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Telemarketers are people - just not very nice people. How do I know? Because I used to repeatedly interrupt people's dinners for a living and I absolutely hated it.

I worked for a British telecommunications company, cold calling people at all hours in order to get them to switch their home phone account. I was terrible, mainly because I'm an overly-polite person and inconveniencing people for a living is not my dream job. Trying to get people to calm down enough to try to sell to them was not worth the meagre wages I was given.

The people I worked alongside were mostly like me: young, little work experience and desperate for money. Some mis-sold to customers, switching their phone account despite the customer repeatedly saying they weren't interested. Others would deliberately antagonise the ones they didn't like, putting them back in the queue to be called an hour later. Some "agents" (as we were called) got through the grinding boredom by playing games. One game a colleague played was to tell every customer that he loved them at the end of every call. Another game was to challenge a colleague to integrate an obscure word (penguin, bin-lids) into the conversation.

We were given a script to talk through which we had to repeat over and over again. Unfortunately the deals we were offering were so uncompetitive the customer's frequent reply was that they had exactly the same deal from their current provider for less. That was one of the most grinding things about the job - I truly believed that what we were doing was completely pointless. All the training and pep talks in the world couldn't change the fact that we were selling poor deals. I've had other sales jobs where I believed the product could benefit the customer and sold very well but its impossible to lie to people and tell them they'll benefit from something I know will make them worse off.

Our work environment didn't help either. We were in what can only be described as a large shed with a tin roof. When it started to rain, the noise was deafening and made it difficult to hear the customer. Hot desking every day meant that you never knew whether you were going to get a working headset or computer.

We were just trying to make a living from a fairly awful job but at the end of the day we chose to annoy people for a living. The low wages and poor working conditions attracted low-skilled, badly motivated employees who couldn't cope with a constant stream of abuse from customer who (rightly) were not happy about missing the game on TV. Yes, we are people. But if telemarketers deserve any sympathy its because a lot of them have been forced into the job by the recession. Desperation is the only justification I can possibly give for taking one of the most soul-destroying jobs out there. Thankfully I don't work in the industry anymore but I am sympathetic on the rare occasions I get a telemarketing call. Then I tell them to take my number off their call list and hang up.

Learn more about this author, Nic Edwards.
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