I will never apologize for being a telemarketer. We live in a capitalist society, and the telephone was the cutting edge in reaching new customers. People who didn’t have the time and patience to talk to me hung up. No hard feelings on my part. Most people were too busy to talk to me. And that was awesome! It meant I didn’t waste their time with my presentation, and they didn’t waste my time. I usually had a quota of 150 dials an hour. I didn’t have the time to waste. Hang up on me, and I went on to the next call.
The no-call list came out in the early 90s, the most tremendous boon to telemarketers since Alex Bell. Telemarketing is a numbers game. Out of about 100 people, one might be a sale. And it wasn’t unusual to have a two sales per hour quota. The no-call list eliminated hundreds of wasted dials. Productivity jumped by about 25% when they came into use.
We used to call it “dialing for dollars .” Every day I’d sit down, light a cigarette, and the floor manager would call out, “nine O’clock, you bastards, It’s time to play dialing for dollars!” The cigarette burned out in the ashtray before I took a second puff. I’d pause dialing to light another and have one drag out of that. Most of my nicotine habit was satisfied by secondhand smoke from my fellow bastards’ cigarettes burning in the trays. By the end of a four-hour shift, our ashtrays would overflow, and we could sit back and finally enjoy a whole cigarette.
As a telemarketing manager, I hired single mothers on their way back to the workforce. I wrote college recommendations for my part-time high school employees. Then the many artists and writers passed through my telemarketing rooms. And a couple of them are names you might recognize. But they dialed for those dollars just like the rest of us on their way to the top. And I was able to help them all. Being a telemarketing manager gave me the power to do some good.
I started telemarketing in the late seventies, selling subscriptions to the Newark Star-Ledger. In those days, you were given a contract that listed all your responsibilities and laws you dared not break. One complaint to the right person could end your job. There were FCC regulations and FTC regulations, and we were monitored by state authorities. We also had a code of ethics. We were always polite to the nastiest prospect. That was the golden rule in telemarketing. Even before the no-call list, we never called a person who requested to be left alone. And we never gave out the numbers of the celebrities or politicians we spoke to. And I talked to many. I befriended Senator Arlan Specter after I called him on a wrong number.
So what happened? The celebration of greed which was the 1980s, grew into the lapsed ethics of the 1990s. By 1999, telemarketing had become so dirty that I couldn’t do it anymore. The worst was between 1998-2001 when I worked for Aames Home Loan. That job deserves a blog entry that will come in due time. But I watched my profession rot around me, and there was no reason for that to have happened. It was the greed and stupidity of management.
Nobody understood how I could be a telemarketer, not my partner, and not my brother. I think you’d have ADHD to understand the attraction. Telemarketing wasn’t managed like other jobs; the bosses left you alone. They were happy as long as you kept smiling, dialing, and selling. I hate being in a structured environment, and there is a minimum structure in a boiler room. I ignored the script. Once I had it memorized, I free-formed. I increased everybody’s production when they picked up some of my on-the-spot spiels. And no two conversations are ever the same. Not the good ones, not the bad ones, and the weird ones were priceless. It was the endless variety that kept me coming to work every day.
It was a brutal way to make a living. Not everybody can do it, and you must learn to use your anxieties and insecurities to fuel your work. The more scared you are, the faster you dial. The more sales you made. The more counters to the customer’s objections you made.
People who couldn’t do the job stared at the phone in terror. Their fears and anxieties were too big to control. I remember one poor girl who tried so hard for half a shift before running away in hysterics. That was an extreme case. People generally sat down and tried for a week before quitting.
The pay structure was another attraction. No way in hell I could support my family on minimum wage. Conversations amused and delighted me, but the commissions and bonuses motivated me. And making more money in bonuses and commissions than you did in your base was addictive. Quitting cigarettes was easier than leaving telemarketing. I tried other ways to make a living. I owned a bookstore in Allentown. I did payroll for Bethlehem Steel, factory work, Alzheimer’s respite work, and retail, but I always came home to telemarketing.
I spent years calling for contractors because that was what I knew. At one time, I could rattle off the strengths and weaknesses of every brand of windows on the market. And as I spread my wings, I learned other aspects of home repair. I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, even though I shouldn’t be trusted with a hammer. I partnered with a salesman, and we traveled through three companies together. We must have been the most successful team in the entire Lehigh Valley. But we parted ways when I discovered he was a grand wizard of the local KKK.
I fell back to the bottom of the dog heap and sold newspaper subscriptions for an outfit in the Pocono mountains. That’s where I had my first brush with telephone dialing machines. Those machines were the first step in destroying telemarketing as a profession. It was impossible to stay focused on the job when a computer dialed the phone for you. Your head drifted off, and you were always surprised if somebody answered. Or you would confuse a real answer for an answering machine. And for me, dialing machines came out of the worst corner of hell. I have ADHD, and I have to stim to concentrate. Pushing buttons on the phone was a perfect way to stim. If I can’t stim, I smoke. And, of course, I was in my first non-smoking boiler room.
