PORTLAND, Maine -- In a cavernous, festively decorated room far to the north of Baltimore, hundreds of workers busily take orders day and night to make sure that holiday wishes are fulfilled come Christmas morning.
They are not concerned whether you've been naughty or nice. Your credit card number will do. For these resolutely cheerful workers with the telephone headsets don't report to Santa Claus.
They answer to another icon in these parts, "L.L.," as he's referred to here, the late founder of L.L. Bean, one of the largest, oldest and most famous mail-order catalog companies in the world.
But with Christmas fast approaching, they might as well be working for St. Nick. Even in the dead of a recent night, Bean's telephone operators barely had time to catch their breath during the overnight shift in this reconstituted Woolworth's department store.
Hundreds of calls come in after midnight and before 6 a.m. By the end of this particular day, 126,242 people will have called. (The record of 165,314 calls was reached earlier in the month.)
To keep up with the extra holiday demand, Bean begins the annual process of bulking up in mid-October. With the addition of seasonal workers, it more than doubles in size to about 8,600 workers. Each December, Bean becomes Maine's largest private employer. Its workers start at a little more than $7 an hour and are eligible for a one-third discount on Bean products.
Many of the extra workers end up in this gleaming warehouse-sized room in an office park in Portland, one of two telephone centers. (The other -- a daytime operation only -- is farther north, in Lewiston.) They sit in rows of cubicles, each containing a computer terminal, a telephone and headset, a batch of past and present Bean catalogs, and sizing information.
Along the wall are aphorisms from Leon Leonwood Bean, who died in 1967. "A Customer is Not an Interruption of Our Work," says one. "He is the Purpose of It."
To get this far, those working the phones had to pass at least two interviews in which they were evaluated for personableness, among other attributes, and a week of training.
Many prefer the night shift, because it enables them to spend more time with their children during the day, to work a second job or simply because of the slightly more relaxed atmosphere after midnight.
On average, a nighttime phone operator handles 11 or 12 calls an hour, and the calls tend to last longer than those during the day because customers tend to be more loquacious.
"Some people don't even want to order," said Barbara Maier, the nighttime "floor leader." "They'll tell us they had a nightmare or just couldn't sleep."
The phone representatives are to show polite interest in a caller's digressions but never to initiate irrelevant conversations themselves. That's the approach taken by Joanne Wiley, a bubbly, 38-year-old mother of two, when a caller kept her on the phone for more than a half-hour beginning at 1:40 a.m.
The woman caller told Mrs. Wiley about her family's recent relocation from one home to another in New York, the whereabouts of her grown children and the illnesses suffered by those in her family. She discussed the attributes of various catalog companies. And she complained, good-naturedly, about Bean's practice of supplying gift boxes rather than gift-wrapping.
Finally, after the caller got down to the business of ordering a shirt for her son, she asked Mrs. Wiley to include a gift box and a card with the inscription: "Merry Christmas and do your own gift-wrapping. Love Mom."
"He has a good sense of irony," the woman said, to Mrs. Wiley's laughter.
A great deal is happening while a customer is on the phone. The representative's fingers clatter across the keyboards to check on merchandise in stock, to ascertain the dimensions of items and to verify addresses.
Few customers realize -- and Bean representatives do not reveal -- that through caller identification, the representatives often learn the name and address of a customer upon answering a call.
Sometimes, as in Mrs. Wiley's next call, that information triggers suspicions. One man, who ordered nearly $500 of merchandise, gave a different last name and address from those he had used in two previous calls from the same telephone number.
"He's a fraud," Mrs. Wiley said after the call, which she flagged so that Bean's security people would run checks in the morning.
Although the phone center is in the far Northeast, it is in some ways a gauge of the rhythms and habits of the nation, particularly at night. In the phone room, you sense the country going to sleep and then rising again as calls first evaporate from the East Coast and then the West Coast. And just when the last Western calls trickle away, the East starts weighing in again.
But the calls reflect more than bedtime habits.
Ms. Maier says a surge of calls starts after "The Late Show with David Letterman" ends. Presidential addresses are always followed by a burst of calls.
"I was here a few years ago when J.R. was shot on 'Dallas,' " said Dawna Jean Banester, the night supervisor. "We got no calls during the show and were flooded right afterward."
In a side room, someone continuously monitors the Weather Channel. If a major storm is forecast in one region of the country, Bean arranges for more telephone coverage, knowing that the weather will keep more people indoors and prompt thoughts about staying warm.
"Sometimes they'll ask us to ship stuff out overnight, hoping it will get there before the storm leaves," said Ms. Maier, who after her eight-hour shift ends at 7 a.m. will head for her second eight-hour job as a supervisor at a discount club.
Occasionally, Bean's phone representatives learn of significant events before the rest of the country. "We knew about the California earthquake because we were talking to people out there when it started," said Mrs. Banester.
Now, Americans are preoccupied with getting their shopping done by next Sunday.
"The first question I get now is, 'Can I get it by Christmas?' " said Sarah Dorsey, one of the thousand extra "phone representatives" Bean hires for the Christmas rush. "Customers are definitely a lot more panicked now."
(The answer to the question: Yes, until Dec. 23.)
Although Bean began as a mail-order company, the term is now something of a misnomer. Three out of every four Bean's catalog shoppers place their orders by way of the toll-free phone number rather than through the mail.
(Almost all of Bean's business is conducted through its catalogs. Only 10 percent of its sales comes from shoppers at its retail store in Freeport, 15 miles north of Portland.)
The heaviest volume of calls comes now, during the Christmas season.
Catharine Hartnett, manager of Bean's public relations, said 40 percent of the company's sales -- which last year exceeded $870 million -- come during the Christmas season, beginning in mid-October.
To keep its operators stoked up during this high-pressure month, Bean fetes them with refreshments and gives them small gifts.
"I love working here," said Andy Murray, a wholesomely rosy-cheeked 22-year-old phone operator back for his third Christmas season. Next month, he will ship out for four years in the Coast Guard, where, he said, he will make up his mind between a career in search-and-rescue or one in sales.
For now, though, Mr. Murray and his colleagues have thousands of last-minute shoppers to bail out before next Sunday. Then, abruptly, it will all be over, "a relief and a letdown," said Ms. Maier.
The lull will be short-lived. Although Christmas telephone orders end this week, January brings another period of peak activity, Christmas exchanges.
"And that," said Ms. Maier, "is a more stressful peak."