Thursday, June 10, 2004
I WAS JOBBED, MAN: Reading about other people's crappy summer jobs reminded me of my first summer job doing a telemarketing gig for one of the local newspapers. It was 1987, so we were hand dialing numbers off a printout, and at least once I was cussed out by a guy for calling and again for losing my place and calling him back immediately after. It wasn't the greatest gig in the world, but it was enough money for my first CD player.
The most memorable call of that entire period was an old guy who said he'd never consider taking the paper because forty years ago he applied for a carrier job and they passed him over for "some old punk". I listened to the whole thing, at the time being under the influence of Dale Carnegie's advice on winning friends and influencing people. The best way to defuse a temper is to listen sympathetically, Carnegie said, so I always let people talk much longer than the job required on the off chance that they'd just get the poison out of their system and buy a subscription anyway. Of course, this guy was having none of it (none of them did); the more he talked, the madder he got until he slammed the phone down. It's a shame, too, because I was about to mention that routes were open if he wanted to try his luck again.
The most memorable call of that entire period was an old guy who said he'd never consider taking the paper because forty years ago he applied for a carrier job and they passed him over for "some old punk". I listened to the whole thing, at the time being under the influence of Dale Carnegie's advice on winning friends and influencing people. The best way to defuse a temper is to listen sympathetically, Carnegie said, so I always let people talk much longer than the job required on the off chance that they'd just get the poison out of their system and buy a subscription anyway. Of course, this guy was having none of it (none of them did); the more he talked, the madder he got until he slammed the phone down. It's a shame, too, because I was about to mention that routes were open if he wanted to try his luck again.
|| Eric 12:14 PM#
