Thread by @AlexandraErin

I know I've told the story about how I quit the shady telemarketing place before, but I'll tell it again.

https://twitter.com/ZackMorrison18/status/1479265222430965763

This was a cold-calling sales job, but it wasn't phrased to us or the customers as a sales job. We were the "scheduling" department. The sales reps were in the field. We were supposed to call someone and get whoever answered the phone to say "yes" to a visit from the sales rep.

The company was nominally a home-improvement company. Sold siding and windows and a few other things (gutters, maybe?) so that if we encountered somebody who didn't believe us when we told them they needed X, we would pivot to Y and then Z.

And everything about what they/we did was shady as heck. One of the products was manufactured by the company and we were supposed to mention this fact in a way phrased to create the impression that we manufactured everything we were selling.

If your manager was listening in and you specifically mentioned another product or explicitly said "we make *all* our own stock so we can vouch for its quality and keep costs low", you'd get dinged because that's lying and could get the company in trouble.

But if you mentioned whatever the flagship product we actually made was and touted the benefits of making it ourselves in such a way that made it too clear this was the only product it applied to, you'd get dinged for that, too.

And in that case you'd be told you were being dinged for "going off script", which is true. But you would also be told, when your conversion rate was too low, "Look, you can't just stick to the script. You have to *sell it*, you know?)

And the thing is that this company had been operating for decades, and basically each decade its fortunes had fallen as various state and federal agencies had come around and said, "No, no, you can't actually do that, that's super illegal." to specific things.

The company would have been much better served by cutting the pretenses in its training and orientation and script and explaining, in so many words, that they were running a boiler room, the following claims and words and phrases must be avoided, here are the still-legal tricks.

But telling people working for just above minimum wage on a promise that they could potentially earn many times that in bonuses "We are running a scam here and we need to keep it just on the legal side to get as many lonely and confused grandparents to say yes." was a PR risk.

I was passingly good at this job because my most recent employment situation before it had me looking skeptically at companies, systems, and the divide between their stated purposes/values and actual purposes/values.

But even for the best worker on the floor (by the company's measures; it was not me because I was not ruthless enough), it was still a numbers game. If the person you dialed had no use for or interest in new siding or windows or whatever, you couldn't make them schedule.

And if you got them to say yes to a sales appointment... which often happened, especially for the people who booked the most appointments, because the person on the other end of the line didn't understand what was happening or was going along to end the call politely...

...then the sales rep might arrive to find the homeowner had blown them off, or wasn't a homeowner, or wasn't actually interested in giving them a chance to sell.

But the company pretended it wasn't luck of the draw, because the myth that there was a skill you could learn that would lead to success was at the heart of the wage structure, which had the possibility of both bonuses and higher hourly wages for "high performers".

And so every week on Thursday there would be a floor meeting before we started calling where the team that was the top performer for the last week would get a trophy (not to keep, it was one trophy that circulated) and then we'd break down into our teams for a team meeting.

So the day before I quit without notice was a Thursday, and we had our floor meeting, and my team won. Our manager accepted the trophy and said a bunch of nice words about how solid we are, good, dependable workers who "know the script and know the job", etc.

Floor meeting ends. He goes and puts the trophy in his office, out of our sight, and the team meeting comes to order.

"You are pathetic. You hear me? Pathetic. My guys are out there in idling trucks, burning gas, burning hours, because YOU can't book them appointments."

"You sit around getting fat and lazy on your nice cushy hourly wages, but if my guys don't get appointments, they don't make sales, and if they don't make sales, they don't get paid. These guys have families. KIDS. You're taking food away from kids."

And he told us we were all coming in tomorrow "an hour before your shift starts... no, two hours... for REMEDIAL training. And we'll keep training after the other teams show up and start their shifts if I think you need it, because there's no point putting you on the phones!"

And he told us that we shouldn't even dream of clocking in again until he told us to because we weren't getting paid for not booking appointments, and that if we didn't like it we didn't have to come in at all ever again.

And I thought: ah, at long last... honesty. Amazing.

So of course I took him up on his kind and generous offer and the next day, I slept in. I got up just before noon to listen to a succession of messages on my machine: one angry, one forgiving, and the last one pleading.

No one had shown up. His whole team quit without notice.

The pleading one he sounded actually scared, like he knew that he had messed up and he had messed up big time, but he didn't actually admit that or apologize or say he was out of line.

That afternoon I went and applied for what became my next job, and my favorite job ever.

I should have quit that job sooner. It was a bad job... a bad fit for me and also a business model that should not exist. The whole time I was there I had been thinking about applying at the place where I wound up working next. The bad place was just easier for me to walk to.

I feel a bit of pleasure at how his attempt to give the Alec Baldwin speech had blown up in his face but I don't feel proud for quitting the place in the easiest possible way at a tailor-made moment. Younger me had a real addiction to paths of least resistance.

I will say that one thing I *am* proud about, regarding my time at the company, was that the reason I had decent numbers was that I had figured out that pushy Christian evangelists were *easy* to keep on the phone and, with the proper phrasing, would agree to let Our Guy come by.

That would have eventually blown up on me because it kept me on-target for booking sales visits but didn't actually move any product and eventually one of The Guys might have spotted the thread that someone in our team kept sending him to be a captive audience for salvation.

I never came out and said anything like, "What time can I put down for our troubled sales rep to come by and hear the good news?" and my manager wasn't versed enough in the lingo or culture to understand the implications I dropped to plant the idea in the prospect's mind.