The machine was as stupid as a sack of hammers. It dialed one number after another without regard for wrong numbers, disconnected numbers, or fax machines. There’s an art to working a telephone list, and the goddamn soulless machines lacked the ability. Once I sat for half an hour while the goddamn soulless idiot machine dialed one disconnected number after another. I said fuck it, sneaked out for a cigarette, and returned to another 15 minutes of disconnected numbers interspersed with fax machines. And when I was finally talking to actual human beings, they were from Brooklyn and only read Hebrew language papers.
On my third night, I let the stupid machine dial while reading the help-wanted ads. I found one for Resorts USA in Bushkill, right outside of Stroudsburg. I had heard rumors about that place. Even part-time workers were said to earn over a thousand dollars a week. And that was a princely amount back in the 1990s. I typed up a resume as soon as I got home. The following day, I shaved off my mustache, brushed my hair into a neat ponytail, and applied for the position. I was hired during the interview and began work that coming Monday. This was my first corporate job with paid sick days and yearly vacation. It was a giddy step upwards from boiler rooms.
My job was to sit at a telephone that never stopped ringing. Remember those TV commercials that flashed a phone number and promised operators were standing by? I was one of those operators.
I worked in a vast room with a few hundred telephones in it. Several departments shared that space. I ended up transferring to one of them, but that was the same thing I did just by answering the phone. The commercial would play, and the customers would call. The phones lit up from the front of the room to the back in a long wave. I answered the phone and talked the prospect into coming to an office for a timeshare presentation. In return, they were promised a transistor TV set, a cutting-edge novelty at the time, and a voucher for three days and two nights in Atlantic City.
I got a twenty-dollar bonus for everybody who came in. I’d have twenty people coming on a bad day. Since they happened twice a week, that was a minimum of 800 dollars a week. More often, it was closer to 1200. And that was just in bonuses. I also got a small piece of any sales which would raise my paycheck by another couple hundred dollars.
I thought I had found the job of my dreams. My partner and I were so excited we planned on buying some land in the mountains, stick on a trailer on it, and growing ginseng. But our dreams of ginseng farming died very quickly. Resorts USA’s managers were pushing the sales staff to oversell the timeshares to impress the bigwigs at the parent company, Rank International. It got so bad that there were two families per available timeshare, and they kept selling. This resulted in a few lawsuits, and Rank dropped Resorts USA like a bad habit.
Overnight, working at Resorts USA became more trouble than it was worth, and I volunteered for a layoff. Which was not a good thing. The Clinton economy had devastated the area. Bethlehem Steel was already half closed down, and other factories were high-tailing it to China. Professional salespeople were fighting over telemarketing jobs they’d have sneered at only a few years earlier. So following Horatio Alger’s advice, we went west to California, where the streets were paved with jobs.
Working in Pennsylvania didn’t prepare me for the reality of telemarketing in California. Pennsylvania had stronger consumer protection laws than California. And under Clinton, the FCC didn’t have the budget to oversee telemarketing rooms. And federal consumer protection laws were being slashed left and right. Businesses were allowed to rip people off in any way that amused them, and telemarketers became their weapons of choice.
We arrived in Oakland, CA, in August of 1996. And I was employed within 24 hours of our arrival. The egotistical little bastard that I was, I assumed it was from my superior telephone skills. They saw fresh meat with the hayseeds still in his hair and ate me alive. My first job was for a company I worked on and off for throughout the 80s.
However, that job was in Fremont while I lived in Oakland. I had no concept of the distances in California and assumed a commute to Fremont would be like a commute from Easton to Allentown. I don’t even think I picked up the phone for that place. I couldn’t get from my morning job in San Francisco in time for my evening job in Fremont.
My morning job was fundraising, and that was the job I should have ghosted. Not knowing the game, I found myself trying to solicit funds for some charity or another and failed because I didn’t realize it was a scam. The whole thing was about finding somebody willing to give up 30 bucks in return for an income tax receipt. There were professional fundraisers who kept their own lists of such donors. I figured out that scam and stepped right into another one.
I found myself selling advertisements for the “Police Review.” This time I decided to research and found a copy of the “Police Review” in the public library. And my boss was gobsmacked that I found it.
Eventually, he let me in on the joke. There was no such publication as the “Police Review.” A few copies had been printed in case they were needed. Nobody knows how one of those copies ended up in the library. I suspect it was evil spirits. The true purpose of the Police Review was to shake down Hispanic and Asian immigrants. By donating to the Police Review, you got a sticker you could put in the window. In Asian and Latin American countries, shopkeepers would get stickers on their windows to show they had paid the police their protection money. So on one call, I did things exactly the way my boss told me to, and I hope I can be forgiven someday.
