My first real job after college—that is, the first career-building, adult-oriented, nine-to-five mind number that I took after leaving the record store—was for a major telecommunications company. I don’t want to name the company. Let’s just say it had just stopped being the only telephone company in the country and its name rhymes with Hey She & Me.
We weren’t telemarketers. There were telemarketers who worked in our office in the evenings after we left, and we liked to look down our noses at them. They sat in our desks and cold-called people all over the country trying to convince them to sign up for long distance service with Hey She & Me or buy long distance calling plans. How Neanderthal. We would never do such a thing. We were professionals.
Instead, we answered a 1-800 number that people all over the country dialed when they had problems with their long distance bills. And we’d try to convince them to sign up for long distance service with Hey She & Me or buy long distance calling plans.
There were about 400 of us working in a nondescript red brick building in Reston. All we did all day long was answer the phone. When I started we were supposed to take 45 calls a day. But it was like we were living in Catch-22; every few months a memo would come down from an office on the second floor increasing the number of calls we were supposed to answer. By the time I left the number stood at 65, which was almost a physical impossibility. The only way to meet that number and still make your sales quota was to make snap judgments about each caller: what was the quickest way to resolve their problem and was there any chance that they’d buy anything? When your sweet Aunt Sarah from Harrisburg disputed a 12-cent call to Hershey and it was the only charge on her bill, we wrote it off tout de suite and sent her on her merry way.
I was a terrible salesman, by the way. Every time I started into my spiel— “Say, Mister Potatohead, have you ever considered the thrill your grandchildren would get from finding long distance gift certificates under the tree on Christmas morning?” —I could picture my father on the other end of the line, slamming the receiver down and cursing. Even worse, I knew that if it was me on the other end, I would probably be doing the same thing.
In the years before no-call lists, I struggled with strategies to end calls from salesmen. Obviously being patient and waiting for a pause in the conversation wouldn’t work, because a good salesman never pauses until they know they’ve got you hooked. I thought I’d come up with an unbeatable idea when I started laying the phone down (without hanging it up) and left the annoying hucksters talking. I’d go about my business while they blabbered on. Later I’d go back and hang up the phone.
I set that strategy aside the day one annoying huckster thought I had dropped the telephone due to a medical emergency. The moment I put the receiver back in the cradle the phone rang and there he was, along with a 911 operator, asking if I was alright.
“When you wouldn’t respond, I assumed you’d had a heart attack,” he said.
Taking those few dozen calls a day at the long distance company was nothing compared to the firestorm I stepped into during a strike while I was working for a local phone company a few years later. Again, I don’t want to name it—we’ll just call it Hell Titanic. By that time I was on the management side of the field, which seemed like a pretty sweet deal until they handed out our strike duty assignments and I was made a 411 operator. At Hey She & Me our goal had been 45-60 calls a day; at Hell Titanic we were told to take twice that many calls an hour.
Lucky for me, nobody in that office had any idea who I was. There was a McDonald’s right around the corner and the strike lasted less than a week. You’d be surprised how long the work day can be when you do nothing but read newspapers, drink fast food coffee and hide from your coworkers.
One summer I worked at an all-you-can eat seafood place and I couldn’t eat shrimp or hushpuppies again for years. I guess my time at the telephone companies had the same effect on me. A dozen years later, I still can’t stomach the telephone. Like my father, I say the same thing every time the home phone rings: “now who could that be?” And if I get a call at work, I always assume it’s bad news.
When I worked at the Loudoun Easterner, I learned a lot from editor John Geddie. I often think back on his definitions of success: he came and went as he pleased, he watched football games in his office every Sunday, and he didn’t have a telephone on his desk.
Think about that. Think about the power and respect that is demonstrated by a boss in the modern American workplace who doesn’t have a telephone’s ring disturbing his every waking moment.
I used to say that I’d know I had made it when I had an office door I could slam in people’s faces. But not having a telephone on your desk? That’s the ultimate. Only John Geddie could achieve that kind of thing.
Well, him and that guy Paulie in Goodfellas. I don’t think they did it for the same reasons, though.
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