5 ms·
In high school I actually worked at one of these organizations. It was the typical boiler room you might imagine: Grubby, dirty office space in a forgotten ret
by Multiplayer 7y ago
In high school I actually worked at one of these organizations. It was the typical boiler room you might imagine:
Grubby, dirty office space in a forgotten retail center with dingy cubicles consisting of a beat up desk, a phone and a stack of 3x5 cards to call.
We were taught to do just about everything we could to convey that we were active duty officers calling for donations, without actually saying that.
Middle class citizens were all too often happy to donate or, in our case, buy tickets to what I assume was a non-existent fund raiser because of who they assumed we were. The whole system felt 100% fraudulent from top to bottom.
I lasted about 3 months and moved onto telephone sales for a major retailer. Back then if you had a deep voice you could make way better money than your friends working at fast food, etc.
I can recommend telephone cold calling as a means for getting an extremely harsh but powerful lesson in reading people via voice tone very very quickly. :)
- sokoloff 7y agoIn hindsight, I can now recall that I gave money to these kinds of operations several times in my 20s. (This was back when answering the phone for unknown callers was a thing I did.)
- dillonmckay 7y agoI honestly think it is a valuable skill, but, yeah, lasting 90 days is impressive. I had 3 stints at telemarketing, my first was when I was 14 years old (summer job).
- Havoc 7y agoWhy deep voice?
- anigbrowl 7y agoMany people perceive a deep, masculine voice as authoritative. It's just the same way a big musclebound guy will be taken more seriously than a physically frail person saying the same thing. We haven't evolved as much as we like to imagine.
- nkurz 7y agoYou're near Oakland, right? Have you seen the movie Sorry to Bother You? If not, I think you might enjoy it. It's an Oakland focused telemarketing spoof, and one of the better things I saw last year: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sorry_to_bother_you_2018 https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sorry_to_bother_you_2018. It's not perfect, but it's definitely original.
- anigbrowl 7y agoI've seen it, but thanks for the reminder to give it another viewing.
- ip26 7y agoLike he said, they were supposed to imply they were police officers, as it was some kind of (pretend) police charity. A masculine sounding voice would obviously help, compared to a prepubescent boy's voice.