As many of you know, I was temporarily laid off from the Schaumburg Boomers at the end of our 2013 Championship season. It was a purely budgetary move—they didn’t want to pay a box office manager when no tickets were being sold in the offseason—but it still hurt. I’ve since been rehired but I nonetheless spent 5 months in unemployment, searching for jobs, working temp gigs and scratching myself on the couch.
Since I have a
mortgage and a wife and a lawyer (sigh), I went back to work for the temp
agency that bridged my Playboy-to-minor-league-baseball careers. They are good people and found me work almost
immediately. However, that work
kinda-sorta killed my soul.
The company for which I worked swears up and down that they
are not telemarketers. “Lead
Acquisition” is their game. But I
nonetheless had to cold-call several hundred people a day to see if they wanted
to go to college.
A little background into what they do:
There are many ways to find work these days. One can apply for a job in-person, via email,
through online databases. Sometimes
these databases link directly to a company’s website, sometimes they are via
state unemployment offices and sometimes they are independently run job-search sites. Some of the shadier independent websites and,
oddly, the government websites often have little pop-ups that ask seemingly
innocuous questions like “Have you ever thought about going to college?” or
“Looking for a better job? Click here!”
Typically, these pop-ups then give the user the option of
clicking “Yes” or clicking “No”. But
here’s the secret: neither of those options are actually “clickable”. Really, even if you think you’re clicking on
“No”, you’re actually only clicking on the advertisement itself, legally giving
these lead acquisition companies permission to immediately contact you about
going to college.
This is where I swoop in to save the day
And I do mean immediately. Most of these
people were genuinely surprised by the speed at which we called them. Some of these people were interested in going back to school; some were
even pleasantly surprised we called
when we did. These were the folks we
liked to speak to. We link them up to a
few schools, we talk about their future and we send them on their way,
hopefully towards a college degree. We
didn’t technically “sell” anything; we merely asked a series of questions,
tried to narrow down the field for what kind of college a lead might be
interested in (Nursing, Vocational, Business, etc), and submitted their contact
info to the schools. Nice and easy, done
in less than 10 minutes on the phone.
Some other folks…well, I’ll get to them in a moment.
Presented below are 7 things I learned while working a
terribly depressing telemarketing job:
1) Unemployment is a real problem in this
country. Sure, this sounds obvious
since the unemployment rate has hovered around 8% for the last decade but you
can’t really wrap your head around the problem until it is your work.
Of course, my job specifically
targeted those that are out of work. By
my second week, I was genuinely surprised when I spoke to someone that had a
job, much less one they actually liked. Two dozen times a day I had the displeasure
of speaking to someone who was on the verge of tears, someone who had a
mortgage and 5 kids and was heavily in debt; someone who couldn’t afford their
next hot meal, much less a 4 year college degree. It was brutal. On the plus side, it did make me tremendously
thankful for the many boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in my pantry.
Also, I was thankful that I had a pantry.
2) People
are scared. And scared people are dicks. What happens when someone is at wits end,
desperately searching for a way out of a financial bind without a job and no
prospects and just sat down for a meal of a generic hot pocket but the only one
left from the variety pack is the broccoli and nacho cheese one and god damnit the
Browns just lost again and why won't the damn baby stop crying when who is to call on their pay-by-the-minute trac phone at
8:48 at night on a Sunday but some asshole trying to get them to go to college,
reading from a script specifically designed to take advantage of the poor and
desperate.
I absolutely understand why this particular
gentleman wouldn’t want to talk to me.
But you know what? I’m a human
being too. A simple “Hold it! Let me stop you right there. I’m not interested but thank you
anyway.” At this point, it is entirely
proper to disengage from the phone call.
Hang up. I’ll take a sip of water
and move on to the next call. I was not often greeted with such courtesy.
Many folks used this opportunity
to unleash a vile string of profanity at me—loudly, as if they knew I was
wearing a head-set—in an attempt to basically make me feel as low as possible. There were nights when I would have preferred
unemployment to the continuing tirades of the angry masses. Eventually, this reality is what lead me to request
a different assignment from my temp agency.
Thankfully, they complied.
3) The lack
of a high school diploma is a real problem.
As a semi-privileged WASP, I’m always a little surprised by the sheer
number of people that never graduated high school. I’m also surprised when people who didn’t
graduate for whatever reason—be it pregnancy, disinterest, prison, etc—didn’t
complete the work on a GED. So many
people—maybe 20%?—that I talked to didn’t achieve this minimum educational
milestone. It’s why the 3rd
question we asked our leads was “And what year did you graduate high school?” That was a real time saver.
Now, you can’t go to college—or make a
decent wage at a reputable company—without, at minimum, a GED. Of course, I type this holding a full-blown
college degree from the University of Tulsa, coming off a dream-job that paid me
$1,000 a month. Who’s the sucker now?
