An I walk into the office, feeling fully alive, though filled with dread at the thought of having to hide my real personality for four hours every day. It's not so much the hiding as the feeling I get when I put on the indignant smile of the pacified, content worker. Every I put the costume on, the masquerade begins again, and I feel as if some little something within me is being siphoned off.
I sit at my assigned desk and begin calling.
"Hello. Could I speak to Mr. or Ms. Happy Consumer? Good Evening, my name is Ian Lynam, I'm calling you on behalf of T.C.I. of Pennsylvania, your cable company. Can you hear me okay, ma'am?
As a valued customer, we'd like to thank you for your support, we really do appreciate it. We'd like to offer you our new Encore channel at the mere price of...."
I ramble and add the proper inflection and emphasis when necessary to push Mr. or Ms. Meat and Potatoes into buying the fucking thing. I'd much prefer to tell the guy on the other end that I don't give a shit if he's pissed that T.C.I. keeps charging him extra for the cable guide. I don't though, because I've got a phone bill to pay, as well as printing costs and I'd really like to save enough to make it out traveling this fall. He buys the premium pay channel and my supervisor finalizes the deal. It's the first of sixteen I'll do tonight, spewing verbal excrement that's so 'marketable' that it's supposedly infallible.
I get a pat on the back from the girl next to me and glance around. He's there, staring at me again, just like the three previous nights. He's looking at me from across the room, a mirror image of myself facially, though he is almost devoid of life. The years of being in this business, moving from mere telemarketer up to monitor and supervisor have taken their toll. His body is bloated like that of a fish washed up on shore three days dead. His skin has the same dead cast to them and his eyes are the same blank, glasses-over gray.
I think it's the phones themselves that do it. It's noticeable at first, the pain of holding your ear to one for hours. People here think that their ears become slightly callous and so accustomed to the feeling that its natural. They're wrong. The phones are alive. Slowly, small ridges develop in the ear piece, leaving indentations that grow ever deeper. Then, in the middle of finalizing a sale, the pincers pop through the ridges, which are now cones one-half of an inch in diameter and three-quarters of an inch tall. As you make your way through the confirmation, they entwine and snake through your ear canal to the underlying bone. You never notice the pain, except for a slight cough and a tear in your eye, which you have deluded yourself into believing is the physical signal of your euphoria of making a sale and being that much closer to the commission they so pettily dole out. You take the phone away from your ear, and the gauzy vein-network connecting pincer to cone. You smile unknowingly as the network spreads quickly, insidiously silent and sensationless to your collar bone and down to your ribs.You pick up the phone again, reconnecting cone to pincer base, unwittingly giving the signal for the excavation to begin. Smaller, drillbit-like growths pulse from the network and harden within the next five minutes, while you go from non-answering phone number to wrong number. They point in towards the bone and quickly burrow through the bone to the nutrient-filled marrow beneath. There they stop, lodged in bone but for the tips, which minutely expand and suck slowly, carting marrow throughout the network, depositing some here and there for nutritional purposes. The majority of the first cargo flowing through the network passes through the pincer and slowly oozes from the base, where it is lapped up hungrily by the gauzelike vein network, which has hardened into tongue-like tendrils.
They burp loudly, but you pass it off as static on the line, and the phone purrs unnoticeably as it digests your marrow. Approximmately ten minutes later, it shits through the tendrils into the pincer base. It floats lazily through the network, occasionally prodded by cilialike appendages along its' course to the one inch length of bone that was just sucked dry. There it rests for a few hours as the network detaches itself from the initial drillbits and regenerates more in their stead. They begin the process again. The shit hardens, and slowly deteriorates into a gas that passes through the microscopic pores separating bone from flesh. Once topside, the gas cells liquidate, exposed to heavy amounts of liquified oxygen, and their toxicity washes throughout the body.
If exposed to the same phone for years on end for extended amounts of time, one will develop physical characteristics and afflictions similar to the supervisor I described. Common afflictions include a shortness of breath at all times, excepting the moment of sale, as well as a deadly cancer that is altogether quite incurable.
Most people are not fond of parasites, and in fact have a preoccupational aversion to them. I think we unconsciously acknowledge the practices of the phones and don't stay and make a career of telemarketing. There are some who take no notice, however, no matter how deep the feeling. They're the ones that stick with the business.
update
Ian is responsible for Migraine (a publisher, he is). He no longer telemarkets.