Consider...

I recall being the recipient of unsolicited phone calls, the satisfaction of disappointing the sales rep on the phone, “I’d gotten over,” “I’d triumphed,” “I’d not been duped,” by “the system.”

Now: I am that disembodied voice calling in the cyber wilderness.

If you’ve received a call from me, you’re a “new mover,” which in the corporate sense means you have a pulse and you “moved.” That’s your fault, not mine. Register with www.donotcall.gov and the calls stop. We use a software system, Gryphon, that screens registrants and we cannot legally call you to solicit business.

Call night is blood sport: it is not for the squeamish. You test your mettle with every phone call. Despite the positive spin on the scripted spiel, someone uses you to vent their frustrations at: life, their employment, their lover, their children, their neighbor and feel vindicated by the fact I did not set an appointment with them.

Consider: making your living like this. Consider that if I don’t make an appointment, I don’t have the chance to sell, therefore I don’t get paid. Commission-only can be lucrative if you’ve goaled for such a career, you have a natural “gift of gab,” and you’re likeable.

Consider: the person behind the spiel had a junior chemistry set, a microscope, a telescope, an erector set, a tool set, an electronics kit and a drafting kit all when my neighborhood was deteriorating with the drug war that was never designed to be won; an intact nuclear family surrounded by broken homes. I was one of the blessed ones that read Peanuts and Shakespeare, whose heroes were Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medger Evers, Einstein, Asimov, Gamow, Cousteau and Sagan.

Consider: better ways to say you’re not interested than to take your bad day out on the disembodied person trying only to make a living after his living was conveniently shipped overseas.

Consider. Reciprocity is almost a universal law (like gravity).