WRITE SOME NUMBS, BITCH! EXCERPT # 2

Mine was a thoroughly lyrical walk that summer morning from the University Bridge, along the Ship Canal and the northern end of Lake Union, past a thicket of houseboats, docks, the Gasworks [an old cracking plant prettified into a kind of Toys R Us larger than life-size Leger sculptures] wharves and blackberry bushes, that mile and a half to my first job interview in a quarter of a century when the 30 K contract for the translation of Genscher’s memoirs disappeared and I suddenly needed a few hundred dollars extra per week. Seattle summers certainly are the best

Adventures in Telemarketing…a first impression

The sounds emanating from the main room seemed pleasant enough... a bit of laughter, a harmonious susurrus produced by the mingling male and female voices, a certain undulation of sounds as though at a prayer wheel, the imprecations of the religion of business, the prayer for a sale.                                           My first sight ever of a telemarketer came  - as I was handed an application -  of a person, wearing a head-mike,looking at a computer screen by the cubbyhole of the front window,]: a name and address appeared on the screen, the sales person at the computer confirmed a sale...If it was that simple! Anna, interviewer and supervisor to be, was to disabused me of that impression at  once.                                                                    From my perspective at the entrance to this large rectangular space, the computer hearts of telemarketing operation were flickering and whirring blue and white electric light will o'the-wisps at the near end of the room; there, Anna and her monitor had their station, a moveable standup screen separating her from the five-pronged cubicles at the far half of the room. The remainder of the right side of the front part of the room was reserved for a table full of packets of sales slips, and for monitors for the verifiers. Surprisingly unSeattle-like, A.C.S. failed to provide coffee for its employees in that coffee-intense trade…