James' World 2

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In my life, I’ve personally witnessed three elite salespeople at work. The first was in the Johnson County, Iowa, jail, where I spent July 4 and 5 some years ago for reasons I’d rather not go into here. It was so overcrowded that we had to sleep head to foot on foam pads, and on the second day, as the discharge process dragged into the afternoon and hangovers set in, the inmates became restive. Among us was a nondescript heavyset guy who started to hold forth: Y’all want to know how to disable a burglar alarm with aluminum foil? Want to know how to cook meth without using fertilizer? Did you know there’s a way to open the door of a squad car from the inside? Soon, almost the entire jail had gathered around him like kindergartners at story time, listening raptly as he dispensed criminal wisdom. Possibly he was making it all up as he went; a guy lying on the floor next to me with his forearm over his eyes would periodically mutter that’s not true, uh-huh, that’s a great way to burn down your house, that kind of thing. But if anything, that only increased my admiration—this guy had installed himself as top dog just by bullshitting.

I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States. I can’t prove it; this was around 20 years ago, and I haven’t kept any of my framed “top seller” certificates or the daily sales sheets showing me already hitting 350 percent of my weekly quota by Tuesday afternoon. But the company I worked for had one of the biggest telemarketing divisions in the world, and during my hot streak there were several weeks in which I was the top salesperson in the entire company. Believe me or not, but who’d lie about being good at telemarketing? It’s like falsely claiming to have gonorrhea.

What’s strange is how completely I’d forgotten about this period in my life in the decades since, as one “forgets”—maybe represses is the more accurate word—certain embarrassing exes or haircuts. But it all came back to me recently, when I watched the HBO docuseries Telemarketers. If you’ve ever worked in telemarketing, you’ll immediately recognize the setting: the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit office building at the edge of town, the empty liquor bottles piled up in the men’s room, a time capsule of a world that came and went nearly unnoticed. You may even recognize yourself in the grainy VHS footage: an alternative but otherwise identical self, hunched over in an upholstered cubicle, rattling off canned rebuttals to some baffled retiree as you mime the jack-off motion for the amusement of the temporarily bankrupt drug dealer in the next cubicle. It was the Y2K-adjacent midpoint between the door-to-door salesmen of the boomer era and the present-day dystopia of A.I.–enhanced robocalling—the last few years before American credulity (and disposable income) was decisively strip-mined by post–9/11 disillusionment, the emergence of the internet, an economy that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, and, well, petty cheats like me, the bedrock of this nation.

I became a telemarketer only because I’d bombed out of every other job in Iowa City, from making the federal minimum wage at a video arcade in Iowa’s largest shopping mall (fired for abusing the “free game” key) to working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour adult video store (fired for being “too horny”). There was unlimited demand for telemarketers in those days; this was in the early aughts, at the tail end of the long-distance wars, when more than 25 million people a year were switching phone companies in pursuit of lower rates on long-distance calls, a sentence that might as well be written in ancient Sumerian to anyone under 30. You didn’t really even have to apply back then. You just put your name in and they told you what day you were starting.

Everyone said that telemarketing was the worst job in town, and for once, everyone was right. Your very first day, you understood that this was the culmination of a long series of bad decisions, the consequences of which you thought you’d escaped—but no, you realized as you walked past the cars in the parking lot with trash bags duct-taped over shattered windows and avoided eye contact with the loiterers in the break room who checked the change slot after you bought a drink from the Coke machine—you’d only put them off until right now. After a short training period that seemed designed mostly to weed out the people who weren’t capable of sitting in a chair for four hours at a time (about half the applicants), we spent some time listening in on the calls of top sellers. I expected them to be devilishly persuasive, modern-day snake charmers, but there didn’t seem to be much to it. They’d tell people they could save them money on their phone bills. If the prospect said they weren’t interested, the seller would either keep talking as if they hadn’t heard or, if a hang-up seemed imminent, recite a “resistance buster” like “I am going to send YOU a check!” The abruptness of this non sequitur, half-shouted over the tail end of the conversation, almost always derailed the lead’s attempts at disengagement, and few people could resist asking, “For how much?”

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Illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo

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