You come into the world clueless and hopefully, if you’ve paid any attention at all, you have slightly more understanding of life by the time you leave it.
I regret sometimes that we can’t learn in a way that’s numerically measurable like you can in simulations such as role playing games. We’d be able to tell where our deficiencies are at a glance and tailor progress as we go. Since accumulating knowledge and skills is more abstract than simple numbers on a page, we’re all left to generally eyeball everything about ourselves. Personal growth overall is virtually assured but you never really know how far you’ve come – or sometimes even in which direction.
When I was a cynical smart ass 22-year-old, I worked at a call centre for a telephone research company. Hey, it was an entry level job and everyone has to start somewhere. It was a fresh period of discovery too and I was just starting to get the hang of this adulthood crap. I was in the midst of change but already feeling wizened.
In my stint as a market research interviewer, I found the number one skill you developed was anger management because let’s be honest: it’s probably one of society’s most hated roles, right behind parking enforcement officer and anyone who operates photo radar. Once you got used to being abjectly dehumanized all day in the same crude ways, you began to find a curious amusement in the consistent patterns. Between outgoing cold calls generated by an auto dialler I passed some of my time writing scraps of poetry, pieces of narrative, casual observations and other highbrow musings.
Evidently I kept some of them. I rediscovered the product of one particular shift as I went through an old storage bin the other day. It appears to collate common types of encounters I had over the phone and damn, did I ever consider myself a phenom of wit. For some context, we were outsourced to collect consumer opinion data by mostly Stateside ad agencies so the majority of our work was calling into the US. Written sometime circa 2004 in a downtown Edmonton office building, here are – verbatim – the investigative labors of that voice on the other end of the phone:
“Field Report on Discernible Respondent Sub-species Based on Behavioral Characteristics”
Paranoid
Under the distinct impression that their pathetic life is actually important enough to be the constant target of numerous mortal dangers coming to get them through the phone. Usually suffers from “The Taliban are After Me” syndrome. Favorite sayings: ‘Who is this?’; ‘That’s kind of personal’; ‘Who do you work for again?’
Bitter
Either abused by everyone they knew when they were young or are American through and through. Lazy, selfish, surly and exceedingly rude, this person’s most important day is once every week on the holy day. Sundays this person worships their tolerant, loving Christian god by bitching as hard as they can bitch at any awful heretic attempting to disturb the sermon on the couch with the beer in front of God’s glorious TV.
Greedy
Absolutely will not, under any circumstances, allow their “opinions” to leave their lips without some kind of monetary gain. It can be supposed that the Prize Drawing for Cash and Products [always mentioned in our recruitment blurb] was implemented solely for this person’s interest. Favorite sayings literally include ‘What’s in it for me?’ and ‘How much will I be paid for this?’.
‘Click’
Speculated to be either a close relative to Bitter or even that very type itself in disguise, little is known of this person, as the only input ever received from them is ‘Hello’.
Stupid
By far the single most common type of all. Far too varied and with far too many highly developed and established tribes to be able to be accurately documented at any reasonable length. However, some indicators are statements such as ‘I’m just walking out the door’, ‘We don’t watch TV [with television audible in background]’, ‘We don’t want any [after hearing the intro blurb clarification that we weren’t selling anything]’ and ‘Hello… What..? Oh! Uh, me no speak-a English. Gracias’. Often stupid will resort to a combination of any or all of these.
Stupider
Tom Green wannabes who delight in being the sickest, most immature buffoons ever to walk the earth. Make a toilet seat look like a five-star genius.
Fax
A most friendly and appealing personality. Obviously the most sociable and intelligent of all the respondent types.
Complete
The successfully recruited respondent. Hardly frequent enough to mention.
[Answering] Machine
Three known types exist:
- The moronic babblings of either a lame setup accompanied by cheesy music or an unintelligibly screaming child.
- The hostile and/or obsessive impulse to use up almost all of the message time telling “phone solicitors” to go away.
- The hollow, impersonal use of automated answering services that sound like Stephen Hawking.
*These stated types represent a mere fraction of the existing sub-species thus far encountered. Further research warranted.
As I cringe through my blindly confident wordcraft of almost 20 years ago, this sample of youth conveniently foreshortens an evolution of personality, writing style and my approach to other people. It’s always handy (if a little embarrassing) to confront a preserved copy of your past self. This is pretty much the closest you get to empirically indexing personal growth.
Direction of growth also depends on what matters to you currently, and that itself changes over time. I don’t regret my judgemental attitude so much as I regret my run-on sentences and awkward jokes. Also, what the fuck is a “five-star genius”? That doesn’t even make sense.
One allowance worth mentioning in the respondents’ defense is that America has always been a culture apart from us here in Canada and we don’t have to deal with the kind of aggressive marketing they experience down there. Much of why they answered their phones so obnoxiously is because they were already bombarded with daily junk calls trying to sell them shit. I think I was aware of that even at the time but when your interaction with others is filtered by a phone line and many boring minimum wage hours, you default to snap judgements by habit.
Of course the natural question now is to ask what dog turd this writing will look like 20 years in the future. I bet I’ll find it pretentious.
Well, as long as I’m less clueless by then. Or dead. Either is better than sitting in a call centre for hours reciting monotonous survey questions to grouchy strangers who don’t care enough to contrive believable excuses but also don’t just hang up. You know, I don’t think that job was very good for personal growth at all now that I think about it.
There's No Going Back 