Photographs of the People You Scream at On the Phone

Have you ever phoned up a customer services department, been put on hold for 40 minutes and then let out your frustration on the stranger who eventually answered? Of course you have. Did you ever bother to consider that there's a human being on the other end of the line? Of course you have not. In an attempt to make you feel bad about that, photographer Paul Jeffers and writer Mike McHardy spent two weeks hanging out with a bunch of people working at call centres in the Philippines.

We found out that many begin their shift as the sun sets – sacrificing a normal body clock as well as their public holidays to provide a 24/7 service for callers in the West. Noriel Atos is a salesperson working for a company that sells American beauty products to wealthy consumers around the world. At 6AM she has a Red Horse beer and a cigarette with some of her colleagues.

"We're used to it, we've been doing this for a long time," she says of the night work. "It's very stressful and it's hard to catch up with our health. Sometimes you feel like you're so sick and not in the mood because of the schedules, and it's so hard to get sleep in the mornings."

India has traditionally been the leading country for call-centre outsourcing, but recently the Philippines has become a more suitable location for that kind of business. This makes sense because, due to half a century of American colonisation in the Philippines, locals have grown up watching American television, learning American English and eating American fast food. The busy streets of Manila are covered with Starbucks, Krispy Kreme and Papa John's pizza stores.

The outsourced call centre industry is expected to reach 1.3 million employees by 2016 just in the Philippines. According to Cesar Tolentino from the Contact Centre Association of the Philippines, entry-level call operators can earn between 10,000–14,500 Philippine pesos (€169–€244) per month, excluding bonuses, allowances and incentives. That's a fairly robust salary in the Philippines – almost double that of a regular Filipino office worker – and allows employees to afford designer clothes and the latest gadgets.

These call centre employees are well educated and vigorously schooled to understand US culture. They get trained to acquire American accents and humour, to better adapt to customers' needs an ocean away.

Nonetheless, the job can be trying. “Callers can just complain and complain,” says one worker, named Ron. “They talk so much and they say bad words, but we can't get angry. We must empathise. We must make them calm.”