4) People don’t want to be helped. I’m not even talking about college here. Sure, maybe the world would be a better place
if everyone went to school. But as Judge
Smails so eloquently put it, “The world needs ditch diggers too.” So I understand if people just wanted to take
welding classes and skip the prestige of a glorified community college.
But there were folks I talked to every damn
day that continually found themselves on our lead list and were angrily trying to remove themselves. This all goes back to those shady pop-ups
employed by our company. Once someone
finds their way onto our list, we contact him or her and attempt to give our
spiel. Sometimes folks hear what we have
to say, sometimes they hang up and sometimes folks request to be added to the
“Do Not Call” list. If they wish to be
added to the DNC list, we happily comply; we don’t want to waste our time with
anyone who won’t be buying what we’re selling.
Problem is, those folks that hang up or
tell us to fuck off before disengaging?
We vindictively thrown them right back into the queue.
And the folks that request to be added to
the DNC but then continue to stupidly click on the damn pop-ups? Also right back on the call list, although
that’s their own fault, not ours.
So I get it. I really do.
People who may not know about the pop-up gimmick could then end up in a
continuous loop where we call, they politely ask to be removed from our list,
they click on the pop-up again, we call, they sternly asked to be removed, they
click, we call, they scream at us to fuck off…forever and ever until someone
explains what might be the problem.
Look, it did us no good to continually call
people who would yell and scream and generally throw a big-assed
hissy-fit. So I tried to give them tips
to get out of the loop. And there was a
ludicrously simple fix: Don’t click on
the damn pop-up.
Remember, even when the clicker thought he
was clicking on “no”, he was actually clicking on “Hell yes we can contact
you!”. Here’s a pro-tip for all
involved: every pop-up has a little “x”
to close out the box. This X is
typically in the upper right-hand corner of the pop-up. Sometimes it’s hidden; sometimes you need to
roll your mouse over the edges to find it.
But if you click on this X, you will never, ever find yourself on one of
these cookie-generated lists again.
I would attempt to inform people of this
simple fix and some of these angry job seekers just wouldn’t hear it. They’d yell and scream, I’d attempt to
placate and say “I can make this never happen again!” and they would tell me to
eat a dick and hang up the phone, only
to be called again 90 minutes later.
Sigh.
5) I cannot
tell you how many women between the ages of 18 and 40 are named Crystal. Seriously…I started keeping a “Crystal Count” at my desk to keep myself entertained. In one
night, I spoke to 5 different Crystals, sometimes spelled “Chrystal”, “Kristal”
and even one “Khrystall”. I honestly
have no idea why there is a sizable percentage of unemployed women named Crystal in this country and I’m
even more baffled because I always assumed any woman named Crystal could simply
find employment on a pole somewhere.
6) Why do so
many people want to work at Dollar General?
We must have had an exclusive contract with the Dollar General website
because I talked to a couple of dozen folks who wanted to work there. Pizza Hut was another big winner. Which made my job all the more difficult…how
was I to convince someone to go to school when they were
having trouble getting a job at Pizza Hut?
7) Black
people have names that white people find difficult to pronounce. I’m not the first to point this out. The way our auto-call system worked was upon
finishing a call, our system would automatically dial the next name on the
list. The catch is, we couldn’t see who
we were calling until the lucky winner picked up the phone and their name
appeared on our screen. As such, we had
to make quick judgment calls when it came to name pronunciation. I would say, “Hello! May I please speak to David?” and the call
would proceed from there. This could be
challenging depending on the caller…sometimes I had to straight-up guess (and
no, this wasn’t only a problem with black people. Sometimes it was an Asian name or a Muslim
name or an Indian name…actually, I got a reputation for pronouncing Indian
names like a boss, thank you very much, Krishni).
As a result, I had many conversations that
began as “Hello! May I please speak to...Uh,
La…um…Lakway…dria?” when the name “La’Quaedrea” appeared on my screen. My favorite call was when the name “Pa-ge”
appeared. I was baffled,
but I took a shot. “May I please speak
to Pay-gee?” The clearly annoyed caller
responded—with a bit more volume and attitude than I would have
appreciated—“You mean ‘Paige’?” “Uh, yeah,
if you say so.”
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It was an awful experience. Shame too…the people that worked there were beyond awesome. The phone reps were the perfect mix of frustrated and hilarious…it made for a bonded team. And the brass were nothing but supportive; it took me a long while to hit my groove and even then, I never quite felt I was pulling my weight.
But like all terrible things, it eventually came to an end. I can’t say I’m a better person. But at least I can say the experience aged me incredibly.
Unemployment sucks. I do not recommend it.
