I’ve done a lot of gigs with a lot of different monikers over the years. I guess you could say I’ve spent a long time looking for my true calling, but one of the things that’s always come naturally to me is a passion for languages. I happen to be fluent in a couple. So it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that today, I find myself working as an over-the-phone interpreter.
It’s a fairly simple job, if you’ve got the right skills. Guys like me work in a freelance capacity (that means no benefits) for a company which shall remain nameless, but which brings in a good chunk of folks like myself from a bunch of different places around the world. It’s a home office job, so it can be done no matter where we are, and the company doesn’t ask for much beyond a few quick evaluations to make sure you’re able to effectively understand and convey information in the relevant languages and that you have a decent mic setup. It had been a good while since I had anything resembling a steady job, so even though I wasn’t really planning on staying long between the no benefits and the pay not being great (I don’t live in a first world country, so the company acts like they can give us the bare minimum and we’ll just lap it up— and a lot of the time, they’re right), I decided to join up for a while.
Now, even though the job is home office, long story short we’re expected to log on during certain hours to complete a shift, and the company’s pretty stringent about this. My options were either to start really early in the morning, or do a half-shift starting shortly before midnight and finish the rest at some later point during the day, usually after I woke up. I’ve always been more of a night owl than anything, so naturally I ended up going for option B.
What did this mean for me, broadly speaking? Well, the company mostly gets calls from clients in the US and Canada asking for translations, but there’s been a few times when I get connected to some kind of middleman operator who then links me to someone somewhere completely different, like the UK. It’s some kind of network functionality the company has with other agencies, they have a name for it but I always forget what it is. But hey, it gets the interpreters more work, so why not? Anyway, my time zone matches up with NA, which as I’ve implied is where the vast majority of my calls come from, so at those late graveyard shift hours you tend to get a bunch of stuff that you wouldn’t usually see during the day. There’s police/911 dealing with all manner of weirdos, stalkers, junkies, drunkards, what have you. Or sometimes it’s just hospitals having to look after pregnant women or people who ended up in the ER for stupid reasons. At any rate, it’s a front in which you’d do well to expect the unexpected. It’s also rather sleepy a lot of the time instead of the back-to-back calls you tend to get at other times of the day, which is just fine by me.
Now, it’s not an awfully rare occurrence for someone in my line of work to get calls involving people who are in some kind of uncomfortable predicament. Off the top, I recall a woman whose nurse had to remove some sponges placed into some surgery wounds were really stuck in there and ended up screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs as they were taken out, or a really dejected sounding guy who’d ended up arrested when he’d been caught by the cops on a DUI charge because he went out to buy something for his little girl late at night. I’ve heard all manner of sob stories before I ever took this job, so these things never affected me terribly, but they were the sort of thing that tends to stick with you a bit.
Out of all the calls I ever got, though, this one takes the cake.
The call request came in as normal, and I picked up. Now, every time we answer a call we’re expected to do a little spiel: “Hello, I’m so-and-so, my ID number is blah-blah, please speak clearly and make this easy on the both of us,” that sort of thing. The company’s frontend website usually gives us some questions we’re supposed to ask the clients to fill out some fields, but not always. They weren’t there this time around, so I got straight to business and asked how I could help.
“I need a special favor,” a curt voice replied immediately. I must say that wasn’t something I was expecting to hear. Could just be someone being funny though, so I tried to play it cool.
“I’m sorry, what do you mean, sir?”
“This is a bit unorthodox, but we’ve got a unique situation that we’ve been led to believe you can help with.”
“I’m afraid you might be a bit confused, our line can’t connect you to specific interpreters. I don’t really know what you’re referring to, so I’m probably not whomever you might have been trying to reach.”
“We have good reason to believe you’re the only one connected at this time.”
That may very well have been true, with how quiet the night shift tended to be.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that—”
“We know this to be true.”
This was not normal. I had never gotten a call with a client pulling this kind of nonsense before. I stayed quiet for a few moments, unsure on how to respond.
“Can I ask what institution you’re representing, sir?” Only formal organizations were supposed to have us contracted and be able to contact us like this. There was no way in the fresh hell that this guy was a private caller… was there?
“It is a simple matter,” the voice continued, ignoring my question. “We need help with a translation from someone who speaks a very particular dialect. Specifically…”
I’ll refrain from revealing exactly what he said next, because the next few words he uttered confirmed a rather bizarre circumstance: Whoever he was trying to get me in touch with was, without a doubt, someone from my hometown.
