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The Money Which Is So Low I Am Embarrassed To Have My Name
Connected To It
Hours: anytime you call, inbound
Places: anywhere, usually Canada, USA
Training: none
Type of phone: manual
Pay: low commission only, 7% often
Legit or illegit: completely legit
Security: I don't know
Pressure: not much
Victoria. 40, psychic
I worked for one of the famous telephone lines
in the country doing fortune telling. No one calls it that anymore, except that is what it is.
I was insulted at a
party a few weeks ago. The guy says to me, do you really believe in all that stuff. Let me tell you, I do, and I have been
doing it since I was a teenager earning a lot more than the telephone service paid me.
I am a honest woman and run
this side business according to what older people told me to do when I started. For example, you never talk about illness,
dying or death, no matter what if you have a good training or just any sense in your head at all, because to talk about illness
is against the Criminal Code.
Also, my husband always was in our home when clients came to see me. At a certain point
I just never saw male clients because there were so few of them anyway in thoe old days, though nowadays more men may be going
to psychics.
Seemed like more trouble than it was worth, always having to have my husband about.
How did the telephone
service work? the employers always paid me the right amount. It was the structure of the work that sucked. For example, they
run ads very late at night. If they have two or three hundrerd people call wanting a reading, then they have to have two or
three hundred people sitting by their phones, all bright eyed and bushy tailed in the middle of the night.
This sucks,
really.
The calls quickly taper off, and though you make three dollars and fifty cents for a ten minute reading, they
only give you seven per cent, I cannot be bothered to stay up late for such wages. They keep a few select workers on full
time, and there is a huge staff who earn maybe ten bucks a month though I came to this when it was drying up.
I never
had any problems with any of the people, just the money, which is so low I am embarrassed to have my name connected to it,
because anyone who can read cards can work at a coffee shop or a restaurant, split the take with the owner, and do better
in one day than this seemed to pay in a whole month.
I am supposed to be rich, ha ha. I have Jupiter conjoined Altair
with three trines to it in my eighth house of money, and stars on my Mounts of Apollo. A double fate line curving to the Mount
of Moon and throwing a branch off to the Mount of Jupiter, and it has never happened.
Actually, I have become more
religious in the conventional sense as I get older and have been refusing readings for some time from my own friends in the
business. Except for the large money, many other things came true for me, quite specifically. It influences your head too
much. If eighty per cent comes true, you just sit around waiting for the rest of it to happen.
Mostly people talk
about money and work directions, and love problems, usually triangles.
I got into the phone line because I thought
it would be good when I was working around the house. You can't do anything else, take a bath, wash the dishes, walk the dog,
cause you have to be professional when that phone starts ringing.
My great Aunt Jessica was a Tarot card reader, and
carried a deck around with her most everywhere. She was rich and didn't need to do this for the money.
The field lately
has been getting too flooded. My advice to consumers is test the waters first. You do not need to spend a lot of money at
first or at anytime. However, some astrologers do spend an hour or two making and studying their charts before they even see
you.
I always found people when I was a young girl by work of mouth. That is my advice which everyone probably already
knows.
In the future I see myself in another type of business. I have small perfect triangles all over my palms so
a new line of work will be no problem for me.
Andrew, 38, ex-insurance executive
I worked at one of those auto-dialler places that do insurance and telephone companies
mostly.
I have gone back to university and do not know how I will pay all my bills, except
that I am lucky to have a good wife who has a stable job with Bell.
This place paid rock-bottom, about $7 an hour.
They did a lot of commission altering. for example, most places like this have a weekly
rate for the commission based on how well the sales are going on that campaign.
If the sales were going well, the bosses changed the rate in the middle of the shift!
Sometimes in the middle of the hour! This made it hard to keep track of your rates.
I would never have bought insurance like this, in a two minute sale, you don't know
where the call is coming from and you can never speak with the person who sold you the policy.
When I was a boy on the Lakeshore, our insurance man came right to our house,
and sat down in the kitchen and talked to my mom and dad. He came from a famous name company that had a big building
in downtown Montreal and my parents knew him for years. The way things used to be done can be the
best way, sometimes.
Back to the high-pressure place. It was a lot of pressure for not much money.
You could be washing dishes at a submarine sandwich joint for less stress on the head. One night two of the top salespeople
broke out into a bad argument, they got up to their feet and almost were punching one another out.
The managers whisper in their ears to compete with one another, to get those sales
up. The managers too have to compete with one another. There was listening in on all the calls from several areas.
I thought that was against the law, we are only told when the clients who are using our company are tapping in. Not
when our own managers and bosses are cutting in.
The competition is so fierce that even the day and night shifts are turned against
one another. One night, a young girl who was always better than the day shift employees was lectured for being the slowest
on her team of four that night. She was working with two of the best on the floor, and her sales were still higher than
day shift.
You pick on the weakest to increase the fear of being fired, so the fear will get
the sales up. The girl started to cry. Instead of backing off, the tears seem to make the boss want
to dominate and control the situation. Any jerk who sells a lot thinks he has great people skills, whether or not he
does or not.
Since almost offices in the city paid the same or more, she had nothing to lose by
flipping out, which she did. Over a hundred people in the room, including the entire French end of the office, stopped
to listen to the argument.
I'll never forget what she said, when she left the room that night. She spoke for
a lot of us myself included.
I am not telling you. Sometimes pain requires privacy. Not listening in
on others' conversation. And everyone would know where this happened, too.
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