A Former Telemarketer Reveals All

For about a three year period I made my living as a telemarketer. As any telemarketer can tell you we are the most despised people on the planet. Lawyers and politicians don't hold a candle to telemarketer. For the most part is a well deserved despised.

I started in a firm that supposedly sold tickets to raise money for fire departments around the country. It was a fairly easy job, a computer makes a call for you, someone answers, the call is sent to your station, and you go into your sales pitch. I like the job for the most part for awhile. Think about it, I got paid for sitting on my butt and making phone calls. Then one day the manager gave us a pep talk in an attempt to prop up sales. But he said something that just crawled under my skin. One of the employees asked him where the money actually went. He started spouting off percentages. At the very bottom of the list were the actual fire department getting about 5% of the profits. The manager was actually proud of himself when he stated that. It made me sick. I immediately quit trying to make sales. I was making $8.25 and hour but I figured as long as I wasn't making sales I wasn't screwing anyone over. On a Friday, my immediate supervisor came to me and informed me that because of my lack of sales I was being demoted to part time work. The next day, a Saturday, was a not required for full time workers but was for part timers, but having been just demoted he asked me if I was going to come in, I told him yes. I didn't. I quit instead. The following Tuesday the twin towers were attacked. I was especially happy that I had decided to quit.

But back to the revelation. By rule a telemarketer is supposed to get off a phone call and remove a person from the call list if that person says no (or any variation) three times. As telemarketers we were encouraged to go past that three no mark and stay on the line until the person either (usually out of frustration) said yes or hung up the phone. If the person ended up hanging up, their number would be put right back in the numbers to be called again.

If a person that was called, got irate and started cussing, their number would be put right back in the numbers to be called again.

When the Do-Not-Call List first came around we as telemarketers were encouraged to sign a petition to send to Washington to block the list. Naturally, after the list went into affect, I put my number, my mom's number, and my dad's number on the list.

Telemarketing is a cut throat business and one that pays extremely well. At the last telemarketing job I work, my base pay was %7.75 and our, but with commissions from sales I could potentially make upwards of $13 and hour for simply sitting on my butt for four hours a day making phone calls.

I was always told by my supervisors that I had the voice and characteristics to sell to to every person I called (they were probably blowing smoke up my butt in an attempt to get me to produce more) but unfortunately for them I suppose I had empathy for the people I was calling, so I never really put much effort into it.

A few years back, when the Do-Not-Call List was being put into affect, the Daily Show went to Lincoln Nebraska to do a story about how the list was affecting telemarketing. They came to the firm I was working at and the reporter kept referring to a female telemarketer as H-O-T-T-T. She was my roommate and we all had a blast watching it when it finally aired.