'Thank you for calling xxx, my name is Noel, can I have your home telephone number please?" I have spoken this exact sequence of words at least two thousand times in my life.

The last time I did it, I vowed never to do it again. I answered 50 or 60 calls a day in the exact same way, and in the exact same tone when I worked in a call centre some years ago, providing technical support for computer-related issues.

If you had a problem, you called me, and I told you what to do. Quite often though, I wouldn't know what to do, but of course I wouldn't tell you that. 'Never admit you don't know' was the tech support motto. Instead, I would put them on hold, have a mild panic attack and try and think of what to do.

Such is the life of a call- centre drone. What you hear as a politely spoken voice that vows to help you in any way they can is actually a thoroughly unhappy, damaged human being that hates your guts for calling. They wish they could tell you what they really think about you and your billing issue.

During training, they teach you how to handle irate callers, failing to add however that a very large majority of calls would be from irate callers. The trick is to speak in a very low voice, so they have to concentrate in order to hear what you are saying. Eventually, they adopt your tone and order is restored.

Then, of course, there was the 'sneeze button', a cute little thing that when pushed meant you could hear them, but they couldn't hear you. You were meant to press it only when you needed to sneeze or cough.

Instead, it was widely used to curse in frustration, or to continue your wide-ranging conversation with the colleague beside you.

Our call centre handled calls from the UK only. After a while, you began to learn how to handle different calls from different area codes. '0208' meant they're from London, and expected special treatment.

If they were from Liverpool, they were generally more reasonable. Geordies too tended to be bemused by why it wasn't working, but not necessarily angry. Scottish people would often take issue with how much they were paying each month.

Then there were the various rules and protocols initiated by management. They never stopped coming up with new ideas and rules. We never stopped thinking of ways out of doing them. It was decided that employees had to say the caller's first name three times during a call, for reasons of friendliness I suppose. Their mistake was to not specifying when, thus leaving open the handy loophole of saying their names three times in quick succession at the end of the call: "is that okay, David? Thanks, David. Bye, David ... "

Another was the attempt to get rid of the sneeze button altogether, as management came to realise it was being 'misused'. They installed new phones that had no mute button. We retaliated by physically disconnecting the headset from the phone when we wanted to go on a rant. And of course there were the games. It's boring work remember, hundreds of people sitting in a room with no windows, taking call after call after call, barely clinging on to their sanity. We took comfort in each other, forming bonds that only war veterans and ex-call centre employees fully understand.

We sometimes used to take calls speaking in a foreign accent, and then slowly morph it into another accent to confuse the caller, and amuse ourselves.

I was known for being able to sustain a London accent for long periods (it's easy; just say 'yeah?' at the end of every sentence), before reverting into a heavy Dublin or Cork accent towards the end of the call. Most times the caller would respond to this by asking if I was American.

'I want to speak to a supervisor' are the words all call centre workers fear. If you have to pass your calls to a supervisor all the time, it reflects badly on the agent. The easy way out was to just get a colleague to pretend to be a supervisor. They would just repeat everything you said in a more authoritative tone, and the caller usually felt a lot better.

The job was as bad, though, as you wanted it to be. I struggled to shrug off tough calls, sometimes thinking about it all the way home, perhaps only letting it go as I drifted to sleep.

One classic I still remember to this day: during a call that was getting increasingly fractious, a very well-spoken English lady declared "you must think I'm stupid, and you're the one who's Irish". I would moan about it, sure, but if it was to a fellow employee they always had a better story, something that happened that was even worse. Everyone claimed their department was the hardest-tech support workers all wished they were in customer services; customer services wished they worked in tech support. Everyone agreed that the sign-up department was the place to be.

Towards the end of my time there a rumour spread that an employee in tech support had lost the head, and thrown his chair across the room in a wild rage over a difficult call. Word also had it that he had been given three months paid leave for stress.

Everyone who heard this story had a light bulb suddenly appear over their head.

About a week later I stood up from my desk, threw my headset down, and approached a supervisor. I performed my best impression of a man on the edge, mumbling incoherently about call times and support. I said, Peter Finch-like, that I was mad as hell, and I wasn't gonna take it any more. They said fine, and asked me what address they should send my P45 to.

If I do need to ring a call centre now for whatever reason, I'm always polite.

I learned, the hard way, that it's not the person on the end of the line's fault; it's not even the supervisor's fault. It's the system. Whoever I'm polite to will probably get an earful on the very next call, but it's a welcome relief.

Every little helps.

i just can't take it any more...

Many call centres never stop hiring. A report showed that 56pc of recruitment drives were due to staff turnover.

The report also found that the average 'lifetime' of an employee working with a call centre is only about 15 months.

After 15 months, they either join another call centre or quit the profession altogether.

In 2006, a call centre in Arizona came agonisingly close to taking the world record for annual staff turnover rate for a call centre outside of India.

Agent Dan Ferguson, who had been working there for three months, decided he had had enough and walked out, thus breaking the record.

However, two hours later Ferguson had a change of heart, and decided to come back to work, remembering he couldn't make his car repayments without his job.

- Noel Burke