Some years back, I was between jobs....meaning I quit a job that I really hated and at which I wasn't getting the promised pay raise and benefits and was looking for a new job. One of the places I applied to was a call center place here in town. I show up, go through the interview process, the hiring manager was highly impressed with me and said that I could start Monday. Then she began laying out the rules: All employees must wear business attire even though they sit in tiny cubicles making phone calls. All employees must make so many calls each day for each of the clients, meaning making calls for the Democratic Party, then the National Association for the Criminally Insane, then the Republican Party, then the Sarah Lee Frozen Desert Company (this may or may not have been actual clients...just clarifying the point that each day the employees had to make calls for the various clients the call center had). The hiring manager walked me around the call center...and I have never seen so many depressed, stressed, job hating people in my entire life. It was like these folks were chained to a wooden benches in a Roman Man-of-War ship and were being forced to row the ship around the world under threat of a flogging!
After the orientation and tour, the Hiring Manager asked me if I was excited about starting. I looked her in the eyes and told her that the other job offer I had was as a $20-a-day horse poop shoveler out at the county fair grounds.....and that I would rather shovel "sh-blankity-t than work in that dungeon.
I did my best military about face and walked out as the Hiring Manager tried to pick her jaw off the floor.
I went the next day and started cleaning horse stalls at the county fair grounds. Actually liked that job. The guy I worked for was a neat old guy. The gal who worked as his groom and tac putter-on'er and taker-off'er was really easy on the eyes (and other ways). But the best part of the job was the horses....such amazing animals! Well, there was one that should have been turned into dog food in my opinion, but the rest were great.
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Now I hate telemarketer calls. Big time. If I want to buy something, I get into my van and go buy it, or I get online and buy it. I don't need someone calling me at home trying to sell me skid mark proof under shorts (my wife says otherwise), dehydrated water, or recycled toilet paper. If our phone rings and I don't recognize the number on the caller ID, I don't answer the phone. We no longer have a land line, so we really don't get any telemarketer calls any more.
When I did inadvertently answer a telemarketer call, I tried to be polite and cordial with the people on the other end. They are just doing a job and trying to pay their bills. And if they are like the folks at the call center I had the interview at, they are not loving their jobs. They are just putting in their 8 hours/5 days a week to make up a pay check at the end of the week. I don't fault the people, just the industry of telemarketing. But if they did not listen to me when I told them that I was not interested in their offer and when I asked them to take me off their call list...sometimes I got a little ugly with them. Like the time a lady called in the middle of supper and tried to get me to vote for a certain political figure. I told her I was not voting because neither candidate was worth their weight in helium and she got all huffy because I said that her politician was less-than-worthless. I asked her how she would like it if I called her house in the middle of her having supper with her family and tried to get her to vote for someone she felt was not suited for the position he was running for...she said that it would not bother her. I told her...quite bluntly....that she was either lying or stupid. Then hung up. Everyone at the dinner table was looking at me like I had sprouted a third head (it was way beyond the sprouting a second head look) as they had NEVER heard me talk to someone with the level or rudeness.
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