SMILE AND DIAL
(THE COLDEST CALL OF ALL)
"A gracious hello. Is this the party
to whom I am speaking? It is? Great! You wanna buy a..."
«click»
"...newspaper?"
In the interests of Keeping The Wolves From The Door, as well as Having Money In The Wallet At All Times, da Flatline once ventured into the wonderful world of telemarketing as a secondary/tertiary job. Yup, ol' Dix useta be one o' those gnomes who ring yer Touch-Tone at inopportune hours in order to separate ya from yer hard-earned dinero. I have now guaranteed that I ain't going to heaven when I die.
My first shot at Screwing Up My Karma Big-Time was with GehTerra/PurzYnja out in Denville, NJ. This wasn't really telephone sales per se: my job was to call people up and offer 'em a "free lawn care analysis," where one of the full-time lawn guys would check out the mark's -- 'scuse me, the "prospect's" -- yard for bugs/weeds/weird grasses & write up what it would cost for GT/PY to make it green 'n' lush. Even though we promised 'em these were no-cost, no-obligation surveys, it was pretty damn clear to all parties involved they were sales leads pure and simple.
The actual act of calling these people was pretty -- umm -- low-tech. GehTerra telemarketing consisted of a room full of telephones and a file cabinet full of Xeroxed pages from a county phone book -- the kind where people are grouped by city and street address, rather than name. Each packet consisted of streets from a particular map grid; the idea was to get as many analysis leads from that grid so as to optimize the lawn-tech's route the next day. If you got a person in the packet to agree to the lawn survey, you crossed out their name in the packet with a yellow highlighter (so we wouldn't bug 'em again that season). Management expected you to make twenty contacts an hour (i.e. reach the owner of the house and spout some or all of your "would you like a free, no-obligation lawn-care analysis" rap); out of that twenty, at least five should say "Sure, what the hey."
It weren't glamorous, to be sure, but it was fairly easy money and it was the first part-time job I'd applied for that actually interviewed me, much less made me an offer. (Denville was a bit of a hike from Flatline HQ in West Caldwell, but I'd heard zilch from the area supermarkets/retail outfits I'd also applied to. I'm not surprised; those places are looking for highschoolers that'll kiss ass for the opportunity to work for minimum wage, not a thirtysomething married-with-children programmer...)
So I started ringing people's chimes for GehTerra in February of '94. Uh, that's Feb. '94 as in "The Winter Of Eighteen Consecutive Snowstorms In The Metro New York Area." So for the first month, the standard reaction to my offer of a free lawn-care analysis was "You're kidding. My lawn's under three feet of snow! How're you even going to see it?!?" Err, umm, well of course we won't come out until the snow's melted somewhat, but can I sign you up now before you change your mind? (Amazingly, this was enough to sway people.) For my first month, I actually managed to stay pretty close to the expected quota.
Then the reality of the situation started setting in. Before getting bought up by GehTerra, PurzYnja apparently had a pretty bad rep for both lawn care and customer service; more than a few people I called had been burned in the past, and sometimes no amount of wheedling would get them to change their minds and give us another chance.
The phone packets were another matter entirely. The county phone books they'd been pulled from weren't newer than 1991. That meant tons of wrong numbers, disconnected numbers, and generally fruitless dialing. More than one person would sputter "No, this isn't Mrs. So-and-so. I've had this number for years!" Sorry, I must have an old listing. Hang up. Swear profusely. Dial next number. Even worse, no two telemarketers had the same method of indicating a sales lead, so it was not uncommon to call a person, go through the rap, and then be told "I'm already a GehTerra customer!" or "Your guy already came and did the survey!" Charming.
Answering machines -- there's another circle of Dante's Inferno for ya. Management's position was, if you're calling long distance and you get an answering machine, don't make it a wasted call! Leave a little verbal advert telling 'em to call the 800 number if they'd like the lawn survey. I actually came up with a nice professional spiel, very Don Pardo -- upbeat, friendly, with round, pear-shaped tones -- that the other employees would give me some good-natured ribbing about. But having to repeat this spiel five or six times in a row got old (and hard on the larynx) real fast.
I also had to listen to every kind of answering machine message under the sun: pleasant, stilted, comedic, curt (one old biddie's tape started with "If this is a sales call, hang up now!"), you name it. Probably the absolute worse messages were the ones where the three-year-old recited "we're not home, please leave a message" as only a three-year-old can -- painfully cute and wholly incomprehensible. (On the other hand, it was nice to call a house and have a kiddy with good phone etiquette take the call).
[One of the better messages I heard went something like this: you hear some Gregorian monk chanting, followed by a voice saying "We're on a higher plane right now..."]
Fax machines -- Christ! I came to dread listings where the same guy had two or more phone numbers, for that usually meant that one was a dedicated fax line. Every time I got that infernal NEEEEEEEEEEEEE, I'd slam down the phone, scream, and make the sign of the cross with my index fingers, just to ward off the evil fax demons. (My dream is to learn how to whistle like a fax carrier, just to make the fucking things spew out garbage in retaliation for blasting out my eardrums.)
Worst of all was the simple fact that people HATE telemarketers. Face it: you're calling them out of the blue, usually when they're not expecting a phone call, and trying to talk them into (or out of) something. Some people just hung up. Others cursed. Lots of folk huffily objected to putting chemicals of any kind on their beloved lawn (we also offered an all-organic program to grow grass and kill bugs, but by that point they just didn't wanna know.) Many bluntly told me "I don't take sales calls" or demanded we take their names off our lists. One lady I called told me she was in the middle of a funeral. (THAT had to be the coldest call of all...) Many's the time I'd conclude such a call, slump back in my chair, and moan "We are all going straight to hell for this job." At the very least, I was convinced my karma wuz gonna be set back three thousand years. Now I know how Opus the Penquin feels when he finds himself in the kind of job that he would otherwise find morally reprehensible...
