In my entire 30 years in the work force, here are some of my best job experiences.

1. From January, 1988 to March, 1989, I had worked out of the branch office of a medical telemarketing firm. Their clients were the major drug companies and I was contacting doctors, nurses, dentists, and other health care professionals nationwide to market their products by phone; mainly sending out samples to their offices. It sure beat keeping decision makers on the phone for lengthy surveys. I used to organize my call sheets by day, time of day, and results in order to make my calling days more productible. My first boss there was fantastic. She would give me leftover food from some of the meetings that we had and she evendrove me to the train station when we were going home. But one day, the bomb fell on me. She was being transferred to another office that the had company opened up just outside of Dallas for six months, and we got this manager from the main office, whom I didn't like at all. Then one day, and all of a sudden, the Vice President of Sales comes into our offices and tells us that the buidling's management decided not to renew their office lease and that the office was closing the following Friday. We were then on the phone trying to see if we could get other jobs. I do remember telling the manager that I didn't want to leave. The next day after it had closed, I took a trial run out to the main office just to see how long it would take me to get there. It was in an area where there was no public transportation, and it took me a little more than an hour to walk to the nearest train station. Because of this, I could not

continue to work there.

2. From May of 1990 to July of '91, I worked for a market research company in downtown Philadelphia as a telephone recruiter. I had wanted to work in the city again and it was a good opportunity at first. I mainly recruited doctors for focus group discussions and one-on-one interviews. I had to use whatever contact sheets the client sent us, plus do my own by checking other references that they had there. If the doctor wasn't in or was too busy with patients, I was able to leave a return phone number for the doctor to call back on. I was also able to utilize some of my clerical skills such as writing up and mailing out confirmation cards, noting my call results on paper, and so forth. If a client did not provide us with a call record sheet, I was able to go back and use some of my previous contact sheets and recruit the people who couldn't come to the last group to the new group. I explained what the group was all about and I had to ask them a few short screening questions. Then one day, we were all called into a meeting and we were told that they were changing the pay scale from a strait salary to an hourly rate based on the number of recruits that we got. This I just couldn't simply accept. Even another girl in my office said that it was just like working on commission. I then decided to look for something else. I needed a guaranteed salary and I just could not accept this change. Five months after the meeting, I found a job as a dietary aide at a downtown Philadelphia hospital. At first I had missed the place, and I did go back there on my day off from the hospital. But it was the same old thing, I had made a big mistake there at going back, and I was better off out of there.

Learn more about this author, Lisa Fagan.
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