The voice on the other end of the telephone connection is exasperated yet curious, a reaction all too common in your line of work as an insurance salesperson. It’s a routine that you have down to an art form — you and every other employee of this department, of course; you hit the enter key on the keyboard to dial an arbitrarily selected number, prepare your brightest and most affable demeanour as you wait for the dial tone to swim along the wire into a thin and wiry headset, and guess how far into your opening spiel you get before you are summarily interrupted or instantly hung up on.

You once managed to finish it all, but on this particular occasion you’re estimating you get about halfway...maybe even two-thirds. It’s usually about the time you utter your name that the call ends, though, and you once wondered if your parents were having a laugh when they decided to name you. Brilliant name and quite apt for the person you used to be, but not exactly conducive to a sales environment.

Still, it could be worse. You could have the name Papaya.

In the first few weeks of your job when you were naught but a call centre virgin, brusque hang-ups and the occasional volley of snappish vitric at daring to call would punch at your self-esteem and make you incredibly reluctant to start again, but a few years of it has had the oddly beneficial side-effect of developing thick skin.

You call, they answer, you speak, they hang up, you move on. It’s a perpetual cycle that constitutes your working day.

Sometimes you do get a sale, though. Ordinarily it would be cause for celebration as it’s a nice little bonus to your monthly salary, but the people that fall for your spiel are usually elderly people that just want someone to talk to, or who would buy a statue of pure cow dung if your tongue was silver enough. The kind of people that society tends to leave behind as time goes on, that makes you feel like you’re selling a little piece of your soul whenever you succeed in taking their details.

There was one person who fought in the Mechanical Emperor’s War, specifically the First War. You remember listening to how Rubert I discovered the Anti-Organic Equation, and how brutal the implanted inorganic beings were. Laurel Wreath Galaxy civil wars. Philosopher’s Poison. Organic and inorganic beings falling left, right and centre, torn apart as they fought.

At one stage, you completely forgot that you were supposed to be making a sale when they were describing how Polka Kakamond was backed up by Dongfang Qixing, and how she used her scalpel to eliminate Rubert I. One of the bloodiest battles in history crammed into a half-hour phone call, straight from the mouth from someone who was there.

Even when a younger voice had taken over the phone call and subsequently berated you for your disgustingly predatory behaviour, trying to con an old person into a sale, you still felt that on that day, you were able to buy a small piece of your soul back.

Mental fatigue begins to dull your senses and drop your eyelids as ‘New Call?’ appears in a small window on your computer monitor, and once you notice that you also become aware of how stiff and clunky your joints are — lack of real movement for three hours tends to do that. It’s at that point that everything starts to feel a little claustrophobic, including but not limited to the headset perched around your aching head, so with a feeling of cathartic satisfaction you lace your fingers around the thin metal strip above your left ear, yank the whole thing off, and toss it with a clatter onto the pitifully small and ridiculously cheap wooden desk in front of you.

“Honestly, the way you kept your voice level? Masterful. I would’ve started hurling datapads around minute three.” Topaz’s voice lazily drawls behind you in your hollow cubicle divider, and you desperately try to wipe the weariness from your face as you whirl around the spinning chair to face her. She was Jelena to you. “So. Big pitch done. Are you free now, or do I have to file a relationship requisition through your supervisor, {{user}}?”