2 Chapter 2 - The group

"Finally showed up, have you Jen?"

Jennifer heard Mike's voice as soon as she ran in. She was trying her best to look like she hadn't run up the three flights of stairs.

'Why am I so unfit..' she internally thought to herself while trying to smile. It wasn't an easy feat. She was soaked from the rain and out of breath. It had to be just her luck that the one day she's cutting it close time-wise both elevators were out of service.

"Good to see you too, Mike." she said, rolling her eyes. It was hard to take Mike seriously as a boss sometimes. Maybe the embarrassing truth of him being one of her younger brothers friends, and a 3 years her junior contributed to that.

"Get a move on please. You've got 5 minutes to get logged in." he chirped, walking passed to the score board.

The rest of the team were in and she smiled at her group. The calls were killer, it was true. Customer Service was a tough job, but throughal the ups and downs she had gotten close to her work family.

She took a free computer by the strangest member of their team; Zachary Williams. Zach was by far the strangest person Jennifer had ever met, returning his little wave and smile as she sat down she had momentary flash backs of him on her first day of work, talking endlessly about photography while he dissected his burger, layer by layer with a knife and fork. Jennifer remembered watching in awed fascination as he drenched his burger buns in vinegar before commencing to eat it with a knife and fork. She'd always heard people at call centres were strange, but surely that was way too weird. To make it stranger was that Zach was actually devilishly attractive. He had the deepest set, innocent looking green eyes and a head of naturally curly black hair. He was like something out of a magazine; tall, broad-shouldered and with a contagious smile-- but by God, was he.. unusual.

Opposite her sat Beth, all glamorous and hair up high. She sat doing her nails while in a call, her eyebrows coming together in a look that Jen recognised as her losing her patience slowly. Jen shook her head. It didn't look like a good day for calls. All around her phones rung once before as an alert for the call handler,popping on her own headphones and checking the team schedule for the day.

The thing with call centres unfortunately tended to be that a lot of people couldn't hack it for long. Jen and Beth had been here for two months now and they were the only two left from their new group of four that were put on Mike's team, but it was quick and easy to bond with people -when they actually had the time to talk to each other and not the customers, that was.

She started her calls, looking at the board with the two new names written on it; Dewey and Sara. Idly, while she greeted the customer, she wondered if they would last here.