Many years ago I worked at a financial company that offered various investment opportunities to customers. Which was based on cold calling people who in genera

Many years ago I worked at a financial company that offered various investment opportunities to customers. Which was based on cold calling people who in general did not need them and telling them they did. (I was young and innocent at the time, and I didn't figure this out right away) (I had not even seen boilerroom) I worked in IT. We created a fantastic tool (it really was) that managed the entire process. You could put someone in front of a screen, given them a phone and the software would guide them. 1. Name, address, number to call. 2. Script for selling, whith branches depending on how the conversations was going. Obviously we could only cover small subsets of possible paths. (but it was reasonably good, since the conversations tended to be much the same) Let us say the conversation went well. In order to make the sale, a number of government and financial forms had to be filled out, 3. Highly guided and simplified data entry that would at the end of the process cause all forms and documents to be issued. 4. As part of the process prompts for specific things the customer had to be told to be in compliance 5. Documents go out by Fedex. (then some boring stuff) The concept was that you could take someone off the street, who had no training or understanding of the product or financial matters etc etc, put a phone in front of then start the software and bang. The reason I have bored you dear reader with all of that is coming up. At Christmas bonuses were paid out. People in sales got some huge $$$$$ cash bonuses and there were some expensive gifts in there as well. Including a horse,. Makes sense. The IT department... We got coupons for 50% off at Heavenly Ham. (or something like that). We were not amused.