YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS

The ghosts of the region’s miners linger beneath the laminate floors, buried under layers of cheap carpet and corporate indifference. Where there were once calloused hands and roaring furnaces, there are now fingertips tapping keyboards, tethered to plastic headsets. Industry is gone, replaced by sprawling call centres where the forgotten take the nation’s fury through the vomit-inducing fog of depression and deep-rooted apathy.

Every morning, they shuffle through turnstiles into open-plan prisons. They’re granted three minutes of comfort breaks—barely enough to cry, breathe or masturbate—and three chances to be sick in a year before they’re replaced. Diabetic? Depressed? Pregnant? Get to fuck, you silly cunts. They aren’t people here; they’re stats. Monitored, recorded, and disposable as fuck.

The work isn’t productive; it’s survival. Call by call, they absorb the anger of strangers who see them as faceless, voiceless drones. They don’t build or create anything. They endure eight hours of relentless engagement with people who hate them because they represent everything that’s wrong in their own fucking lives. And in return, they’re handed just enough cash to stay tethered, just enough of a dangling carrot of career prospects to keep coming back.

But resentment festers like a cold sore that refuses to heal. Quietly, invisibly, it grows in the margins of their existence. 

The part that nobody seems to grasp is that these workers hold the keys to literally millions of lives. Names, numbers, and secrets. Then when survival depends on breaking the system that binds them, they learn to bleed it dry.

They sell data to the highest bidder, every transaction a silent rebellion. Compliance is dead, replaced by necessity. It isn’t loud or flashy; it’s sabotage. Emails vanish. Records go missing. Systems quietly fail. They dismantle the machine from within, piece by tiny piece.

It won’t be remembered as a revolution, and their names won’t be spoken. But it will be felt. 

For a brief, fleeting moment, the voices on the phone held the gun and their trigger finger was twitching.

This collective is a symptom of a country whose heart bleeds black.