What I did this summer was...

While home for the summer after my first two semesters of college, I found it necessary to find temporary employment. Of the half-dozen places to which I applied, only one scheduled an interview with me: a "research" company which shall remain nameless. "What does one do when employed at such a company?" you may ask. Well, my position was euphemistically labeled, "telephone interviewer," aka: those people who call you during dinner with an opinion survey. My dreams had at long last been fulfilled! Actually, I didn't ever have dreams about scoring such a job, and if I had, I now realize they would have been nightmares.

It was easy enough to get hired (it should have tipped me off when the people interviewing after me came in ripped jeans and dirty tank tops... in fact, my interviewer was wearing baggy jeans and gangsta-style sneaks), and I foolishly thought, "How bad can it be talking to people on the phone?" This is the Hannah that still has to work up enough courage to call and order pizza. This oughta be good...

I breezed through the training like I was born to use that computer survey system, and the training supervisor seemed spitefully amused at my light-hearted wit. Then it was time to make real calls... to real angry people. And the blood pressure started rising. It wasn't such a big deal when people turned me down, I mean we get paid by the hour and there are no quotas because they want legitimate survey results, but I soon learned that it takes a very specific kind of person to handle a job like that: the kind with tattoos and missing teeth and tobacco breath. That kind of person really excels. I'm pretty sure if that job was all I had to look forward to for the rest of my life, I'd smoke too.

Words cannot describe the dread I began to feel as I prepared for each shift (hours are voluntary - just call to sign up). It didn't take long to discover that more than two hours of smelling my smoker coworkers gave me a headache and after four hours of sitting at that computer I wanted to cry. In fact, with one particularly irate batch of registered voters, I did just that. I'm a tender person as it is, and after an already tolling day, an ignorant man insulting my intelligence for some coworker's negligence was just too much. And it's difficult to respect the supervisors when the most advanced word in their vocabularies is "verbatim" and they often misuse it in their sentences anyway. Finally, I just stopped signing up for hours - and what a relief it has been.

Anyway, I have just a few points I want to make with all this narrative. Obviously, I want to encourage you all to be kind on the phone. I know it's annoying when someone wants to conduct a twenty-minute survey with you but please don't yell; it's just his/her job. So if you must decline, do it in a way that does not belittle the messenger. In the time between calls, as I looked around at the older people who have been telephone interviewers for years, I knew that nobody worked there because they liked the job. It's just the only way these people have to support their children and pay the bills. Now, more than ever, I am truly grateful that I have a future and it starts with my next semester of college. I will never go back to that dump, or any other such job. I learned what poverty smells like (a mix of cigarettes and scalp grease), and whether I live alone or have a large family I intend to avoid that smell forever. I will make something of myself, and that is a choice.