Terror Babies

My little call center is a microcosm of a huge call center. Our call volume is much smaller then many call centers allowing me to take lots of time with each and every caller. I am fortunate and I like this ability to render this kind of service to my callers. I have been working for information lines or systems, it seems, all my life from the old hotlines I worked in Idaho to the disability information line I operate today one thing all these line have income the lines tend to breed 'chronic callers. These “chronics” for one reason or another all call daily, weekly or monthly but they always call.

Jim is my current chronic caller. Jim has a disability but I think just barely. He lives in a motel in another county not from Salt Lake. Since our info line had a toll-free number we get calls from all over the state and country for that matter. That is how I first met Jim, he called the '800' line wanting me to make calls for him in the Salt Lake area which he did not have long distance for. I made a couple of calls but that was all. Jim called a week later wanting information about this and that but clearly more important then the information was his need to just talk. At first he tended to rank and rave a little and then wanting to know about local governmental systems of operation. I ge the impression that impression that jim is a bit of a hobo who landed in this forsaken community, landed in a low-income hotel and is too poor to leave the county. Jim is a bit of a conspiracy theorist and redneck conservative., was that redundant? But he calls and we talk and I bounce ideas off him, he takes them and then ruminates over them for a week or two then I hear back from him and e o to the next level.

This week, or month the topic has been food banks or pantries in ti small community. The man pantry is run by the local triple A (Area Aging Agency) i.e. the Senior Center—the local independent living center also has a food closet and the manager has not gotten back to Jim so now Jim is building a theory they are discriminating against him. I don't think so—I think the manager is busy and that she is part-time labor. We talked for over thirty minutes and I gave him my take food banks, FDA, USDA and their food donation programs. We ended the call by him taking a couple of dollars and walking over to the Senior /center where they senior lunch program to see if they would sell him a meal. Jim was convinced that these food programs were scams perpetrated by mothers of “terror babies”: minority moms having children to defraud the local government and systems.

What Jim does not realize is that he infact is also a scammer, a guy with a questionable disability working the system for all he can get. I think old Jim is turning round and sooner then later he will be back in the system maybe even working in a food bank. Stranger things have happened.