I’ll be damned, I thought. Helluva coincidence, but it made things make just a little more sense. In the places that give us most of our calls, there’s always been lots of ignorant, opinionated people that don’t like seeing “our kind” among them. Whatever poor bastard they were trying to get me in touch with had probably run into some kind of problem with that senseless discrimination. Still didn’t explain how these weirdos had ever managed to get a direct line to me, though.
Well, I must admit that one of the little pleasures I do get from this job is the satisfaction of bringing some help to paisanos in need, so if nothing else, the mysterious client had certainly begun to capture my interest.
There was a little more to take into consideration, though. There was a pretty strict code of conduct the higher-ups at the company expected us interpreters to adhere to, and you can bet that included not taking calls that weren’t for whatever languages you had been approved for. If I were to bring up this bizarre situation as a hypothetical to my supervisor, I’d get told to just say that I can’t do anything for the caller and terminate the call.
But there was definitely something about this whole setup that I found intriguing. There was no doubt that I was being naughty by staying on the line, but I also knew that the way we were evaluated is that they picked out a couple of calls at random each month and went based off of those. Couldn’t possibly check every single one, after all. Maybe I’d get lucky and this would fly completely under the radar. And hey, I got kicked out of my first real job because the boss thought I was being too rowdy, so it’s not like I was in any way a stranger to going against the edicts of out-of-touch old farts. I took pride in being able to do the things that had to be done, and to do them right. That certainly included using my knowledge of languages to help those who needed it.
There was no denying that it was unnerving, and that I had tons of questions, but thinking about it like that made me feel just a little too compelled to get as much out of that bizarre situation as I could. My choice was made.
“Okay,” I finally responded. “Put me on to them.”
What followed were a few moments of rough shuffling noises before I finally heard the guy. As is staggeringly common in this line of work, the audio quality was pretty garbage —I had to get a browser extension to bring the volume above 100%, which I had to use quite often just so I could make out whatever the person on the other end was saying— but I could understand the voice well enough. The accent was really thick and noticeable, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the gringos were giving this guy some funny looks.
I doubt it would be very viable to try and provide a line by line transcript of the way the conversation went; the dialect in question is rather antiquated, and the quirks would make that too tricky. But the gist of it, as I understood it at first, was that the dude had moved into a place he had been led to believe was vacant, when it actually wasn’t. The guy who actually owned the place had noticed pretty quickly, and angrily tried to kick him out. To be honest, this was mostly me guessing, as the guy was clearly not in a very good place mentally and was mostly just spouting words out in a barely coherent stream, with more than a few curses mixed in. Could be drunk or high, or just really out of it.
“What’s the owner’s name?” I tried asking in English.
More shuffling noises followed before the first guy, the one who had spoken at the start of hte call, said something again.
“We don’t know,” he said. “But we believe our associate might. The owner is trying to kick him out unlawfully. We need the owner’s name to take proper action against him. We believe our associate knows, but we’re having a hard time communicating clearly. Can you try asking about that?”
I did as the guy asked, trying my best to communicate with the more incoherent of the pair. It had been quite a while since I had attempted to have a meaningful conversation in that crusty old dialect, but I gave it a whirl.
A good deal of complaints and curses followed, but I thought I eventually managed to get the guy to agree to what I was asking. The voice went quiet for a bit, then I heard another, a third man. Based on the way this guy spoke, he definitely sounded like a native English speaker; I figured that the mysterious ‘associate’ had managed to get a hold of the owner somehow.
The owner definitely didn’t sound pleased, though. There was a lot of angry shouting, and from what I could tell, the associate was actually trying to rile him up on purpose. After a lot of yeling, I heard what I presumed to be the owner’s voice shouting something resembling a fairly common Anglo-Saxon sounding name. It sounded pretty generic, but in the interest of keeping things vague I’ll omit that as well. After this came through, the owner’s voice went quiet before too long. The associate had presumably cut him off. I heard the caller’s voice come through next.
“Thank you,” he said curtly.
“Are my services still required?” I asked in an almost sarcastic tone, repeating one of the things we’re supposed to say if we’re not sure if we ought to be staying on the line any longer.
“They may be,” the other replied, “please hold just a minute longer.”
Afterwards, I heard a little back and forth between the more coherent guy and his friend before I suddenly heard the owner’s voice again. The third man’s voice sounded much clearer, like they had actually brought him into the room all of a sudden, and just as angry as before. I feared that maybe things were about to get violent between them, but after a little longer, it sounded like the owner gave a cry of exasperation and just went away. All through this, I was just sitting there listening with my microphone muted, making use of my alloted 15 minutes of hold time in which I’m allowed to sit there and do nothing before I have to hang up and move on; sometimes, the things you hear during that time is more entertaining than any TV show.
