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Yesterday's LAT story on the entertainment industry's "headset protocol" or "culture of listening" sought to give a taste of the widespread practice of using every sensitive phonecall as a training ground for the next generation of agents and executives to those readers who've never had the pleasure of a hot latte tossed into their face as punishment for a dropped call. In the article, one brave agency call-roller risked certain receiver-bludgeoning by an angry boss for talking to the press and offered a glimpse into the world of sanctioned eavesdropping:

One ambitious young assistant has worked the past two years for a top Hollywood agent, a man whose clients include A-list actors, directors and producers. The assistant, who has been accepted into the agency's training program, estimates that he makes and/or listens to between 150 and 200 phone calls a day.

Using a seven-line phone and a mute button, it is not unusual for him to juggle four lines at once, lining up callers in order of his boss' preference. Unless ordered off the line, he listens to every call his boss makes or takes. "At first it's intimidating. You forget who people are, and who is on what line, but actually once you get good at it, it's fun to juggle the calls." [...]

A 20-minute conversation with this young man is an almost comical illustration of the rapid-fire, intense life of the assistant whose main priority is to execute the commitments his boss makes to callers, and keep the calls moving.

Before he can fully answer a reporter's question, he says, "Oops, that's my boss calling in, one second!" The rest of the conversation is punctuated by variations of "Hang on, that's my boss."

If he misses anything important, it could mean his job. "You always have to be there," he says. "The second you are not, you are failing and there's a line of people out the door who want to take your spot."

Fortunately, his boss has two assistants, so there is time in the 13-hour workday for bathroom breaks. "We always joke that if we had colostomy bags," he says, "we'd be the perfect machines."

Of course, today's jokes are tomorrow's efficiency-increasing refinements, and thanks to this anonymous trainee's remarks (overheard in a CAA conference room moments ago: "Holy shit, how did we not think of this ten years ago?"), assistants all over town may find themselves undergoing painful surgeries in unsanitized mailrooms to retrofit them with the bathroom-break-eliminating colostomy bags. Or in the case of boutique agencies without Big Five resources, mandatory enrollment in an Adult Undergarment Friday pilot program.