On the Line: My Year as a Telemarketer
I loathe talking on the telephone, so the fact that I ever worked as a telemarketer still blows my mind. No child dreams of a career calling strangers, begging them to buy stuff they don’t need. One must be indifferent to the daily abuse or desperate enough to be a minimum wage masochist to endure the wrath of working in one of the world’s most reviled industries.
For exactly one year, I worked weekdays in a windowless cubicle farm at American Telemarketing Specialists surrounded by a never-ending drone of voices in various stages of sales pitches, from warmly confident to frantic pleading. The job allowed me to establish residency in Texas and go to the college of my choice at the coveted in-state tuition rate. While my plan was successful and I earned a degree, I sometimes wonder which experience taught me more about life.
Much to my surprise, I was good at the job, once earning the dubious distinction of “Telemarketer of the Month.” The company sold cable television channels in a variety of packages. I grew up without cable, so I had no clue what aired on these channels, but knowledge was less of a prerequisite than being persuasive. The guidelines were to follow the script and use the pre-approved rebuttals three times or until the customer hung up. I rarely completed two rebuttals before being cursed out or the line going dead.
The phone system automatically dialed numbers, though there was often a delay in the profile screen loading onto my monitor, causing the customer to grow inpatient while hearing nothing but dead air. One customer I will never forget had the unfortunate last name of Fuchs. I decided to play it safe and pronounce the u like it sounds when saying pukes. The woman corrected me in a flat Midwestern accent, “It’s FUCKS.”
I didn’t make the sale.
We faced a giant white board where the name of the campaign was written, how many leads were available, and how many sales had been made by each representative. One particularly tough campaign which elicited a groan any time it was put on the board was aptly named DISTROY, which was selling the Disney channel in Troy, Michigan. The campaigns included phone numbers from all over the country, so one hour I could be talking to customers in New York City, the next hour in Destin, Florida. There was one short-lived campaign in Louisiana, deep in the bayou, with Cajun accents so thick I’m not sure I ever made a sale, though I think I did get invited to a crawfish boil.
My budding writing career may have been blessed in a perverse sort of way by the number of rejections I endured that year. Most days I felt like a mosquito, buzzing in people’s ears as they hurried to get rid of me. The failure to make a sale came in such steady waves that I simply couldn’t take it all personally. Making quota for the day served as a soothing balm to receivers being slammed in my ear and being cursed out in different languages. On the toughest days, when I couldn’t make a sale to save my life, I would go home and cry. After a year in that school of hard knocks, my ego shrugged off the polite rejection notices from publishers.
The floor manager changed frequently but was always a balding middle-aged white guy who looked like his previous job was in an adult video store. Barry, the creepiest manager, caught me chewing gum, a violation when on the floor.
“Spit it out,” he commanded, holding his cupped hands in front of me.
Confused, I moved to spit out the gum in the trash bin in my cubicle. That was not good enough for Barry. He forced me to spit out the wad into his hands. I imagined him adding the sticky pink mass to his collection on the back door of his dingy shoebox office, jacking off to it during his lunch break.
The bosses were degenerates, but some of my fellow telemarketers were downright criminals. You know you are working at a sketchy job when being arrested is a common reason for missing a shift. I thought it was an odd rule that we were instructed during training to not accept collect calls from the county jail, but sure enough, one day we got a collect call from Shannon.
Shannon and her girlfriend Debra both worked at ATS. Shannon was loud, brash, vulgar, and from New York City. She could’ve been Andrew Dice Clay’s sister, her daily uniform a studded leather jacket slung over a wife beater and jeans with a pocket chain. Debra was quiet, calm, and had a soft, vaguely Southern accent. A coworker joked that Debra looked like Melissa Etheridge with a lobotomy. But we all underestimated Debra. She was one of the company’s top sellers.
Shannon sat next to me, which meant I got an earful daily. Wired on caffeine or a more powerful illicit stimulant, she never stayed planted in her seat for long, so she would crouch in her chair or lean halfway into my cubicle. I was hostage to hearing every word of her sales pitches if they could be called that. Her calls often quickly went off the rails.
“Excuse me, it’s ma’am, not sir. I’m a she. No, I’m not joking!”
