At some point your phone
will ring, and a complete stranger will ask you for money. Perhaps it
will be for starving children in Sri Lanka, or a new phone plan from
Teleripoff, or life insurance. At this point you can either tell him
yes, no, or f*** off. If you say yes, you will make him happy. If you
say no, you will make him sad. But oddly enough, if you tell him to
f*** off, you will also make him happy. The reason is simple: you
will save his time.
You see, telemarketing
is a job so awful we don't even force murderers to do it. It has the
highest employee turnover of any job in the world, bar none. Deep sea
fishermen on the North Sea, getting their arms torn off, or being
torn limb from limb by giant squid? Ice road truckers, falling into
gorges and landing uncomfortably at the bottom, with a severe
headache from the ninety five tons of road train that fell on their
cranium? Frontline soldiers in the middle east? None of this compares
to the horror of being a telemarketer. You have more chance of making
it through the SAS training course than succeeding as a telemarketer.
And that's not an exaggeration.
There are several
reasons for this. Every telemarketer this side of the planet Neptune
must fight to keep their job- every single day- by achieving a thing
called a KPI, a Key Performance Indicator. This is a fantasy figure
dreamed up by Senior Management, which represents the highest number
of sales ever achieved, multiplied by a thousand.
Soldiers have a drill
sergeant. Telemarketers have Hitler, Goebbels and Irwin Rommel
stomping about he room, in gumboots and greatcoats, bayoneting staff
at random. Telemarketers must crawl about the floor of the phone room
to get to their seats, as the carpet is too slick with blood and
intestines to walk upright. But this is fine, since the people who
run telemarketing companies have not yet reached the stage of
evolution where they can walk upright either.
As if the bayoneting and
daily dismemberment is not enough, staff are verbally fed nonsense
all day long. This is called, “Positive Thinking,” and it claims
that you can achieve anything, even fly, change your own gender or
even change species, if you just try hard enough. So all
telemarketers are told, on a daily basis, that they must sell a
trillion units each today, or else lose their jobs. The fact that the
average staff member has only sold one unit a day since the company
began fifteen years ago is meaningless. If you can't do it, you're
not trying hard enough. The denial of reality is staggering.
In order to achieve any
sales at all, a telemarketer has to call as many people as possible.
But this is tough, because not enough people are humane enough to
tell him to fuck off. They're too cruel to put him out of his misery
quickly, opting to say “no,” instead, and then proceed to torture
him for ten minutes.
You see, he may
inadvertently telephone Beryl from Lake Macquarie, who knows in the
first instant that she cannot afford to sponsor Samerawit Tesfaye of
Ethiopia, who is so impoverished he has had to eat his own feet, as
well as twenty-five feet of barbed wire. But she's not about to let
on to Brian in the call centre, because the last time she had someone
to talk to, Winston Churchill was inspiring the world with speeches.
She's determined to keep him on the phone until the universe ceases
expanding, and collapses completely back into what some scientists
call The Big Crunch, which they claim is the end of everything, in
fifty trillion years time. But it won't be the end of everything,
because afterwards there will still be Beryl's voice, telling Brian's
decaying corpse about the relief her new haemorrhoids cream affords
her, her hopes that her son Cyril will find a nice girl and settle
down instead of flouncing around with those boys from the theatre,
and the miraculous new flea shampoo she has been using on Fifi…
But there is worse to
come for Brian the Telemarketer, for no sooner has he convinced Beryl
that her chicken coop is on fire and she must put the phone down and
investigate immediately, than he'll get Mervyn from Edgecliffe.
Mervyn's a middle manager at XYZ Telco, with permed hair, teeth
brighter than a supernova, and more narcissism than Kyle Sandilands,
and he knows that everyone who has ever lived except himself is an
idiot and a fool, and he's going to tell Brian not only all the ways
he's doing his job wrong, but everything the government, business,
the police, and God are doing wrong, and how to fix it. But he won't
stop there, because even though he's never been on an oil rig or
never launched a satellite, that's not going to prevent him from
dispensing his advice on how oil rigs should be run and how the
satellite system could be improved. But this is only in the second
hour, because in the first hour he'll grill Brian relentlessly on his
full name, DOB, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and what type
of fossiliferous shale his first home was built upon. He will
ridicule all of these, and explain to Brian what sort of geological
formation he should have been born upon, and how it is Brian's fault
exclusively that he wasn't. Brian's ears will have evolved
sufficiently to detach themselves from his skull and run away at
least as far as Malta by then, but Brian's poor old skeleton and
liver and oesophagus will still be caught in the tides of shoulds and
ought-to-bes flowing out of Merv's mouth like acid.
But don't think that's
all, because that's just the first two calls, and Brian has to make
another 348 today, and do the same again tomorrow.
So if you do receive a
call from the hapless Brian, you could give him the shock of his life
by saying yes. But since you're unlikely to do this, it's best to
make him happy by telling him to fuck off.
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