My boss "volunteered" me to telemarket!

The BBQ Pit
1

ARGH! I am so incredibly stressed out right now. I’m an engineer. I work for a consulting firm. We’re a little low on work right now and my recently transferred boss is trying to get in good with the local mass transit authority. So he “volunteered” some of us to cold call potential donors for a mass transit referendum.

ARGH! (again) I’m am sooo stuck. I became an engineer so I would never, ever have to do something like this. I hate cold calling. There’s pretty much no way out of this. He said “If you can’t be 100% enthusiastic, just let me know now,” but you know if I bail I’ll get labeled “not a team player” and a wuss.

I’ve got twenty phone calls to make today. I’m so stressed out my stomach hurts and my hands are shaking. ARGH. Man, if I had any money saved, I’d just freaking quit right now.

2

An engineer who does part-time telemarketing at his bosses request is a wuss. An engineer who refuses to do so it not a wuss, and demonstrates to their boss that they have some self-respect and aren’t a fucking doormat. As for being a team player, ostensibly you play for a team of engineers, not call center grunts.

I’m assuming you’re an “engineer” in the “have a degree in engineering from an accredited university” sense of the word, not the “sales engineer” or “direct marketing engineer” sense…

3

I’d just tell him you can’t be 100% enthusiastic. And that you despise cold-calling so much, and are so stressed about doing it, that you are becoming ill and might have to go home.

Calmly tell him you have a serious issue with being forced to “volunteer” for these duties and that you are extremely uncomfortable with that line of work, which is why you have never chosen a job that required it.

If it were me, I’d refuse to the point of being fired, at which time I would be calling the newspapers and TV stations and asking them how they’d like to hear an interesting story about how my former boss is trying to gain favoritism with the transit authority by forcing employees to telemarket on their behalf. I am positive they’d be interested in hearing all about it.

4

Yeeeeech. I cannot imagine a more horrible scenario. Well, I can, but that’s only because things are never so bad that they can’t be worse! :slight_smile:

I like missbunny’s advice, but I can also see where one would not want to even risk such a situation in today’s job market. Tough call!

5

I got volunteered for that once. I responded that I wasn’t participating. When my boss said that it was mandatory I replied that I still wasn’t participating and he could :

a - take me off the list and get somebody else
b - do it himself
c - eat a big bowl of shit for all I care

Apparently he got many responses similar to mine because the “call out” event was cancelled.

It still baffles me that anybody would think of asking an intelligent person to do telemarketing.

My very strong non-apology to all you telemarketer and former telemarketer dopers out there. You too can eat a biug bowl of shit

6

Yeah, I’d always said I’d never get stuck doing this and it’s so easy to say that you’d just say “no” until you’re stuck in the situation. The job market around here isn’t great right now because a lot of the DOT districts are sitting on projects. Plus, while I do ahve a real engineering degree, I dont’ have my PE (professional engineering license) yet so I’m fairly easy to replace. And recently, I’ve been having to charge some of my time to overhead (which the company hates) anyway. I generally like my job OK (I mean, I have time to come goof here plus we get free sodas and my direct boss doesn’t care if I come in at 10am as long as my work get done) but I just wasn’t prepared for this type of thing.

ARGH. I think I’m gonna put it off til after lunch at least. Maybe nobody will be in after lunch and I can just leave messages.

7

My boss did something similar to me, although he wanted me to call about a thousand people and ask stupid questions. I said I couldn’t, that it took me about half an hour to build up the courage to call these people and I’m terrible at asking questions and the poor callees were sorry for me. My boss pulled up a chair and belittled me for an hour, bullying and pushing me to call these people. I told him I was not hired to be a telemarketer, (they make more than I did) I was hired as an assistant editor and editors don’t have the skills necessary to call people and sell stuff. He finally left the room, saying that he hoped I would be done with the list by no later than Friday.

I didn’t do it.

I was fired shortly thereafter, not as a direct result of this incident, but that was probably a factor. In fact, hell, it might have been a direct result. The boss didn’t give me a reason why he fired me. He just met me at the door one morning, gave me my work sweater, and told me to have a nice life. So whenever any potential employer asks why I was fired from that job I have nothing to tell them.

The whole situation was fucking awful. I hope his business falls down on his head. I have so many other stories about that place that I could write a small book on how NOT to run a small publishing business.

8

“This is just the worst problem I’ve ever had! Ever!!” — Marsha Brady. Sheesh, man. Just pick up the phone and make the calls. And start saving some of your money.

9

I’d kill to have a boss that didn’t blow a gasket if I was 5 minutes late, or who wants everyone to stay at least a half hour after business hours. He also freaks if you try and do anything of a personal nature on company time regardless of how much work I do from home and all my deadlines get met.