The confused customer would hang up at that point, prompting Shannon to rip her headset off in dramatic fashion.
Shannon would then punch me, hard, on the left shoulder. Every single time she’d ask me, “Why do they think that I’m a man?”
I didn’t have the heart (or the courage) to tell her that she was more masculine than all the deadbeat guys at ATS rolled into one. Her unorthodox sales approach did work magic on occasion. She told one customer late on a Friday afternoon, “Look man, I need beer money for the weekend.”
She got the sale.
Management didn’t know how to handle Shannon. She was a force to avoid a reckoning with, and it seemed the bosses were content with her being a package deal with Debra, who converted enough sales to cover the quotas for two representatives. Shannon and Debra didn’t show up to work one Monday and later that morning, we got the collect call from the county jail. Both women had been arrested after a domestic altercation. A few days later, the pair returned. Shannon was noticeably subdued, and Debra wore sunglasses indoors in a futile attempt to hide the outline of a shiner.
I was still years from being open about my own sexuality, though even then I knew I was only attracted to women. Being a witness to Shannon and Debra’s unhealthy relationship dynamics made me realize what I didn’t want to become.
Debra wasn’t the only one being abused. Susan (or maybe her name was Cathy) was a mousy, quiet woman who seemed determined to fade into the background during breaks. She was likely younger than she looked, but her face was lined with perpetual worry and she had a prominent gray streak running through her coarse black hair.
I never heard her utter a complete sentence, but she confided to a few coworkers that she wanted to leave her abusive husband. These same coworkers convinced her that she needed to open a bank account so that she could have access to money that her husband didn’t know about. There was a bank in the strip mall where the ATS office was located. Susan-or-Cathy, accompanied by a couple of sympathetic coworkers, went to the bank to open a checking account during our lunch break. I remember her returning to work that day, checkbook in hand, beaming with the first and only smile I ever saw on her face.
About two weeks later, Susan-or-Cathy’s husband showed up at ATS during our lunch hour. She was eating a tuna fish sandwich and her jaws froze mid-chew when she followed everyone’s startled gaze to the doorway. Tall, lanky, and sporting a grizzled beard, her husband wore a dirt-streaked T-shirt and jeans with a black-and-white baseball cap advertising a concrete company pulled low over his forehead. He glowered at the rest of us as he escorted his wife out of the building without saying a word. No one protested. We just stared at her half-eaten sandwich and the empty chair.
We never saw her again.
Any time I read about a domestic abuse situation, I think of this woman who I barely knew. I envision Susan-or-Cathy’s husband finding a bank statement, angrily confronting her, and demanding that she quit her job. He never wanted her to get a job, he thought a woman’s place was at home, but his last DUI had racked up court fees and he resented that he must rely on her for supplemental income. Fearing he was losing control, he barged into the ATS office that day, ready for battle, but she didn’t put up a fight. That didn’t stop her from getting a brutal beating that night. He may have killed her right then, telling the authorities that she fell down the stairs, an “accident.” He may have inflicted a slower, crueler death, never letting her forget the moment where she dared to defy him. Maybe she’s still married to him, and he’s mellowed into “only” a verbal abuser now, no longer able to be a physical menace. After she bathes him and changes his diaper, she helps him into bed and thinks every night about taking a pillow and obliterating that smug fuck of a face once and for all. But she doesn’t, because even in his time-ravaged body, he maintains airtight control of her destiny.
There was nothing my naive 19-year-old self could have done to save Susan-or-Cathy, but nearing 50, I hardly feel more empowered, reeling from a failed marriage that left me doubting everything about the last two decades of my life.
My last day as a telemarketer was a mix of relief and anticipation. No longer would my self-worth be determined by tally marks on a dry erase board. My coworkers seemed happy for me, someone who was getting their life on track and had a shot at a better future. Shannon grinned as she punched me in the arm one last time, offering this piece of advice: “Don’t give this dump a second thought.”
For the most part, I haven’t. But I still get a chill when remembering how easy it was for Susan-or-Cathy’s husband to squash her quest for freedom, like a boot heel grinding a palmetto bug into the ground. Hell to me would be working as a telemarketer for an eternity, but for Susan-or-Cathy, every moment away from home was a blessing.