“Hello, Mr. Asian Victim, my name is Bill, and I’m calling on behalf of the Police Review. This is a very important publication that every law enforcement bureau receives every month. Your local police station gets it. The California Highway Patrol gets a copy. The DEA and FBI all get copies, and even immigration gets a copy.”
I heard voices in the background, and one of them yelled “Immigration,” and it sounded like he was running. I heard a door slam.
“We’re asking for your support by purchasing an advertisement in the Police Review. A full-page ad is 1,000 dollars, and we will, of course, give you a sticker you can put in your window to let everybody know you support the police.”
“But that’s too much money,” Mr. A. Victim said.
“I understand that,” I replied. “These are tough times, but remember, all law enforcement agents and police will see your ad. (Like hell!) Maybe a half page for $500?”
“I can give $100,” said Mr. Victim.
“How about a quarter-page ad for $250?” I asked. “Remember, the FBI and Immigration get this magazine.”
There was a muted conversation in a language I assume was Cantonese. Then Mr. Victim said, “Okay, $250, but we get a sticker.”
“Of course, you get a sticker,” I assured him.
Since this con had nothing to do with any police force, he would get shaken down again and again. The sticker wasn’t going to save him. My boss slapped me on the shoulder and praised the sale. I didn’t even collect my commission. I left at the end of the day and never returned. But it was an important lesson in watching your ass.
This was an awful time for me. We were living on my brother’s kindness and cleaning jobs my partner found. I woke up with anxiety and went to bed in a blue terror. Finally, my prayers were answered just before Thanksgiving, and I found a real telemarketing job with a real contracting firm. This was my first time telemarketing for a company with its own construction crews. I was used to paper contractors.
Of course, this being California, there was a great big hairy fly in the ointment. The entire city of San Francisco was burned out. It was fried. The city had been called so many times that you wouldn’t find a customer to save your life. And the ones I did find were free estimate junkies, and the salespeople refused to go see them. Part of the company’s problem was we called out of the phone book. There were no fresh leads. There were no new homeowners or any factors that make up a successful telemarketing room. I was dialing last decade’s leads and getting last decade’s results. And sooner or later, they were going to start blaming me. Bosses too cheap to buy fresh leads always blame the telemarketers and wonder why they have such a high turnover.
Aside from that, there were more red flags on that job than a bad romance. Among their many other flaws, they were religious. I don’t know if the owner or the managers were religious. I knew the receptionist was a devout Buddhist. But the foreman was an Evangelical Christian preacher who spoke no English. On Sundays, I used to see him preaching in front of the 24th St BART station. He would be hollering into a loudspeaker while his hype-man translated it into English.
Somebody told me he had once been a top chef in El Salvador and cooked the best Thanksgiving dinner in the universe. I’m always down for a free meal, so I accepted the invitation. The dinner was everything promised and more. I can’t imagine how he got turkey white meat so moist. And the turkey gizzards stewed in champagne were to die for. I would ask for the same menu the night before my execution because dying would have been better than the next two hours.
After the dinner, the chef testified. I expected it and stuck around so as not to offend anybody. There was a chance I would work there again after New Year, so I didn’t want to offend anybody. Besides, I had a raffle ticket, and how long could it take? It was two hours of grueling boredom. Two hours of trying not to crawl out of my skin while the asshole droned on in Spanish. And the same hype-man as at the BART Station translated his riches to rags story. He was a famous chef in the old country with a TV show and a brandy habit. Then came the Sandinista, and god brought him to the US, where he found Jesus and humble employment in the construction trade.
That took an hour and fifteen minutes. The chef would say a few paragraphs, and the hype-man would translate and toss in a few “Hallelujahs a praise Jebus or two, and the story meandered on like a Marquis DeSade novel. So I figured the worst was over, and I could go screaming away from the holy water. But no. Then came the prayer. And were I the almighty, I’d have sent a bolt of lightning through his spleen just to shut him up! The prayer took another half hour, and then, there was a fucking alter call. I was ready to go home, bathe in brimstone, and dedicate my life to Satan.
Most of my coworkers didn’t seem impressed and were obviously there to humor the boss. Who took over and did the raffle, and I won a big frozen turkey. Which was a good thing because they closed their telemarketing room entirely. That was a very sound decision on their part. I was spinning my wheels, and they were wasting their money. At the same time, I needed a job. So I came home with a few extra bucks severance and the turkey. Both had to last until my next paycheck.
I went through a two-week job in the Financial District, selling these VIP cards for a hotel chain. My most vivid memory of this job was how intensely uptight the manager was. Later, I would see the manager sitting on the pavement in the Tenderloin, so it was pretty obvious why he had been so uptight.
