The brightly lit room was filled with all sorts of sounds. The rustling of papers, rumbling of printers, whirring of air conditioners, clacking of keyboards, scratching of pens, skidding of chairs, and most dominating of them all, the insistent chatter of the rows of employees guarding their work stations.
One might wonder how anyone could possibly stay sane in this chaotic environment. There was only one answer to that and it was simple: you did not.
Yunho flinched and pulled one ear of his headphones away before he could go deaf from the screeching static on the other end. He had no idea what the customer was saying, but at least he could discern from the high-pitched voice that he was talking to a woman.
"Ma'am, I'm afraid you'll have to call again. The phone reception is not very good-"
The woman screamed again, her words all morphed into sadistic demon noises by the time they reached Yunho's ears. Yunho sighed, repeated what he said in the most patient tone he could manage, and then hung up.
He practically ripped off his headset once the phone call ended and threw it carelessly onto his keyboard. He was so used to being here that he barely registered the ambient noise of the office - all he heard was his ears thanking him for being relieved of the suffocating headphones.
The person sitting across from Yunho's desk gave him a sympathetic look over the low partition before turning his attention back to his own headset, which was still sitting snugly around his head and ears.
Yunho rolled his eyes at his colleague and best friend, Jongho. They met in the first year of work here in Bank of Korea, and it was both their third year of being a bank teller.
Yunho couldn't see himself spending his mid-twenties talking to irritating old folks who didn't know how to press a single button on their phones, but he had to deal with what he was given. And that happened to be a decent salary in his case.
"Get back to work, Yunho." The manager of the phone support sector walked past Yunho's seat and placed a big hand on the employee's slim shoulder, patting it two times.
Knowing he only escaped scolding because of his three-year friendship with the manager, Yunho straightened his body and picked up his headset. Before putting it back on, he braved a look over his shoulder and saw his boss walking away while keeping a vigilant eye on his subordinates.
Kim Hongjoong was a scarily competent man for his age, but being only a few years older than Yunho meant that he was considerate and understanding of their mentally draining job.
Yunho licked his dry lips as he waited for his next call to connect. His ears, trapped under the cushions, were already protesting due to the heat and discomfort.
The dialling sounds cut off abruptly and the banal line of greeting came automatically out of Yunho's mouth like always. "Hello, how may I help-"
"Finally! A person I can talk to," a gruff voice interrupted.
Yunho was used to being unable to finish his sentences, but what worried him wasn't the customers' lack of manners. No, it was the tangible frustration from the other end that made him tense his shoulders, because he had picked up enough phone calls to know instantly - from the very first spoken word - whether the caller was going to be mean, or less mean.
Unfortunately, more often than not the answer was the former. You see the worse in people in this line of work, and everyone in the room knew that.
"...thirty minutes to get this call," the man complained. "Has everyone decided to get a day off suddenly?"
Yunho heard that one before. When he first got the job he was naive enough to think that he could get used to these accusations and insults.
Now that he was on his third year, he had finally accepted the fact that this was not something one could get used to, because the moment you think you had heard and felt everything, people would come up with new and creative ways to stike you down again. Harder and faster than before.
The professional thing to do was to ignore it, so Yunho asked again, "How may I help you, sir?"
The man announced in a tired voice that he lost his credit card.
Yunho resisted the urge to sigh. There were already two other missing cards this morning, and each call took almost an hour to resolve. He had a bad feeling that this call would take even more than that, or at least feel longer than that.
As Yunho collected the customer's account details and explained the steps to recovering a credit card, he listened to the foreboding silence from the other end and subconsciously braced himself for an imminent scolding.
He learned to trust all his bad intuitions so that if they did come true, at least he wouldn't have to hate himself for not seeing them coming.
"What do you mean I have to make a trip to the bank?! Do you have any idea how busy I am?!"
Yunho shrunk into his chair as if that helped him escape from the noise coming from the headset that was more or less a part of his body.
"I hope you understand, it's for security reasons," Yunho replied, trying to keep his voice steady when his heart was already going miles per hour.
He barely finished his sentence when the man shouted back, "Then why can't you disable my account first?!"
Ignoring the profanities decorating that sentence, Yunho answered, "We can only disable your account if we see suspicious activity."
Typing a few commands on his keyboard, he scanned the monitor and continued, "You said you lost your card yesterday night, and there weren't any transactions made from then to this moment. We assure you that your account is protected. All you have to do is to go to one of our branches with identification documents-"
"Wait, I couldn't hear anything you said just now." Yunho looked towards the ceiling when he got interrupted a second time, but the irritation was rapidly replaced by anxiety as the customer continued, "Why are you so quiet? Are you scared or nervous or something? What the f**k is this?!"
All of a sudden Yunho was rid of the ability to speak. He swore he was just talking normally, but as his brain tried to put together the words he just heard he couldn't shake the possibility that what the man said could be true.
Sweat glued the back of his shirt onto his flaming skin, yet his hands, frozen in place on the keyboard, were ice cold. He tried to say something, only to choke on every intake of breath whenever he opened his mouth.
"Hello?! This is ridiculous!" The infuriated customer yelled, but Yunho could barely hear him over the clamor of his own thoughts. "How can you just stop talking?! You're even worse than a chatbot! Is this how you treat every customer? A person who can't talk working in customer support? What a joke!"
Yunho was biting the inside of his lip when the man hung up in a rage. There were many things he could think of, like the fact that the call had finally ended, but the only thing on his mind was the fact that he was compared to a chatbot.
He hunched his back and stared at the "i" key of the worn keyboard, feeling as if all twenty-nine pairs of eyes in the room were directed onto him. They would all be thinking about how he kept his position for three years when he couldn't even speak properly.
The weight of the judgemental stares sat on Yunho's shoulders and neck until his muscles ached and he could barely breathe.
He tore his headset away and stood up, keeping his head low to avoid seeing people's eyes. That was only so effective - he caught Jongho's worried expression as he ended a call in a way that was certainly a violation of the company's rules.
Yunho sped walk as he navigated around the rows of desks, thankful for his overgrown bangs that obscured half of his vision. Jongho was close behind, his hurried footsteps making soft thumps on the floor.
Yunho entered the washroom and closed the door with his body. As he turned around to lock the door it swung open again, forcing him to step back in order to let Jongho in.
Jongho almost gasped when he saw Yunho's pallor. "What happened?"
Yunho didn't reply, because as Jongho closed the door again he caught a glimpse of the office and saw that no one was staring at him after all.
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I hope you enjoyed the first chapter! It's more of an introduction to what kind of person Yunho is, but I assure you that things will get interesting very soon ;)