2002-10-30 - 6:36 p.m.
Oh, the shame; I've been a telemarketer!

You know, in the past 16 days, I had exactly 3 days of downtime; the rest was spent working bizarre hours at a phone. I'm beginning to think there's no experience I can't learn from, even telemarketing; all the same, thank God it's over. I hope the temp agency has a new and improved assignment for me soon.

I hate the 12:30-9:00pm shift, which really erases the evenings, although late mornings weren't so bad. I hate having people constantly looking over your shoulder, so to speak, so that you have no freedom whatsoever in your work, however monotonous and stupid that work may be.

I really hate having people -- customers, actually, as we were doing a survey-slash-record update for a credit company on its own cardholders, rather than random sales calls -- treating me like the Evil Bitch Monster, like an inhuman thing, instead of someone just doing their job same as anyone else.

(Boy, has this given me a new appreciation for the "Is So-And-So Available" folks on the other end of those calls I always hang up on. Not that I'm suddenly gonna be polite and buy stuff, but there really is no reason to be rude. How the hell does J. Random Telemarketer know what they just interrupted in your life? For every customer that goes ballistic at being called on a weekend or at 8:30pm or during dinner there's another who prefers that to getting called on weekdays or in the mornings or while they're watching TV. I mean, really.)

I had one guy tell me, when I asked my "Are you currently employed, sir?" question, that I'd have to give him a blowjob to find out. I started my closing speil to cut him off, and he said, all wounded-like, "So I'm not going to get a blowjob?" I replied back with a bit of snark in my tone -- "Considering that we're on opposite ends of a phone call and I don't know where you are" -- and he said, "Oh, that's OK, just tell me where YOU are and I'll come and you can suck to your heart's content." In the background, I could hear his roommates guffawing at the things he dared say, and I nearly responded with attitude, before I remembered the managers randomly listening in on us. I held my tongue, and closed the call.

Fast-food cashier, custodial worker, postal worker, telemarketer -- I've been through several of the most thankless jobs in the universe now, and each and every one has given me a new respect for people. The fact that I kind of enjoyed the cleaning and mail delivering ones is beside the point; they're jobs viewed by "our betters" as thing-jobs, necessities that they want to reap the results of without ever really acknowledging. (Come to think of it, my "Administrative Specialist" job wasn't much better, in terms of getting respect).

Voting is Monday or Tuesday, right? Sometime next week, then, if I'm not re-assigned by the temp agency, I'll know whether the City will have its bonds passed and be able to afford the position that I want to apply for. I hope so. I really do. Working for any derivation of government has benefits, plus already knowing some employees (Azash and our cousin) would put it head and shoulders above every other job I've had.

By far the worst part of this telemarketing job, however, was the combination of distraction and boredom. I couldn't do ANYTHING except sit there in my chair, with my headphones on and the keyboard under my fingers; maybe 10 seconds would pass between a hang-up and the beep that signaled the next call, if I was lucky. Around me were forty other people doing the exact same thing, and if I wasn't concentrating well I could hear each and every damned one of them, with their differently-pitched voices and different rates of speech, going through the exact same conversations I was having with customers all over the country.

Coffee got me through it, coffee and a Rubix cube. The coffee kept me from getting all unfocused, and I know the cube well enough I could make a move or two in the spare seconds between callers and never lose my place. Together it ate up my attention enough to block out the others' voices, the way my feet smelled sorta sour after I'd dropped a soda on them on the way out the door that morning, the supervisors pacing around at the corners of my vision, the soreness in my back after sitting in a poor attempt at an office chair all day, and so on, and so forth.

Answering machines. Suspicious people who didn't want to talk and only sometimes took the 1-800 number I offered as an alternative to talking to me. Angry people who basically told me to fuck off and die for having the temerity to take them away from the World Series or interrupt cooking or even just dare to exist on the other end of their phone line. People who didn't speak English. Shrill phone-blocker messages. Shriller this-number-has-been-disconnected messages. Wrong numbers, some of which included fax machine lines, I mean, WTF?

No down-time, never, and supervisors who told me not to add anything to a call, like "I only have about seven questions", nevermind that it got me a better survey-completed score, and who gave me an actual, black-mark-on-your-career written rebuke on my second day because I skipped the "How much remains on your mortgage?" question for a caller who'd gone ballistic and refusing over the "Could you estimate your annual household income?" question.

... Apparently, skipping a question counts as Falsifying Information in their world. While I can abstractly understand the objection, hello, my 2nd day, and they HAD told us in training that only the occupation quesiton was important, and that we could use our judgement on the others. I mean, SERIOUSLY!

Okay, I'm getting all worked up, when it's already over. Bad. But can I give you a piece of advice before I change the subject? Never, ever, ever, try to put a person with any flavor of AD/HD in an occupation that requires so much hurry-up-and-wait (frustration and distraction and rigid rule-following all at once). Horrible, no-good, awful idea. If I'd gone much longer in that chair it would have driven me insane, I'm not kidding, and I wasn't even on actual sales, which I'm told is much less rewarding.

Actually, I better not so much change the subject, as end the entry. I've got more to say, but Azash is demanding dinner, and I'm supposed to be calling Hildegaard in about 45 minutes. It's been awhile since we've had a good long chat.

Blessings, all.