Around the same time, I was fundraising for a legitimate ecologic nonprofit. But the problem with that job was everyone was so focused on Julia Butterfly and the protests going on with the headlands they didn’t want to talk about the American River.
Soon after Christmas, my luck improved, and I answered an ad from a contractor in San Mateo. That commute wasn’t as bad as Fremont, and the office wasn’t far from the BART station. And the owner was a nice enough sort. He hired me and even gave me a BART ticket home. Plus, he set me up with a carpool. I stayed with him for a year and a half, but I had to earn every single day of it.
The best thing about this job was the leads. They were fresh. And rather than being confined to the city of San Francisco, we called all the way down the Peninsula. This was a broad enough territory that we were guaranteed to make money unless we were foolish.
Of course, my coworkers were stupid, crooked, and caused more trouble than the job was worth. The boss had no people sense. I have no idea where he found his room manager. I recognized the guy as a male prostitute who tried to pick me up near my apartment. He even lived in my neighborhood, and he was the carpool.
The dummkopf had road rage, and it scared the living shit out of me. This guy would get insanely angry and try to run other cars off the freeway. Once he followed a woman to her house, got out of the car, and screamed obscenities at her. Another time he was cut off by a blond in a Camaro. Dummkopf tried to run her off the freeway, but he got cut off by a beat-up old pickup truck driven by a couple of guys who looked just like Cheech and Chong. They teamed up with the blond in the Camaro and boxed us behind an old man driving a big boat of a yellow Cadillac. The old guy looked terrified and refused to go faster than 45 in the middle lane. The pickup truck and the Camaro took turns pushing us behind the Caddy. Cheech and Chong were making smoking gestures at the blond, and the blond made kissy gestures back. Meanwhile, smoke was coming out of the dummkopf’s ears.
Next week, the boss moved the telephone room from his expensive office in San Mateo to a cockroach-infested hellhole in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. And I insisted on getting to work on BART. We were joined by a crazy woman from Arkansas, and I thought I would have to ghost. And believe it or not, she was a prostitute! I don’t want to consider how my Billy Graham-loving boss found those shitbirds. I’ve worked with junkies, Born Again Christians, Moonies, and outright thieves, but that was the first and only time I worked with prostitutes.
I kept the room going. I broke all my previous dialing records to keep the business going while the other two kept bugging me to join them in their schemes. This lasted for about two weeks before my boss left his checkbook in the office, and the prostitutes stole it. I told my boss about it, but he wouldn’t press charges. The female prostitute was arrested trying to cash one of his checks, but he wouldn’t cooperate with the cops.
The male prostitute played a long game. He managed to buy a brand new Lexus on credit, using the boss’s account number as his own. That man was a hardened criminal and an expert conman. A month went by, and the finance officer called me looking for the male prostitute. She sounded like she was 12 years old and was under the mistaken belief that the prostitute owned the company. It broke my heart to tell her she had been had.
I will have to assume that the 12-year-old loan officer pressed charges. Because the male prostitute came back to the office to kill me. He was stopped by building security. By sheer luck, my phone room was on the mezzanine of the Warfield Theater, and Marilyn Manson was performing that night. There was extra security, and one of the rent-a-cops noticed the gun in dummkopf’s waistband. Otherwise, I would have met a grisly end at the hands of a pissed-off whore.
The bright spot of the day was having to go home early because there was no way to telemarket while directly above Marilyn Manson. It simply cannot be done. We were standing directly over the stage, which was louder in the office than in the front row. The brighter spot was I became the telemarketing manager. A small raise, commissions, and overrides. And I got to pick my telemarketers. No more crazy prostitutes. But one day, working in The Warfield’s Mezzanine supplied enough crazy to fuel Congress for a month.
The great sage John Lennon once said that “life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” But in my case, life was happening too quickly to plan. I had only been in California for less than six months and burned through six jobs, plus two more that I can barely remember. Now instead of floundering from one debacle to the next, I had a safe place to get the lay of the land and make a plan. One of the great myths of the 1990s was all you needed was a plan, and stick with the plan, and you were guaranteed success. And like every other sucker in the US, I believed it. And Sunzi laughed at me from the grave.
I turned 40 while running that phone room. And 40 is the year people tend to confront themselves. And I faced a lot of aspects of myself and found them wanting. My experiments in management taught me that some of my deepest-held beliefs were utter bullshit. And I learned that my people sense wasn’t as sharp as I fooled myself into believing. But most of all, I realized that I was at a dead end, and I was the only guy who could get me out. Telemarketing wasn’t working for me anymore, and I needed to find a better way to make a living. Dialing for Dollars had lost its appeal. It was time to find some other way to make a living.
The Traumatic 90s 