Every now and then–or even daily–your nondescript office job will require you to engage in something called, in typical corporate speak alien vernacular, “customer-facing.” This means you must talk to the people that buy things from your company and discover just how much stupidity is backing your paycheck.
To engage with “salt of the earth” folk from across the U.S. is to wonder how they’re able to call you in the middle of the day and talk at you for an hour while you’re subjected to the travesty of having to actually be at work while they seem to have this mound of available time to either complain or tell you nothing in particular. After enough phone calls, it starts to feel like your boss has put you in a straitjacket and is simply holding up the phone up to your ear while you’re dosed on morphine. Except it’s far less pleasurable when the morphine is only a metaphor.