The research was developed at a client service agency. The services are carried outface to face and demand from the employee discursive exchanges dealing with the failure tocarry out the requested services or non compliance with deadlines. Tension is explicit.Dealing with situations of complaints from the public against the company, whether thesecomplaints are legitimate or not, makes the attendants exercise continuous and long mentalefforts.The general goal of this research is to advance further in the understanding of thesingularity of the subjects in a work situation and contribute for the workers to be able todevelop and transform the activity, aiming at reducing conflicts during service and, as aconsequence, reducing mental sickness.A theory and practice which may contribute to reveal the meaning of the situationsfrom the apprehension of the subjective experiences of the clerks is then sought. With theconcept of “prevented activity", in which intrasubjective conflicts are present, we search theclinic of the activity as a conducting line. In this process we utilize the method of cross selfconfrontation, that is, by means of the discussions and contradictions in situations experiencedcollectively, the workers might be able to reconstruct the meanings of the activity itself.It was from this work field, from the empirical material collected in the simple andcross self confrontations, that an “instrument” arose to serve as a yarn to be unfolded: Thebreak during the work. And from the break we attempt to get to the conflicts of the activityand to the possible development of the workers in the activity.In a general way, we can say that our objective became the double question of thefunction of the break, on the one hand an instrument of activity development, and on the otheran object of work restart from the collective for gender renewal. In this apparently simpleproblem, strong tensions from the face-to-face activity are concentrated, both individual(intrasubjective) and collective (intersubjective), which may reveal the whole potential ofdevelopment of the workers in this same activity.
