Wednesday Factoid: Worst Job

Today's Wednesday Factoid is: What's the worst job you've ever had?

Worst job. Definitely can say the worst job I ever had was the one I quit after two days. I had a very brief stint as a telemarketer when I was in college.

I had been working at an ice cream parlor for my summer job and I got fired because I overslept one day. (Yep, immediately fired on my first offense, even though I'd never missed work or been late before that.) My parents had told me they didn't want me to work while I was taking classes because they wanted me to focus on school, so they paid my rent while I was. But if I wasn't taking classes--which I wasn't that first summer--I had to get a job. Losing that job meant I had to get another one quick.

I answered an ad in the paper and of course the person who called me back was a smooth-talking fool who complimented my speaking voice during the phone interview and said he was surprised to hear I hadn't worked in broadcasting. He called me and some others in for an interview but basically told us we were hired already, and then explained that the job was teeeeeechnically telemarketing but totally wasn't if you look at it differently. You know, you're just selling people things on the phone. But it's stuff they'd probably buy anyway, and it's for a good cause (paralyzed veterans!) so it's definitely different, right?

I was disappointed but decided to try it since I needed the money. I won't go into detail because you can probably imagine, but yeah, we just had to call people and give them the pitch and if they agreed to buy anything we'd get our manager to close the sale. I managed to sell a flagpole to a redneck. Later the boss was impressed because I hadn't yet learned to identify the symbols on the phone lists that should have allowed me to cherry-pick homeowners to call, and my sale hadn't been a homeowner.

Then I found out I had to meet some kind of minimum to get paid, and they could get away with that because they were a nonprofit or something? I don't remember. Even with all the polish on that tongue, the boss couldn't make that sound good, and I quit.

People said some completely indefensible things on the phone. Had a guy shame me and scold me for not saying his name right. Had a lady interrupt me after reading a goofy scripted joke about how they should buy our stuff instead of making K-mart rich, sneering that she WORKED at K-mart so BAD CHOICE. Had a dude ask for my name and then say he was going to look me up and make sure he called me at home while *I'M* trying to eat my dinner. C'mon dude. Very, very few people who do telemarketing jobs are doing it because they love to bother and hurt YOU. Even if you don't want what they're selling, be a nice person.

That was such a short-lived job that it didn't really have time to get terrible, but I guess since I quit after it was intolerable after not even a full two days, it's got to be the worst. I would say some aspects of my bookstore job were horrible, and later some aspects of working with an unreasonable project manager at my last administrative job were horrible, but overall being a telemarketer wins.