JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

I hated telemarketing, but I was good at it — for a while

‘I joked with the men and flirted with the women.’

This is the second of a four-part series on Goldstein’s early life as a telemarketer. The first instalment is at nationalpost.com/goldstein. Our sales manager was a man named Ray, and if you made two or three sales a day, you were doing OK and Ray wouldn’t scream at you. Ray was a loud-mouthed bearded man who often wore skin-tight Hawaiian shirts. One of Ray’s responsibilities was keeping us inspired with pep talks. He’d explain to us that when he first started at the paper, he was sitting right where we were, and that now, seven years later, he made as much money as a plumber, and that we all had the opportunity to make as much as a plumber.

“I’m going out tonight and eating a big fat steak,” he would say. “Just like the way at the end of a day a plumber does.”

Another way Ray had of inspiring us was with a bonus system that involved games of fun and chance. As if working in telephone sales weren’t bad enough, Ray had invented a whole incentive strategy that revolved around Yahtzee dice. Seeing grown men and women rolling those dice all excited was so bad that, to this day, I cannot hear the cry of “Yahtzee” without feeling faint. The weird thing was though, that from my very first week at

The Gazette, I was surprised to discover I had a natural gift for sales, sometimes selling up to 10 subscriptions over the course of a shift.

I got on the phone with people and I made them want to listen. I joked with the men and flirted with the women. I bundled them up in my good, strong telemarketing arms and tossed them into the air only to land back down with a brand-new

Gazette subscription. I would look around at the other sad sacks in the room and wonder how they could go on just scraping by with their two or three sales a day. Telemarketing had been my backup plan, but now I found myself faced with the uncomfortable fact that it was what I was truly good at. There was a bell on Ray’s desk for when you made a sale — and when I made a sale, I had a special way of hitting it with the balls of my fingers that made it sound as crisp and clean as a glockenspiel. I always kept to the one tap per sale rule. I respected the bell — not like some of the other guys who rang the crap out of it like five-year-olds riding their first two-wheeler.

Eventually though, as happens to all the mighty, I fell. Even now I can’t explain it. Hubris, my diet — perhaps I started taking myself too seriously and lost my sense of fun. Who knows. But whatever the case, I suddenly found myself so desperate for sales that at the end of a shift, still with nothing, I would order the paper to my own address and then cancel it the following week.

It’s a very real thing, the stink of desperation. It’s an actual odour — and people can smell it over the phone line. Your jokes become a little more hurried and forced, your confidence a little more false. Your pauses, more awkward. I soon found myself gazing longingly at the filled-out order sheets clutched in the fist of the new office superstar, a 17-year-old whose phone name was Candy, who would stroll past my desk humming Taking

Care of Business. Now, when I came back from the bathroom during my shift, Ray would ask me what the hell took so long. The toilet, he said, was for closers.