by Angela Russell

Created on: January 05, 2008

What was I thinking? I had a decent job with flexible hours. I got along with everyone I worked with and I did my job well. The pay wasn't great, but I was getting by. Then, I ran across a help wanted ad and sent my resume.

I was called for an interview and I wowed the owner. He told me I could start the very next Monday. Without thinking the decision through, I stopped by my current job on the drive home and told them that I was quitting. I was so excited. I had a great job with the potential to earn loads of money.

The job involved sales of an insurance alternative. It had a nice salary along with great commissions. I had done things similar and I knew I could be successful. The first three days were product knowledge training with a group of three others who were hired at the same time. After the training, they assigned us cubicles and we each go our own toll free number.

The job was to call people who had requested information and essentially read a script. The first inkling that something wasn't right was that I was not allowed to close a sale. I was only to read the script, if the customer showed interest I was instructed to transfer them to a team leader. In every sales job I have ever had, the goal was to close the sale, if you had trouble you might consider turning them over to someone else, but this job was different.

I made nearly 1000 telephone calls in a three day period. I was nothing more than a telemarketer, and I detest telemarketers. This was not what I signed up for. I was beginning to feel that the choice to take this job was a huge mistake. After making a thousand calls and getting absolutely nowhere, I began to question why out of one thousand people I had not received one single return call.

The law of averages seemed to be in my favor that at least one person out of one thousand would have returned my call. So I dialed my toll free number to ensure that my number was working correctly. When I dialed the number, a phone began ringing directly behind me. All of my calls were going to the girl in the cubicle directly behind me.

I was livid. She had been bragging about making over fifteen hundred dollars in commissions. Now I knew why. She was getting my calls. When I told management, they shrugged their shoulders and said they would check into it. I waited for hours, nothing. That day, they conveniently forgot to give me my call list. I asked, and was told "We'll get it to you." After a little more time and my blood pressure rising to the point of explosion. I made the decision to walk out.

I had been gone for 3 hours before they missed me. The owner called me and asked where I was. I told him the entire story of my calls going to someone else, not having a current call list and, how enraged that it made me that someone else was getting commissions that I had worked for. He asked me to come back. He promised it would be different.

I considered it, but decided that I'd rather be unemployed than work for a company so underhanded. I spent several months unemployed before I was able to find a good job with good pay. I never got paid a penny for the time I worked for that company, even after several phone calls and many promises that I would receive a check. They never sent me a penny.

I figured I'd chalk it up to a learning experience and vowed to think completely through any decision to change jobs in the future.

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