I will confess. I, too, did some time as a phone psychic.
I was never under the delusion that I was psychic. I don’t think anyone is psychic. I don’t think psychic powers exist. But I do think that, for $9.50/hour, in 1993, as a college student with no real marketable skills, I could darn well be psychic.
I lasted only 2 days on the job. Then my conscience got to me. When I applied for the job, I’d had the rather cynical belief that if anyone dumb enough to call the psychic hotline got fleeced–well, they were getting no more than what they asked for. Then I started taking calls. Most of my callers were poor, and ignorant, and desperate. Lots of them were women in really bad situations. I realized that all I was doing was helping to take advantage of people in miserable circumstances who truly didn’t know any better. I started to feel like I was a social worker–one who some people trusted more than the licensed kind, because I had special powers and wasn’t from the same government that took their money and told them what to do.
Apparently, the phone carrier who supplied the long-distance connections wasn’t so thrilled with the psychic hotline business, either. We were limited to a maximum call length of 19 minutes and 59 seconds. If a call hit 20 minutes, the carrier would drop the connection and the center would lose all revenue for the call. (No, I have no idea how that arrangement worked or why.) So our job was to spin calls out to the golden length of 19 minutes and 59 seconds. The phones all had timers on them that were precise to the 10th of a second. Whenever you were on the phone with someone, you had to watch the timer. Once a call hit 19 minutes and 40 seconds or so, you had to tell the caller, “Hey! It looks like the machine’s gonna cut me off soon!” to get them to complete the call. And if they couldn’t complete it by 19 minutes and 59 seconds, you had to hang up on them. And if you didn’t–woe betide you. I always wondered why we never had a device that just automatically terminated calls at 19 minutes and 59 seconds. I asked a couple of times, but no-one seemed to know. Oh, well.
The entire experience was really pretty surreal. I worked at a phone bank, which means that there was a building with lots and lots of phone lines. Different companies paid for the use of the phones and the personnel to use them. So there were lots of different phone conversations going on in different regions of the building. There were two floors, and each floor was partitioned into areas with moveable cloth walls. That meant that, while you couldn’t actually see more than a tiny glimpse of anyone on the phone, you could certainly hear the hubbub of phone conversations as you walked past. One area did some sort of computer-related customer service stuff, and another did some sort of mail-order thing. Those areas sounded more or less normal when you went by them. Walking past the sex line area, though, was often a stroll through the truly bizarre.
So was dealing with some of my co-workers. On the day we had to fill out the usual forms, I heard some of the other new hires raise some rather atypical questions. One guy said he couldn’t fill out his W4 because had no last name. His name was (dramatic pause, flip of blond 80’s heavy metal hair) Smoke. And he was (pause, hair flip) truly gifted by the (pause) Beyond. Another guy protested that he had no birthdate. He was actually a robot, and his actions and thoughts were remote controlled by an outside entity. Therefore, he had a date of manufacture, but no birthdate.
Some of the callers were kind of interesting, too. One wanted to blabber on and on about how he was “READY… to ASCEND!!” Well, OK. I was quite happy to help him ASCEND!! for $9.50 an hour. But he didn’t seem to quite know exactly where it was he was ASCENDing to. He’d start telling me “I am READY…to ASCEND!!! I am READY to ASCEND!!! I am READY to ASCEND to the NINTH LEVEL!!!” So I’d keep him on the phone for his full 19 minutes and 59 seconds and then hang up. He’d call back later to tell me all about being READY to ASCEND to the ELEVENTH LEVEL!!! Well, it was nice to see him moving up in the world, I suppose…whatever world that was. So, after 19 minutes and 59 seconds of his gearing up for ascension, I’d be done with him once again. He’d call back yet another time to inform me that he was “READY to ASCEND to the SEVENTH LEVEL!!!” I suppose that getting demoted a full 4 levels by the Great Cosmic Force had to hurt, but I was a little disappointed that he hadn’t filled me in on the drastic changes in his life.
After the amusement of this wore off, I realized that psychic phone lines can take some serious advantage of the mentally ill. Or, at the very least, of the mentally ill who called in; the ones who worked there (like Robot Boy) weren’t necessarily treated so great, either. Then again, the more sane ones (like me, presumably) didn’t get treated any better.
The company I worked for was a bunch of phone fascists. You had to get the manager’s permission to go to the bathroom, for crying out loud. And they would time you while you were on the pot. Every second you were off the phone was a second they were losing money, and they knew it. Our breaks were strictly regulated, and there was no way anyone was going to the bathroom while someone else was on break. And you couldn’t take off your headphones without permission, either. (We wore these industrial-sized headphones while we were working. It was kind of freaky to enter the phone bank, which was pretty raucous, and then get to my desk, put on the headphones, and suddenly be surrounded by silence until the calls started coming in.)
That’s all I can think of writing out right now. IIRC, someone asked about the job interview. That was pretty interesting, too. I’ll write about that later.