Fortunately, the other telemarketers I worked with were a pretty fun bunch. (Excluding the guy and gal who got into a knock-down, drag-out fist fight at the end of one shift...) To blow off frustration, we'd kid around about the kind of call we'd like to make ("Hello, this is GehTerra/PurzYnja. Are you going to ruin your own lawn this year, or would you like us to do it for you?") or make rude jokes about some of the names we had to call. One guy next to me had a family in his packet named (I'm not making this up) "Dickover;" you have to wonder if this family is just náive, immune to cruel jokes, or if we have dirtier minds than previously thought. But I did him one better, with a listing for a "Gerald Boob." (One can imagine the discussions in that neighborhood: "Hey, Mom, can we go over and play with the Boobs?")
(At my next telemarketing gig [which you'll be reading about shortly], I was telling the "Gerald Boob" story when the TM'er next to me announced, "Oh, yeah? Well, I just had to call a guy named 'Dickover!'" [Cue Twilight Zone theme...])
High spirits not withstanding, by May of '94 GehTerra was getting to be too much pain for the paycheck; sales leads were drying up, and the whole "manual-labor" aspect of it was getting me down. Then I saw an ad in the QNVYL ERPBEQ for telemarketers to sell subscriptions to their paper outta their Parsippany office (which was only half as far away as Denville). So I investigated. Oh boy, they've got terminals that dial for you! Headset phones! AND they pay a bonus for each sale made! (GehTerra was strictly hourly wage for the TM'ers) This, thought I, is gonna be a piece of cake, and signed right up.
Yeah, right.
Believe it or not, I actually found a place that had a lousier rep than GehTerra! Years of stinky delivery service and stinkier customer service had soured much of Morris County (the ERPBEQ's home base) and surrounding environs, and sales calls frequently devolved into frantic damage control ("Yes, we understand there have been problems in the past, but we're working hard to rectify them and would you like to try us out for just eight weeks?"). Many people had settled on the NEW YORK TIMES or NEWARK STAR-LEDGER (sometimes both!) and didn't want to deal with a second/third newspaper. Others objected to the ERPBEQ's content (or lack thereof); a frequent gripe was about the rag's "anti-teacher" editorial slant. More than once, we'd run specials where we'd offer the marks eight weeks of just the Sunday paper for free -- and they still wouldn't take it! (I mean, jeez, even Ma and Pa Flatline taught me "if it's free, don't knock it!") On more than one occasion, the callee informed me "I don't read newspapers;" when I politely inquired why, they replied "Because I'm blind." Excuse me a moment while I pry this foot out of my mouth. Hey, it's MY foot! How the hell did it get there?
[Then there was the guy who told me he didn't get ANY newspapers at all. So I politely asked him "How do you get your news, then?" He replied, "I don't absorb any news. It's rather blissful, actually; you should try it sometime."]
The terminals themselves offered up a whole world of new hassles. The system didn't put the name and address of the person being called up on the screen until actual contact had been made. That meant you had about a nanosecond to (1) figure out how to pronounce the person's surname and (2) decide if you were talking to the husband, wife, baby-sitter, house guest, pre-schooler, or stoned teenager. (Here's a trick: use a slurred mumble instead of "Mr./Mrs./Ms." and that'll at least get you time enough to get your bearings on the call). Unlike the printed packets at GehTerra (where, if a person's name looked too unpronounceable, we'd just skip over it), at the ERPBEQ you had to run with whatever the system threw at you. (At least households where English is not the mother tongue could be bounced from the system with a "Language Problem" flag...)
And -- yes -- even here, people
hate telemarketers. Especially here! We interrupt
their dinner. We catch them as they're running out the door. We
barge in on their attempts to still a crying infant. Because of
the high speed of the dialing system, calling lists were looped
through at an alarming rate (three weeks in, I was seeing names I know
I called when I started out). People getting several calls from
the ERPBEQ per week were not uncommon. Many demanded we take
their names off the lists. Others merely hung up the moment they
hear the words "QNVYL ERPBEQ." One guy I called snapped
"Is this a sales call?" Uh, yeah... " STICK IT UP
YER FRIGGIN' ASS!!!" Click. (Hey, I don't need that kind of
abuse from total strangers -- I can get it at home! 
)
I sometimes wish I still had my old part-time job: telephone ticket sales for Ticketron. That was a breeze job; people would call you for tickets, it was all credit-card sales, and I spent most of my time over on the Broadway section (where, let's face it, you get a better class of customer than the standard rockshow crowd). But I did give it up, and shortly after that Ticketron was swallowed up by rival Ticket Master (now targeted by the FTC and Pearl Jam for monopolistic business practices).
Anywho, that's all ancient Flatline history. I did recently resume moonlighting, but it's a more "dignified" job, with no consumer contact: loading trucks for United Parcel Service. (Yes, it has it's own set of personal hells, but that's for a subsequent column...)
But for a brief, tarnished moment, I was one of:
The Few.
The Proud.
The Scum Of The Earth.
The Telemarketers.
* Disclaimer: All employer names in this article were ROT13'd to protect the guilty -- namely, moi.
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