Working in telemarketing… (PART 1)

Yes, I know you already feel bad for me having to work in telemarketing, but let me explain. I got my first job at a sandwich shop named Subway. Worked there for a year, graduated high school, and needed something higher paying. I was a little desperate so I applied basically everywhere that would hire someone with a HS diploma and minimal experience. I stumbled upon a call center that vowed to “do good for the community”. They allegedly called up customers and asked them for donations to various local and national causes. Anything from Police/ Fire Fighter Department, to toddlers with cancer, to elderly people who need homes and food. I stupidly applied, got hired the same week ( that should’ve raised flags) and was thrown into training. What was really scummy to me was that these “donations” were bullshit. Let’s say you donate $10, we only give around 10-15% of that $10 to the actual cause. The rest was commission for the employee, to the call center, and about $2 was to ship an envelope and brochure to your house so you can put your measly $10 in and send it back. Sounds simple and dandy right? Well like how our chief in command says, WRONG. What really made this job a little more challenging though was that the call center was so money hungry every employee would have on 2 different headsets on, talking to 2 different customers at the same time using an “auto dialer” ( basically we would press a button on the keyboard to give the customer a response or do a specific action). About 90% of the time, you were dealing with 2 idiots at the same time who can’t grasp simple concepts such as using their phone to fucking communicate. I would take about 300 calls a day In total, and would be absolutely drained by the end of the fucking day. Some of the more common calls that everyone at the shithole despises are with old ass fucking people who A. Can’t fucking hear and say “WHAT??” , “HUH…HUH??” B. Talk way too fucking slow and go on for about 15 minutes about how their family doesn’t visit them anymore, or their 401k is almost down to $0. C. Old people who purposely try to fuck with you and your mind by saying stupid shit in the most annoying tones, such as when we ask them if they’d like to donate to their local Police Department, and they reply with ” I WAS RAPED BY A COP, MY WHOLE FAMILY WAS RAPED BY COPS LAST WEEK, WHY WOULD WE DONATE TO THEM?!” Bruh 🤦🏻‍♂️. I would then press 43 on the keyboard to put them on our “Do Not Call List”. Speaking of the Do Not Call List( DNC), one of the more annoying things would be when we’d get people to commit to a donation but as we were handing them off to another department to verify their address and donation amount, they’d say ” ill donate this time but I want to be placed on the do not call list RIGHT AFTER!”, we actually can’t do that. I’d then have to put her on the DNC and wouldn’t get that sale. Don’t even get me started on the people we’d call that would get “political” on us, this would specifically happen when we’d be calling to raise funds for the police department and for some odd reason, THEY WOULD THINK WE ARE COPS. So they would deny the donation then would say something like “stop shooting black kids” or “i support Black lives matter instead” , or ” if I donate does that mean you won’t pull me over for drunk driving later this week?”. Oh my fucking god. These fucking people. Now, the pay. I made about $9.15 an hour, and although we made commission, if we didn’t hit our quota for the week, we didn’t get any commission no matter how many sales we had that week. What would really make it difficult was that our supervisors would purposely make our jobs harder and pay smaller by raising the amount of sales we need on easier campaigns that tend to bring in a lot of sales, and thus having our commission be cut no matter if we had 1000 sales or 10 sales for the fucking week. Another shady thing about this very shady call center, was that all these “causes” or whatever, were most likely fucking fake as well. After I quit, I googled these “organizations” and nothing but complaints to BBB about how they were scammed into donating to a fake organization and would like to report them,so I was basically part of a fucking scam. I wasn’t at all fucking surprised, but it was pretty fun watching them get raided by the FBI and get shut down though!😁 Let me know if you guys want some more, I could type up more of these all day because… well because I had to deal with bullshit people all day, 40+ hours a week, for 3 months.