A Black Feather, A poison pen... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- crime sometimes pays more than legitimacy Much like Bobby who is currently enduring the trials and tribulations of the telemarketer, for a portion of the summer when i was 19, i did the same job for the same company. In an ill-conceived plan to try and get into more steady "straight work" (i.e. things that wouldn't get me arrested or killed or both) i took a job working for MCI. The first thing i liked about working there was working downtown in the early evening. I could watch the sun set over the western expanse of the city, i frequently shared the elevator with and got to hear conversations between the politically well-connected lawyers that worked in the law firm a couple floors above our call-center...and most of the women that worked in the call center were about 19 to 22 years old and most of them were awfully damn cute too. This was the during that stretch of time where i was just consistently high enough not to be a pathetically shy basket-case when talking to women. (never let it be said that drugs or alcohol don't make good "social lubricants" - insofar as their influence can do wonders for knocking down one's inhibitions) In my sales group, our top seller was a guy who sold mostly the basic plan and talked even faster sometimes than the guy from those old-school FedEx commercials from back in the early 80's. Our bottom seller was someone who had a high rate of hits, but an even higher rate of cancels because his calls usually figured out that he had bullshitted them somewhere along the line. During my three months in that call center, i spent most of the time somewhere in the middle since i got a lot of referrals for spanish-language pitches. I went from just cracking the weekly bonuses for passing quota when different types of plan sales were worth different point values, to being among the low men on the totem pole when they switched to a sheer volume, per conversion quota. I could make seven and a half points a night for taking the time to make three international plan sales a night which was much easier than trying to push out six switches a night over to that silly-assed "Friends and Family" plan which most people seemed to loathe the way you might loathe a roach trying to dance the macarena on your toilet seat I remember that for whatever reason i never got an ID badge while i was working there and constantly had to badger the group manager nearest the door to let me back in. When i remarked to a buddy in another group that i still didn't have one, he joked that i should take it as a bad sign... not knowing that later that evening, after a big meeting detailing the marketing push for the aforementioned toilet-dancing cockroach, the sales groups were being totally re-organized and anyone too far on average below quota for the last three weeks was out on their ass. I remember the job situation was a series of blue mondays for a few months thereafter and had it not been for the Pavillion and the occasionally profitable criminal endeavor, the going would have been pretty rough 6:52 p.m. - 2003-06-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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