A brief essay on my job as telemarketer. |
The Calling Life rigged this one. I know it. I spent the last several years trying to establish myself as a professional musician, bloodstains of effort spotting my path. Do sweet fruits of success spring from them? No. Instead, a weed of opportunity sprouts from the unstained newspaper under Employment. A local company hiring telemarketers. The ad telepaths I could be it. I could be your ticket to a steady job. I could save you from poverty. Three times I deny the weed. My wife wants to go apply for this job and wants me to go with her, saying “You don't have to apply if you don't want to.” I look at her then back at the ad. Several seconds pass. I tell my wife that I'll go with her, but probably won't fill out an application. We arrive and go inside. She begins to fill out her application and asks “Do you think you should fill out an application while we're here? It can't hurt.” She smiles sweetly. I carefully consider how much I hated telemarketing twenty years ago and the fact that I need to be working as soon as possible, too. So I relent and fill out an application. We turn them in and take our tests. My wife doesn't get hired, but I do. And I've been there ever since. If the odds of chance were in a slightly different context, I might have gotten a great job, won the lottery, something....But Life loves to see me hate my job. Maybe it's because I do that so well. |