Don't hang up - this is not a sales call
At Large
Julia O'Malley can be reached at julia_o_malley@hotmail.com.
"Hello, Mrs. So-and-So, my name is Julia and I am calling on behalf of the child-care provider you recently inquired about. This is not a sales call, rather I am conducting a brief survey to help us improve our services. Do you have a minute?"
This is what it has come down to. I have a little work freelancing at a local paper but mostly I have been temping - spending my afternoons doing phone surveys in an empty cubicle at the corporate office of a national day-care company. My task is to bother people about why they didn't choose the day-care company that hired me.
"Oh, it smelled like rotten diapers?" is among the things I now commonly say to people. "Please do tell me more."
Before I started, in theory, temping seemed so glamorous and non-committal. You are like a superhero, hovering over the city in your twin set and lip-gloss when someone puts out the temp call and you swoop down to rescue the receptionist-less office. You are a benevolent creature of mystery, efficient and impervious to office politics. Xerox woman. Fax-ra. The Filernator. Once your job is done, you disappear into the rainy night, gratified by your first-rate customer service. Then I actually tried it.
My first hang-up call came early in my shift, maybe 5:30 p.m. in the Midwest. I'd been getting people's voicemail for an hour. Finally, someone picked up and I reeled off my "this is not a sales call" speech.
"I sorry no speak English," the voice said.
I launched into college Spanish. Roughly translated I said, "I is to make a 'survey' about care babies." Then I heard a click.
On the next call the woman pulled what I later identified as the "cell phone fake-out." She said I was phoning her cell and asked if I would call back at her home number. The home number she gave me was actually for a pizza delivery place. When I called back on the cell, she didn't answer.
Then I got a woman who interrupted me in the middle of my opening speech to say, "I'm not sure why you people think you can call me." Then I heard the receiver clatter down.
After my shift, I rode down in the elevator with three other temps. We introduced ourselves, and then told each other what we wished we were doing for a living. One of them was a theater director, another was a teacher and the third was a former advertising executive. All of them had been looking for work for the better part of a year.
As the elevator doors opened, the director sighed.
"Another day, another $24 after taxes," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow."
It started to rain as I left the building. How could this be it? Here I was, college-educated, enthusiastic, relatively bright. I moved to the city and the only work I could find was as that voice on the phone during the dinner hour? Me, Julia, the annoyance that makes people sign up for the national Do Not Call registry. I was no benevolent Filernator, I was the lowest of corporate drone, a phone slave, a telemarketer. It couldn't go on, I decided. So what if a teacher, a director and an ad executive settled for this mind-deadening job? I wouldn't. I was better than this.
The next day, before work, I spent the morning scouring the want ads. I was surprised to find that there really weren't many of them. I could be a donut fryer, if I wanted to work from midnight to 4 a.m. I could also be a delivery driver. Everything else, and there wasn't much, required a master's degree and five years of experience.
Back at the temp job, the hours inched by as I crossed names off an impossibly long list. I was making calls in some suburb of Chicago when I noticed that everyone was home and they all wanted to talk. It was 4:30 on a Tuesday.
"I can't afford day care," a mother of an infant told me. 'My husband lost his job and had to go to work at the Wal-Mart. I looked into going back to work, but the cost of a babysitter cancels out my paycheck. What would you do?"
For an hour, the answers were similar. People were out of work. Women were stuck at home, trying to make ends meet, answering the phone around dinnertime, confiding in telemarketers as their kids squealed in the background.
"If I lived there, I'd watch your kids for you," I heard the ad executive say from a neighboring cubicle.
As I listened to a single mother of two explain about waiting for her government day-care vouchers to come in the mail, I realized what I'd missed growing up in Alaska, where I knew people and jobs seemed to come easily.
It occurred to me that I wasn't the only enthusiastic, bright person looking for work in the Lower 48. The only difference between the woman on the phone and me was that I didn't have two kids to worry about and I had a job. I wasn't better than anything. In fact, I was lucky. I wished the woman a nice evening and dialed another number.
"Hello, Mrs. So-and-So, my name is Julia and I am calling on behalf of the childcare provider you recently inquired about," I said. "This is not a sales call."
• Former Empire reporter Julia O'Malley will continue to write columns twice a month from Portland. She can be reached at julia_o_malley@hotmail.com.