certainly unique and had lived rent free in my brain ever since even though this all happened years ago. I wanna preface this by saying that I have never worked for any kind of crisis line and cannot imagine why this person called my company of all places, but regardless he did.
Call starts and pretty soon it becomes clear that something is not right, the dude sounded like he’d been crying. At first I thought this was a someone calling to close a deceased family members account, but when I ask him about it he says no he just doesn’t know what he can do. I ask some probing questions to try and figure out how I can help, and he drops the bombshell: he’s thinking of hurting himself.
At this point I start getting nervous and scared, I literally had no idea what to do in this situation so I while he was talking I sent a message to my manager asking what I could possibly do. I was then told to A: try to get location information from him if I could and B: keep him on the phone as long as possible.
I go back to asking probing questions and I manage to find his account in our system which had his address on there. I got him to confirm that he is at home and once again message my manager with the info. She said she was going to call his local police and to still keep him on the phone.
From here on I mostly just listened to him. He told me he had moved into a new city for school and was feeling alone without any friends, he’d also lost his father recently and that was weighing on him as well. He talked about feeling lost and overwhelmed with no one to turn to for help. I wasn’t saying all that much back, but it didn’t seem to matter he had a lot to say without my input anyway.
At some point he saif something to effect of “Someone is at my door” and hung up. I assume that someone was the police my manager had called. I still think about this man once in awhile, I really hope he’s in a better place now and that what I did actually helped him in some way.
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