The punchline is this joke has a tie back to something we used to do in my call-center days. Coming up to about 9PM, when the lines were due to close in the next minute, one of us would log into the main call-queue and then repeatedly hit the ‘Answer’ and ‘Hang-up’ buttons on the phone until the queue was empty. We knew that it took a little more than a minute to re-dial the number, get through the IVR menus and get back to our center. So by the time these callers reached us again, the line would already be closed.
This was pretty evil to do, but at the same time, calls starting at 20:59 didn’t necessarily end at 21:00, and some more difficult customers could sit on the line for over half an hour. After a full day of call-center work, we never wanted that. And so, we would ‘dump’ the whole queue at about 20:59, just so we could actually get home that night.
This is the inspiration behind the actions of my comic alter-ego in the last panel 😀
You could even make fake static on the line and then disconnect. ‘Oh, I don’t know what happened to the phone system, you know how unreliable it is…’
Ahh…I loved that trick too. I’d save that for the mosre difficult customers who just wouldn’t go away. Also for the run-up to closing time 😀