Six versions of the same lost job.

It is when a garage door will not close, when water is coming through a ceiling, when somebody locked themselves out. Emergency work arrives after the office closes because that is when people are home to notice it.

The caller with an emergency is the least patient caller you will ever have. They are not leaving a message. They are already dialling the next name.

The agent answers at nine at night the same way it answers at nine in the morning, works out whether it needs someone tonight or can wait until the morning, and puts the ones that cannot wait straight through to whoever is on call.

Volume does not arrive evenly. It arrives all at once, on the day of the storm, the cold snap, the long weekend, and that is the day every call is worth something.

One person can hold one conversation. A second caller hears ringing, a third hears voicemail, a fourth hears nothing because they hung up first.

The agent takes them all at the same time. There is no queue and no hold music, because nothing is waiting to become free. Every one of those callers gets asked the same questions and every one of them ends up on your phone.

Or from under a sink, or with a torch in one hand, or with a customer standing in front of you mid sentence. The phone rings, you look at it, and you decide to call back in twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes is usually too late, and worse, you are the one who pays for it twice: once in the lost job and once in the evening you spend returning calls instead of eating dinner.

The agent picks up the ones you cannot, and the ones you can you still answer yourself. Nothing takes your phone away from you.

When there are trucks out, somebody has to know which one is closest, which one is already double booked, and which caller is an emergency rather than an enquiry. That job usually lands on whoever happens to be near the phone.

The agent takes the call, gets the address, the problem and the urgency, and sends it to the crew thread while the caller is still on the line. Urgent goes to the person on call. Everything else goes in the list.

It is not making the dispatch decision. It is making sure the person who does never has to chase the details.

Somebody filled in your contact form at eleven at night. They also filled in two other companies' forms in the same ten minutes, because that is what people do. Whoever rings first usually gets it, and the gap between first and second is measured in minutes.

The agent rings them while your site is still open on their screen, says which company is calling and why, and finds out what they actually need.

If they do not pick up, it tries twice more and then sends a text they can answer instead. Nothing sits in an inbox overnight going cold.

You priced eleven jobs last month and heard back about six. The other five are not all no. Some are comparing, some forgot, some are waiting on a spouse, and one of them booked someone else on Tuesday because nobody called.

Chasing them is the job everybody knows they should do and nobody does, because it is the least pleasant hour of the week.

The agent rings them, asks whether it has gone anywhere or is still sitting, and sends you the answer. Not a no is worth knowing. So is a real no, because it stops you wondering.