Not much more time passed, however, before the caller’s voice came through again.
“Thank you,” I heard him say. “You’ve been very helpful. I believe we can take it from here. The client would also like to thank you before we terminate this conversation.”
A few more moments and shuffling noises later, the ‘client’, the one who had sounded so out of it before, gave me a quick “thank you” in our common language before the call disconnected. I guess the little bit of help I provided must have made a real impact, because in that one moment, the voice I heard definitely sounded far more calm and serene than the babbling I had heard before.
Anyway, just like that, the call was over, and I was back to just sitting there, being prompted by the company website on whether I wanted to write a special comment for that call. I quickly dismissed the text box and sank back into my chair for a minute, with things thankfully moving slowly enough that it was a while longer before the next call came in. Part of me wanted to know more about just what that last call had been all about, but another was just relieved and satisfied that I had apparently been able to help one of my fellows.
The rest of the night was business as usual, perhaps with a few of the quirks I mentioned earlier, but nothing too out of the ordinary. I carried on like that for a few more days, waiting for the next paycheck to drop.
One day, however, I woke up to my phone going crazy. After I rolled out of bed and logged on to get the back half of my shift done, things ended up going a bit sideways as it looked like some supervisor from the company I had never talked to before was trying to message me on WhatsApp.
Not knowing what was up, I took his call. He started laying into me at once, angrily confirming my name and ID before demanding to know just what I had been doing —and thinking— the night of the incident. Just my luck, I thought. Someone had found the call record.
“Do you remember the courses and interviews you had to go through when you were going through the application process for this position?” the guy was shouting. “The details that were specified, so that the company’s integrity and reputation wouldn’t be compromised?”
“I sure do,” I said, not particularly caring for what would happen to my job if I just went along with what this guy was ranting about.
“Then for what reason did you agree to take on an interpretation for a language which doesn’t even exist in our service listing? One that doesn’t even seem to be included in any other interpretation services that function like ours? And for a caller who did not give any form of identification and doesn’t even seem to have a valid profile within our system?”
“It’s an old dialect,” I offered. “The guy clearly knew what he was calling for, and he needed help.”
“That’s a nice sentiment, but accuracy and integrity is very important to us, and your certification does not include any guarantee that you could have provided either in this case.”
I decided to keep quiet for a moment. This was just the kind of nonsense I was talking about earlier. The ignorance, the discrimination. I had a feeling the guy was about to get to what he was really thinking.
“And what kind of dialect was that, anyway? I listened to the call record myself, and I must say I’ve never heard any modern language that uses sounds like those. It was like coughing and gargling, like you were clearing your throat a hundred times in the span of a few seconds. And when the other, the owner or whoever it was, supposedly came on, it sounded like the exact same voice that had been speaking in those weird tongues just suddenly decided to switch to perfect English in the span of a moment. Like he was talking to himself. How could you hear something like that and go along with it?”
“It was a unique situation. If you listened to the call, you know that the client had been led to believe the space was vacant. The owner lied. He had to be removed.”
I could tell that the guy was fuming. “Well, how fitting,” he continued, “because I’m afraid this debacle cannot be ignored. The only way this can end is with someone being removed.”
Before he could say another word, a few knocking sounds and some screams of pain suddenly came from the other end of the call before things went quiet again just as quickly. I smirked to myself. The other call I had made on the sly when I started talking to this guy had been answered. Poetically enough, the very last thing he had said turned out to be true.
“An unfortunate development,” I heard from the other end. It was the caller, the one who had gotten in touch with me that night.
“Quite so,” I replied. “But that should clear it all up, I believe. My thanks. And our friend, is he getting accustomed to his new home?”
“Indeed. He decided to come along. He’s still wearing it now.”
Once again, I heard the voice of the client —my compatriot— giving a word of thanks before the call went dead.
Just like that, I kicked back in my chair for a moment before logging onto the company’s site and beginning the next part of my shift. I’ve actually decided to stick with it for a little longer, if only because of the interesting experiences. I also quite like the home office setup, which keeps things cozy for me even though the weather is as hot as ever down here. Who knows, maybe the next call I get from a hospital or a lawyer’s office or whatever will be just as interesting, and maybe I’ll even get to talk to one of my fellow countrymen again— I happen to know that there actually are a lot of them in those kinds of environments, even if most of them aren’t so easily identified, but I can always tell by the special satisfaction I get whenever I get to help one of my own.