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It's not a pretty job, but someone has to do it. Most of the time, those people are either too young to know better or too desperate in our current economy to go without a paycheck until a better job comes around. They cold-call, they finagle, they try to sell things which are sometimes useful and sometimes utter crap, and they get cursed at, rejected, spat on, called names, and people hang up on them.

Some people call them demons; other people call them invasive and rude. They are the telemarketers (or telephone service representatives, to be PC), and no group has been so universally hated and loathed by so many people since the Inquisition tried to wipe out the Jews.

Telemarketers aren't abominations or a blight upon the world; as I stated before, they are normally just young, stupid kids who don't know any better or older, desperate adults who feel as though they can't do any better. Telemarketing firms take on the jobs that the companies which they represent don't have the balls to do themselves. Sure, that insurance place wants all of these people who have a credit card with a certain other company to buy their product, but they sure don't want to jeopardize their own assets by hiring and training on-site outbound callers to contact their potential customers. These companies are smart enough to realize that turnover is high and morale is low, so they have to outsource their work to telemarketing companies unscrupulous enough to prey upon people who are desperate for work.

Those who are desperate for any job at all fall for the slick lines of the advertising which telemarketing companies use. They claim to give new people huge starting hourly wages, but those new people are in for a rude awakening when they begin training and discover that unless they attain goals somewhere between the Himalayas and impossible, there is no way that they will make much more than minimum wage, plus a tiny bonus for showing up for work each day. The person in charge then reassures the duped new hires that the work is easy and the sales come quickly to people who read the script...which is, of course, a boldfaced lie, since the person who wrote the script was the lowest bidder and most likely couldn't sell ice-cold water in the desert.

If the scripts are bad, the rejections are worse. Even the most naive person knows a scripted call when he or she hears it. Some people are nice and give a telemarketer time to read through the entire thing before saying, "no sale." Others can be

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