"Hello! Please give me all your money."

I really don't like talking to telemarketers. Whenever I do end up talking to one after I answer a call, I'll come up with some absurd story or comment or change my voice to throw them off. It's funny to me.

For a time, though, I used to be on the other end of the line. I spent about two weeks during the summer of 2003 at a small call center conducting surveys to businesses in the US. I felt like some kind of irritating insect talking to small business owners in an attempt to harvest marketing data. Every time I heard the line ring on my headset, I hoped for any reason to not have to talk to anyone. But most of the time someone answered and I'd have to go straight into reciting a scripted greeting trying to get that person to answer a series of questions.

It all would have been a little less mind-numbing if one was allowed to go at his/her own pace dialing each person. But, as anyone who has worked these sorts of jobs knows, telemarketers are hooked up to an automatic dialer. Companies want continuous outcalls.

So here I am repeating the same lines until they start becoming meaningless to me. This goes on for about four hours, then lunch, then four more hours. Monotony, day after day.

After that job, I somehow ended up at another similar position working for a company that is designed to "build credit" by giving people with bad credit scores a high limit credit card. Hmm. Anyway, it was another automatic dialer job repeating the same script to people although in an inbound call center. I got more varied responses ranging from people yelling at me for sending them an activated card in their name (its not activated) to people joking that they wanted this card to pay for another card (I bet they weren't joking). I talked to some of the strangest people during that job. These were usually the highlight of the day as any response out of the ordinary snaps me out of my zombified state repeating scripts all day. Some were just downright stupid. Every time I argued with someone on the phone I had to laugh. That didn't help my relationships with the supervisors but it was either that or I was going to snap from the frustration and scream my head off. Yep, it's real fulfilling to perform a job you hate day after day.

The last call center gig I had was at a company that managed the collections department for a telecommunications corporation. I won't tell you which one. But it was, and still is, a major telecommunications corp. Now, this job wasn't like the last two I talk about above. You see, there's a difference between a customer service department and a collections department. Customer service wants to (or at least they should want to) help you. When you call the customer service department of a company, they are supposed to solve your problems. They are supposed to treat you well and keep you satisfied so that you keep your business with the company. That's why they have the power to make offers to keep you as a customer.
The collections department is not customer service. You owe the company money and they need you to pay it. My job was to collect. That's not to say that I was a jerk to customers or that I treated them badly. The point is that bills had to be paid.

See, when someone falls past due on their cell phone bill they received from this company, their service is shut off. The only number that can be dialed on the cell phone now is the one that leads directly to the collections department. Mostly everyone that I talked to was three or more months past due. So, they do have some leeway in terms of how long they have service if they don't pay up on time. But after three months, I need to get a credit card payment.

A lot of people deny being that far behind on payments. But collections operators have access to a client's information including including their payment history. That made this job different from the two jobs I had before because the main goal was to collect. I didn't have to persuade someone to buy something or listen to a survey. If they didn't pay up, they didn't get their phone turned back on and eventually their delinquent account is reported to the three major credit bureaus. After being told this, people's attitudes change from rude and belligerent to accepting and calmed down. At that point, almost everyone comes up with the dough. I learned to be unwavering in the pursuit of collecting money. I mean, when you think about it, a cell phone is a luxury. Sob stories didn't work and neither did yelling, cussing, lying, or death threats. It wasn't the most glamorous job but hey, I called the shots this time.

After four short months, word comes down to the cubicles that our services will no longer be needed. All of the collections operators had done a swell job of harvesting the clients' money. But the corporation found people who would do what we did for a lot less. Yep, our positions were outsourced to Panama and India. But, hey, what did I care. I was starting my junior year in college two weeks from then. I got an end of term bonus and learned an important lesson. I never want to work in a call center again.