To Whom It May Concern

Some Jobs Stink, Others Are Worse Than That

I did telemarketing for about a year once. No, that doesn't mean I was the "MORONIC FOOL" that called you during dinner or while Survivor was on television, I did inbound, not outbound. For the better part of 1997 I worked for West Teleservices here in Omaha, Nebraska. I started the job as a quick fix to get some money, and yah, stayed longer than I should have.

I don't really recall what I was making an hour when I started working there, it was decent pay to a kid fresh out of college, a college in a town where you couldn't make more than 6 dollars an hour doing anything. I had just moved to Omaha, and I was going to do the whole telemarketing thing for a couple months. I didn't know what to expect, I figured everyone that you would talk to would be pissy and irritable. That's hardly the case at all. With inbound, people are calling you, and they are in most cases ordering something they saw on television, in a magazine, heard on the radio, etc. West handled everything from The Eurosealer to Valtrex medicine for herpes. If nothing else, it was an interesting job.

I met a truly wide variety of people there. I use the word variety as a friendly term, because I imagine freaks could just as easily describe a lot of them. Take PAHA for instance. PAHA was really strange, for really only one reason. He was an older guy, probably around 55, and he liked to talk a lot. No big deal, right? Well, until you walk into the bathroom and see him standing in front of the urinal with his pants around his ankles, hence the name, P.A.H.A. Yes, that's right, he would stand there bare assed in front of the urinal, taking a leak. Nothing like a good reason to leave and come back later, especially because he would still talk to you while you are trying to take a leak, it was a little unnerving to be quite truthful.

There were gay guys, lesbian women, there was even a guy that always smelled horribly like cat urine. My friend Alfonzo and I would hint at that guy, trying somehow to let him know how bad he stunk. We would ask "Do you own a cat" or "How many cats do you own" and so forth, but the guy would say he didn't own a cat, which was perplexing. Finally one day Alfonzo flat out told the guy that he smelled really bad, because it got to the point where you would smell the guy coming before you even saw him.

Alfonzo is one of my best friends to this day. He might be black, but you would swear that he and I are brothers, perhaps in another life or something. We had a lot of fun at West, he was one of the reasons, well, about the only reason I look back fondly on that job. Later on he took another position on the 'floor' while I got promoted twice, the second promotion ended up with the one and only time I ever got fired in my life, after ONE WEEK on the job.

I got fired for 'being belligerent on the telephone' to a senior West Teleservices vice president, which was odd, because I was never on the phones that day. My direct supervisor knew this but she never supported me a bit. I didn't like her anyway, she and I just didn't click, I could see that from day one. So I didn't let it bother me too much. It hurt to be fired, but in that situation, when it was under less than truthful circumstances on their part, I wasn't bothered all that much by it.