Alright, we need a quitting story to reset things. This one's from 1998, and it's not mine, although I did witness it at close range.
My first real job was at a massive telemarketing company, trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to sell mail meters to businesses. After being trained to read the script, new telemarketers were held in a special area until we made a sale. This story is about Kwame, the sales runt of our litter.
Kwame’s Final Song
For every success in telemarketer hell there were hundreds of quiet disappointments. And with mounting failure came more unwanted attention from management. New employees that failed to convert their first score quickly began to feel the pressure to lose their sales virginity. The last holdout from our cohort was Kwame. Kwame was a nice guy, but a little too much ADD to hold down a sales job.
After two weeks without a single sale, Kwame was put back in training. When he came back, his calls were monitored by Marlene, the morbidly obese supervisor responsible for indoctrinating new hires. Often times, Marlene would sit next to Kwame, listening in on his calls - this is common in telemarketing, and the main reason phone salesmen don't easily quit - on a duplicate headset. As Kwame tried to work off the script, Marlene would whisper mostly-useless advice at him. Predictably, Kwame couldn’t handle juggling the script, a phone conversation and Marlene’s frantic wisdom (“Make them commit!”). As a result, his pitches grew ever more feeble and his sales remained unrealized.
After two more weeks of failure, it stood to reason that Kwame was not far from being put to pasture. It is surprising then, that his end came unexpectedly, and with more dignity than one might imagine.
For space reasons, Kwame had been released into the general population. On this particular day, he was sitting in the cubicle next to me. By now, Marlene had given up on live-coaching him, and had retreated to her office, where there was a TV that she used to watch her soaps. The theme of this day’s call list seemed to be sports-related businesses. Midway through the shift, Kwame drew a sports memorabilia shop. After making his halfhearted pitch unsuccessfully, Kwame brightened and asked if this year’s Topps Platinum Series MLB cards had arrived yet. What transpired next was a stunning example of reverse-telemarketing. Within minutes, the shop owner had apparently sweet-talked Kwame into buying something**.
There was one wrinkle, though: Kwame’s call was being monitored. Marlene the Manager had been listening, and she raced out from the back just as Kwame began reading off his credit card info into the phone. Marlene moved to intercept, but her pillowy body was too wide to fit down the narrow aisle of back-to-back telemarketers. You could hear the squishy collisions grow louder as she bounce-brushed hapless workers on her authority-fueled charge.
“Hang up the phone, Kwame!” Marlene commanded, eyes blazing as she plodded towards him. Kwame’s gaze traveled between Marlene, the credit card already in hand, and the rows of phone drones mumbling into their headsets around him. By the time he refocused on Marlene, it was clear he’d made a tactical decision to continue the transaction. Without saying a word, he ignored the supervisor’s imperative and continued feeding his credit card info into the phone.
Marlene verbally fired Kwame one second later. He nodded understandingly and put up a finger, asking for silence to complete his final transaction (for the record, this left his lifetime sales total with Marketing Solutions at an impressive minus one). Marlene, apparently drunk on the tiny amount of power she wielded, decided to escalate the situation, again ordering Kwame to hang up, and adding that he needed to pack up his shit immediately. Kwame took this with surprising equanimity, raising his voice only enough to be heard over the irate supervisor.
By this point, the altercation has attracted a crowd of interested onlookers. With Marlene so spectacularly deployed, everyone knew that the gestapo wasn't listening in. As a result, work ground to a halt as four-hundred depressed telemarketers watched the unfolding show. And what a show it was. Marlene was apoplectic, cursing out Kwame. For his part, Kwame was struggling to complete his purchase over her histrionics, and was simultaneously screaming his credit card information into the phone for all to hear.
In a perfect storm moment, Marlene dropped the N-word at exactly the same time Kwame’s credit card was declined. The mercurial Kwame finally exploded, splitting his fire between Marlene, the poor store owner, and Mastercard. After a furious minute of back-and-forth, Kwame rose and proceeded to leap on top of his swivel chair. “Fuck you!” he screamed into the phone. “Fuck you!” he repeated as he threw the phone's receiver at Marlene. The handset reached the end of its cord and jerked backwards with only centimeters to spare before striking Marlene between the eyes. Marlene pinwheeled backwards, jiggling mightily before dropping into what appeared to be a modified judo stance. “And fuck you!” Kwame added, jabbing a finger towards the small group of managers who’d appeared in response to the ruckus. Kwame rotated violently in my direction and leveled a finger at me. I flinched in anticipating of some overflow anger, readying myself to defend against a possible flip-kick.
At the last second, Mount Kwame became dormant. “You’re all cool,” he announced to the shocked crowd in a softer voice. Momentum spent, he hopped off the chair and headed for the front door, the last time any of us ever saw him.
For those interested in life at this place during the last wave of telemarketing, this is part of a larger story I wrote here:
https://www.ofmiceandmolecules.com/the-last-telemarketer.html**These were early internet days where this sort of thing still happened.
ETA: Kwame's FU Money status was unknown, but he drove a Huffy, so his expenses were low.