10

Yeah, I know it’s freaking whiny. And, yeah, I’ve got it really easy compared to life in the third world. But that doesn’t change that I really wanna puke right now. Hey, if someone can pit nickels, I think being forced to cold call for donations is OK.

Man, Elysian, that’s like my worst nightmare. I’m already afraid this new boss doesn’t really like me much because I’m pretty quiet. If we had plenty of work to go around, I could probalby find a way to refuse. But since I’m charging to overhead…

11

My boss once asked me to do something like this. I dialled my home phone number 15 times and left 15 long one-sided conversations in my answering machine.

12

Waah, nobody understands my username. I mean Liberal in the classic sense!

13

Man, you’re a dickhead, Liberal. Or did you miss this part of the OP: “I’m so stressed out my stomach hurts and my hands are shaking.”?

Let’s face it, a lot of us engineers don’t go into engineering because we’re people persons. Telephone anxiety is common for a lot of people. And asking people for money pretty universally sucks. Not to mention that no one in their right minds would ever ask an engineer to sell something – it’s not what they do well.

14

Too many managers have absolutely no empathy. I wonder if this quality is what allows them to get the position in the first place. Too many don’t give a flying fuck if they are asking their employees to do something that makes them physically ill. If you don’t like it, go. That’s their attitude. And they know they can get away with it.

15

Oooo! Alessan, I like that idea!

Yeah, the whole situation was a fucking nightmare. Hired to do editorial, ended up mainly doing marketing (WTF?), asked to do telemarketing, steered away from doing editorial (at one point the boss took me off a project and told me he was just going to have the AUTHOR edit his own work!) and on and on. This was my first “real” job out of college, and I was thrilled at having it. I liked the work, I liked the people, and it ended so badly I still have strong emotions about it and it’s been years.

Sounds like you are pretty introverted, like me, tremorviolet. Else you wouldn’t be shaking like you are at the thought of cold calling. Liberal just doesn’t understand the fear of calling people you don’t know and asking them things you know they don’t want to be bothered with.

I’ve been studying a lot of Corporate Law, and it’s really opened my eyes to a few things. First of all, the power in the employer/employee relationship lies with the employer absolutely. Pretty much the only way an employee can gain any power is to have legislation, to band together in unions, to have a contract made up (good luck getting any employer to sign that now) or to quit employment. Sounds good, right? No. Legislation sounds great but you have to sue to enforce it sometimes and that’s a few ants short of a picnic. Unions are great for a while and then they become corruption sinks. Contracts hardly exist anymore except in CEO and other high-paid positions.

So when anyone complains about their job on this message board, the one response they get is that they can quit. And that’s not a viable option in a lot of ways. So where do employees get power? They don’t. They pretty much have to do WHATEVER the employer wants, whether it is cold calling or team-building activities, as long as it’s not completely illegal.

And that probably seems well and good to a lot of people. The employee is getting paid, right? What do they have to complain about? The problem is that people must make money, so they must have a job (I’m excluding small business owners at the moment). They must submit to anything an employer asks of them when in a job or face losing that job. They have no choice but to do what an employer asks of them. There is no power in that position.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going here. I think in a perfect world there would be a two-sided employment contract, where the employee would agree to perform a specific task and the employer would agree to compensate. The contracts we have now are drawn up by the companies and basically say that the employee will do anything asked or the employer will fire with no repercussions. This is, I would venture, a result of a huge glut of workers trying to find employment, which lets the companies ask whatever they want.

Perhaps a solution would be to have more companies competing for employees.

Anyway, I think it’s a bit unfair, is all. Sorry that you’re being forced to do this. Sorry about the longwinded reply also :slight_smile:

16

Remarkable familiarity for someone so… green.

17

Nonsense. I am the Melancholy’s Melancholy. But in times of fear, one has to summon courage. That’s what courage is — it isn’t being unafraid, it’s doing what you must do in spite of being afraid. I believe that my advice is far superior to all the “you poor thing” posts that serve only to feed the fear.

18

tremorviolet, if you really feel you cannot refuse, you could always make the calls in your own special way. E.g., calling and saying, “Hi, I’m from XYZ Company and I’m being pressured under threat of being fired to call people for donations for the MTA. Do you want to contribute?” Or call your own number, as someone else said, or lie and say you called when you didn’t. Or call your own selection of 20 people (friends or family with whom you can laugh about it).

Does anyone else have a problem with doing the calls? If you can get a group together, your protest will be that much stronger.

19

Don’t you guys have unions, employment laws or suchlike? All I hear on this board is about your how your bosses and companies ride roughshod all over you.

20

Most “white collar” workers don’t have unions. Employment laws mostly exist to keep them from making you do anything illegal, to prevent discrimination based on sex/age/race, and to ensure that (at least in many/most states in the US), they can fire you basically at will for no good reason.