Misfit #6 Harry the Kooshit

If I haven't painted a pretty picture of my work already, I will attempt to do so now.

As I have mentioned before, I work in a call center and there are only 6 people in my team. To make sure that we have as many people as possible on the phones at one given time, we have a "tag" system.

If you've ever heard of a 'talking stick', our system is very similar; just as you can only talk while you have the talking stick, we can only take our break/lunch when we have a certain item that is passed from one person to the next in a pre-determined order. That certain item for us is "Harry". It's a koosh - you know/remember those stringy rainbow koosh balls from the 80s/90s - but it's not in the ball form - it's actually shaped like a 'cousin it' from Adam's Family, but it's rainbow and has a sun hat and sunglasses, and to top if off, it's a key-chain!

I dubbed it Harry the Kooshit. - This can be looked at as Koosh-it or Koo-shit; I prefer the latter. The little guy/girl/it is cute, but the system, while potentially great, does have some flaws.

When you factor in the possibility that any given call could last an hour or more and that it could possibly sneak into your break/lunch time, or the fact that some people just simply forget to pass Harry on, we inevitably get really far behind our regular schedules.

My schedule is as follows:
10:15 - first break
1:00 - lunch
3:45 - second break

However, somedays it looks like this:
10:30 - first break
1:20 - lunch
4:30 - second break

and so far today it's been:
11:00 - first break
2:00 - lunch.

Oy.

I accidentally broke Harry a couple of times - the string of its hat that holds it to the keychain will unravel through the metal loop and detach - causing its sun hat to fly off. I think it might be time to intentionally KILL Harry... for good... 2:00 is just too late to go to lunch... any ideas?

What a vacation!!