“Do you have a mirror?” she
asked. I was 23 years old and a couple
hours in to the first day of my new job. I had already met several charming
individuals who wasted no time in allowing their stellar personalities to shine
through, I am not including the respondents I had the pleasure of speaking with
over the phone in. I had interviewed for the position of Telephone Market
Researcher for a total of 5 minutes before I was offered the job, I considered
this to be a great sign. I should have reconsidered that initial thought. I
sure did after about an hour sitting in the swivel office chair in front of a
dot matrix computer with a headset attached to it.
Obediently and hoping to seem
helpful I commenced to look for a mirror. I rummaged through my bag and offered
the not completely unattractive woman of about 35 my Cover Girl powder compact.
Then, in abject horror, I watched as she shoved ½ of it in her gaw with one
hand, as she carefully placed a broken piece of tooth slathered with superglue
on the corresponding match in the back of her mouth. Once it was placed and she
was satisfied that the glue would hold she handed me back the makeup with the
mirror still steamed up and a spit bubble on the side. I almost dropped it
because I was trying desperately not to touch the part which was recently in
her mouth. I fumbled it in to my bag and placed the purse under my desk. With
stomach rolling and mouth dry I made it to the single stall bathroom with the
dirty floor and purged my breakfast.
That was the first of many
graphic details of disgust I experienced working in the phone bank. The most
interesting manner of human beings (and I’m using that term loosely) are
employed for “phone work”. It’s a fairly easy job requiring no face to face
contact and little to no effort, so the visually unappealing and the lazy make
a bee line. All you really need is a good voice and convincing a manner, and
that is only for those who happen to care what their success rate is.
This particular marketing research company was
strictly for radio surveys. We would call people from all over the country and
try to get them to listen to 3 to 4 second clips of music currently being
played on the radio and then ask them to rate it on a scale from 1 to 5. I
personally listened to mostly alternative rock at the time, so I learned very
quickly to ask for the country music stations because if I had to listen to
clips of songs I actually liked being played on my favorite station over and
over and over ad nauseam, I would never be able to listen to that music again.
That, and when I did the country music surveys I had a high success rate
because I spoke to customers in a country accent and they ate that crap up with
a spoon!
I sat in the middle of a row of 7
cubicle type stations. To my right was a short little feller with the saddest
case of cystic acne I had ever seen offset by a shaggy mop of shoulder length hair,
which was either naturally greasy or created that way on purpose with some
discount product of unspecified nature. I didn’t ask. To my left was a 45 year
old woman pushing 400 pounds with the voice of an angel. Bernita was one of the
top 10 favorite people I ever worked with! She had thinning blonde wisps of
hair pulled in to a tiny bun, rosacea and was gay. I was going through my own
skewed sense of sexual identity at the time and that fascinated me about her!
Her partner was a motorcycle driving butch who treated her terribly. Bernita
would often come to work with tears in her baby blues because Shayna had called
her some derogatory name or hadn’t come home the night before. It was my
mission to make Bernita smile again! Her laugh was infectious and her sense of
humor was razor sharp. I needed that in my life. Sitting day after day in a
quite uncomfortable and flimsy desk chair trying to talk to a decidedly
unenthusiastic public about the music they listened to everyday was boring as
hell. I would crack sarcastic comments or mimic respondents, and when she
laughed her whole body would shake and her specially purchased “sturdy” chair
would rock. Everyone around her would laugh with her, the joy permeated the
drab office interior. About 3 or 4 times every day I would walk by her from the
bathroom or breakroom to get to my station and I would hear “Fuck you, Molly”
in a growly girl whisper. I didn’t need to ask her what it was about, it was my
hair. She was insanely jealous of my thick, curly hair. It would make me laugh
out loud every time I heard it, it was so ridiculous and she was so very
serious! I saw her a few years later after I had left for another job and she
had gotten gastric bypass, but her laugh was still the same and Shayna had
moved on for good. She was a much happier Bernita and was still envious of my
hair.
A couple seats from Paul, the greaser, sat Terry. This was
her second job, she was earning money to go towards getting her teeth fixed.
She is not to be confused with superglue Maguillicutty I began this
reminiscence with, Terry had no teeth to glue back in. Correction, she had 8.
Four on the top, four on the bottom. They were yellow and had sundry pieces
missing, but they were hers and she was hanging on for dear life. Terry was a
“new Christian”, recently out of jail/rehab for (shockingly enough)
methamphetamine addiction and sales. Everything out of her mostly empty mouth started
with “And praise Jesus”. Literally. “And
praise Jesus, they filled up the vending machine and I can finally have my
Reeses”, “And praise Jesus, I found the left flip flop under the back seat of
the car where Jimbo threw it last night”. It was cute the first 6 times I heard
it, when I realized the “And praise Jesus” was her breath before starting a
sentence I started making tick marks on a post it note to count how many times
she said it in a night’s shift. On one vivid and impressively talkative day, when
I was sure she had relapsed on the crank, my tick marks filled the front and
back of 3 separate 4’x4” post it sheets! I was saying “And praise Jesus” when
she finally left for the night!
Alice was a whore. I am not just talking about a loose
woman, she was a real live sex peddler for cash. She was 5’8” tall, about 60
pounds overweight and had the henna red hair of an old timey ‘painted woman’.
She also had a limited tooth count. Are we seeing a pattern here? This was also
Alice’s second job… guess what the first one was. You would think a woman of
the night would have a secretive air about her, a type of mystery that makes
you wonder what goes on after she gets off work at 9:00pm. Nope, not Alice. She
was not only completely unashamed of her alternative profession, but she would
speak to her cubicle neighbor of her adventures and have the audacity to call
the “date” sick! “Honey, he wanted to put the bottle right on up there, and not
the skinny end either! Sicko”. She was terminated because she often showed up
to work an hour later than her start time. She needed a “fuckin’ rest, Goddamn
it!”
Carl was also a woman of the night. Not for actual monetary
transactions, but I am sure he got paid in other ways. When Carl transformed
himself in to Miss Sparkle Devine it was an amazing thing to see! I was able to
see her in action once, and she was a delight! Then the pancake makeup and
cleavage would be washed off his cocoa colored skin and his Armani slacks and
button up shirt would go back on for work. He was 6’1” with green eyes and
always dressed beautifully for his telephone research job. He would sit with
one arm resting on the back of his chair, legs crossed, working the computer
with one hand. He was actually graceful! And charming and completely likeable!
I think about him every time I watch “To Wong Foo, With Love Julie Newmar”.
The phone bank employed between 20-30 people on a revolving
basis. Some were only there a short while, long enough to realize having random
people in Kentucky or Alabama or Ohio or Maine hang up on you with or without
screaming bloody murder that you interrupted their dinner or woke their baby up
isn’t the most fun a person can have at work. Some were there years before I
set foot in the place and are probably still there to this day. I worked there
for 2 years and I quickly worked my way up to floor manager. I left when I followed
the general manager to her own marketing research business she opened. I was
invited to be her office manager, no more phones again! Being a phone
researcher wasn’t a dream job, but it fit my life at the time. The job paid
reasonably well for the amount of work actually done and I moved up quickly.
When I look back at the monkeys running that zoo I have to remember to not be
too smug… I once was one of them.
