"Jake, stop looking at my ass and do your fucking job," Nadia Chaouni said, smiling and shaking her head. The young Moroccan Muslim woman rolled her eyes as her favorite co-worker, a certain six-foot-tall, dark and handsome Haitian, continued to gawk. Jacob Duchene leaned back in his chair, and continued to ogle his supervisor Nadia. The lady was mighty fine, and her Yoga pants seemed to have been painted on. Can Jacob really be blamed for, ahem, booty gawking?
It was a rather quiet day at the Lisgar Call Center in downtown Ottawa. Winter had come to provincial Ontario, and everyone was frosty, reflecting the weather outside. There are hundreds of call center operators occupying five floors of the mid-sized building, with Canadian government workers taking the two topmost floors. Today, the phones were dead, with hardly any callers, and people were a bit more relaxed than usual.
"Desole, mademoiselle, I was daydreaming," Jacob said with utmost insincerity, and Nora grinned, then gently touched his shoulder before she continued making her rounds. She'd recently gotten promoted to supervisor after two years on the job, following her graduation from La Cite Collegiale. Running a call center isn't easy, especially one that takes sales-oriented inbound and outbound calls. There are numbers which every supervisor must meet. Someone has to do it, though, and Nadia Chaouni is the right woman for the job...
"Nadia, I need your help," said Elisabeth Dupuis, and Nadia hurried over to the portly Haitian woman, who'd been eyeballing her and Jacob with disapproval for quite some time. Just as Nadia suspected, Elisabeth had a computer problem which would have been solved by running a simple systems diagnostic. When Nadia pointed that out, Elisabeth gave her a fake smile, then looked her up and down. Obviously, Nadia's choice of outfit, consisting of a black leather jacket over a pink turtleneck shirt and Yoga pants, did not meet with Elisabeth's approval...
"Have a nice day, Liz, I've got to go," Nadia said, with a smile just as fake as Elizabeth's, and she was well aware of the fact that Elizabeth hated to be called Liz. Nadia wondered if Liz was familiar with the concept of irony. The Haitian broad disapproved of Nadia's, ahem, fondness for Jacob, but she had a white boyfriend herself, some guy named Keith or something. Nadia checked up on Ian, a boisterous young African guy who was one of the call center's top salespeople.
"I stole a client from the Quebec cable and Internet company and signed them up to our clients," Ian said victoriously, and Nadia grinned, high-fived Ian and then wrote his name on the board. At the Lisgar Call Center, every employee's good deed was put up on the board and celebrated, from punctuality and customer service awards to exemplary sales records. That's one of the many reasons why Nadia liked her job. She liked making people feel good...
As Nadia continued her rounds, she could sense someone looking at her. At first, she thought it might be Liz, or perhaps Jacob, the call center's booty gawker in chief. Nope, no such luck. Nadia turned around and found herself facing Yassin Assad, a tall, bearded young Arab Muslim guy originally from the City of Aleppo, Syria. He grinned at her the way a serpent smiles at a dove before ensnaring it, and Nadia repressed a shudder. The dude gave her the creeps...
"Well, if it isn't Miss Africa," Yassin said, and he looked Nadia up and down, and the young woman rolled her eyes. Like a lot of Arabs, Yassin viewed himself as somehow superior to Africans, the way some unenlightened North Africans saw themselves as superior to their sub-Saharan brethren. Nadia had seen such racist attitudes in her hometown of Rabat, Morocco, and didn't subscribe to them. The way Nadia sees it, everybody's human, and at the end of it all, everyone turns to dust, regardless of pedigree or skin color...
During Nadia's first year at the call center, she made the mistake of spending one passionate weekend with Yassin. The sex was fun, but the dude was a real douche bag. Nadia decided to dump Yassin after she found out about his racist attitude toward non-Arabs, especially Africans. The fool saw nothing wrong with sleeping with a North African woman while disparaging African people. The sheer nerve on him!
"Something I can help you with, Yassin?" Nadia demanded, crossing her arms, and Yassin grinned. As a quality control manager with the Lisgar Call Center, Yassin outranked Nadia, but she didn't answer to him directly. Nadia's manager was a white lady named Roxy, a short-haired, tattooed lesbian who was actually a really sweet person. Too bad Roxy was on vacation, and there was no one to hold Yassin in check. Nadia resisted the urge to smack the smirk out of Yassin's face...