After reading an article about the new HBO documentary Telemarketers, co-produced by Danny McBride of Righteous Gemstones fame, my nervous system went into overdrive, and I was flooded with memories of a professional double bind and the remnants of an unconscious decision that still haunted me.
In 1993, I took a sales job that promised me six figures. Eventually. The starting pay was $13,000 less than my current salary and as luck would have it, the perfect Manhattan apartment became available at the same time. In a move that can only be attributed to impetuous youth, I signed a lease for $350 more a month than what I was paying in New Jersey.
Throughout the hazing I endured as a female sales trainee on an all-male team I kept my eye on the dangling carrot and convinced myself it would be all right. Within a few months, it became clear that no amount of robbing Peter to pay Paul would keep me out of the hole. I had a come-to-Jesus meeting with myself, and despite fifty-hour work weeks, I began to look for a part-time job. Within days, I booked an interview to be a survey taker.
The building near Stuyvesant Park was regal, with elaborate carvings above the door and original casement windows. The lobby matched the exterior with marble floors and polished brass elevators, but when I reached the fourth floor, I found myself in a large room with stained industrial carpet and stacks of old office furniture.
There was a locked door but no intercom. I knocked and waited. An eternity later, an older woman with a beehive opened the door. “Are you Staci?” she asked in an outer-borough accent. I nodded and she escorted me to the boss’s office, a cramped and dusty space filled with stacks of file folders.
“Sit,” he instructed.
A Bruce Vilanch lookalike with no sense of humor, Russell’s bushy blonde hair, horned-rim glasses and t-shirt with tiny holes deceived me into thinking he was laid back, friendly even, so I did everything I could to persuade him to hire me.
Twenty minutes later, I had the job. “You get one 10-minute break each shift,” he said as I stood. “No eating on the floor and if you need to pee, do it on your break.”
That first week was like boot camp. In a giant room with florescent lights, dinged walls and five dozen desks separated by half walls, I huddled next to more experienced survey takers to get the gist of what to do. There were no manuals or written instructions. I was expected to just figure it out.
Every shift ran like a military op, with no talking outside the din of voices gathering opinions. And Russell wasn’t joking. If I needed to use the restroom outside of a break, I had to ask permission, which wasn’t always granted.
My coworkers were mostly out of work actors and musicians who were there for the paycheck and kept to themselves. Nobody smiled. Or laughed. My smart-ass comments, which others typically found funny, were not appreciated and I learned quickly to keep my head down and just do the job. By my final shift that first week, I was on my own.
When I arrived, I got a stack of computer printouts with names and phone numbers from the shift supervisor, who assigned me a desk. The survey questions appeared on antique monitor and there were no headsets for the beige push button phone.
At the front of the room near the exit was a raised platform where three supervisors sat, each with a phone in front of them. When I completed a survey, I had to stand up and shout, “I need validation.” One of the supervisors then dialed in to my phone line and spoke to the person who’d completed the survey to confirm their information.
Early on, I noticed clandestine meetings between supervisors and certain coworkers and weirdly phrased questions that subtly led people to answer in a certain way. Sometimes the client’s name was redacted, and the political surveys did not offer enough choices to obtain a legitimate result. It all just seemed rigged.
My third week there, I heard commotion from the adjoining aisle. Like a stadium wave, we all stood to peer over the top of our cubes. “You’re so incredibly stupid, I don’t even know how you get on a bus to come here!” screamed a male voice. It was Russell.
His target was a young woman with whom I’d had a few conversations. She wasn’t Marie Curie but held her own during discussions on current events. “You’re a moron,” he continued. “Who the hell hired you? It certainly wasn’t me.”
Russell grabbed her arm, and roughly escorted her to the door. “You’re fired!” She pleaded that her purse was still in her cube. He stomped back to her desk to retrieve it, then shoved her through the door and tossed the bag out after her.
He slammed the door and faced all of us. “You could be next,” he pointed his finger around the room. “Get back to work.”
After that, I dreaded going in, but I dreaded a bounced check even more. Life in the day job hadn’t gotten better and I spent most of my day soothing bougie twenty-year-olds when my own nerves were frazzled from working over sixty hours a week.
One night, my manager informed us we were all expected to go out for team drinks. I had a shift at the telemarketing job and was forced to tell him what I’d successfully hidden for several months. Secretly, I hoped it might inspire him to give me a raise. Instead, he said, “Do what you gotta do. But don’t let this happen again.”
That evening, while on a call with a woman I was interviewing about her cottage cheese preferences, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She rambled on and on about her life, but I needed to move on and was unwilling to lose the tick for the completed survey. Not meeting quota was cause for termination. While she droned on, I answered the questions for her on my computer. When she finally wound down, I thanked her for her time and placed her on hold.
I stood up, raised the headset and yelled, “I need validation.” My part was done, and I hung up to wait for my computer screen to blink that the survey had been accepted. Then my phone rang, and I was summoned to the dais of supervisors.
“I listened in on your survey,” said the middle-aged white man with greasy hair. “I know you didn’t ask all the questions.” My heart sunk into my stomach. He placed a piece of paper in front of me and said, “You’re fired. Sign this. Gather your belongings and exit the building. Now.”
I didn't even read it. I went back to my desk, my cheeks red and my stomach in knots, collected my purse and left for the last time. On the walk home, I wondered if a Manhattan apartment was worth it.
The depth of humiliation was so great, tears were not accessible. I tossed and turned all night and arrived at my sales job at 7:30 a.m. Over a hot cup of coffee, it happened. The anger about the fact that I needed a part-time job welled up from deep inside and crashed over me.
The emotional process of leaving that job took months. Shame and regret were threaded through my body and the internal conversations vacillated between applauding myself for finding a way out and regretting how I did it.
But at that moment, the rage was more powerful.
When my boss arrived, I marched into his office. “You hired me for a reason, and I can’t do the job at the level you expect having to work a second job just to pay rent that allows me to live in the City to be at your beck and call.” Before I went home that night, he informed me I could expect a raise in my next check.
While it wasn’t the smoothest path to getting what I needed, self-sabotage served me that day. It’s not a choice I want to make again but it was a gift for which I’m grateful.
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