Ring, ring

If you want to develop a thick skin, I recommend taking a job as a tele-researcher. This is a slightly more respectable career choice than a telemarketer- as you are trying to conduct surveys instead of sell products- but that distinction will be lost on the 90 percent of people whom you will interrupt while they are eating dinner.

Unfortunately, I speak from personal experience. I was in college, I was poor and only work study job I could find was cleaning bathrooms at 4 a.m. on campus. And market research actually had something to do with my major- so it would look good on my resume. (Stupid, young, naive me!)

Pretty much hated it. I sat next to a middle-aged woman named Eloise McNair who had frizzy red hair and smelled overwhelmingly like tea tree oil. It was when erectile dysfunction drugs were brand new on the market- so guess who got to do the Viagra survey?!

I had to ask couples over 50 about their sex lives in order for the drug companies to better market their product to said couples. So fun. And the survey lasted a painful half-hour. Who has that much time? If someone hung up, the survey was incomplete and I wouldn't meet my quota.

There was this younger guy there that was golden at it. He was like an old-fashioned snake oil salesman. Listening to him work was like magic- he was a tele-artist! He had these different personas he would whip out- each one tailored to get him results. He would be the pathetic, starving student; the cute grandson type; the angry and outraged "lets-stick-it-to-the-man-together" guy; the flirty, "you-have-a-great-voice" housewife-charmer; the "we need your opinion, sir" flatterer; etc. They kept a leaderboard of who was the most successful research up on the wall for all of us to see. He was always number one. I'm sure now he is out there somewhere as owner of a successful string of car lots.

I stuck it out a few months, but truth be told, only because my other cubical neighbor was a cute, older, world-traveller. He was in law school, knew Arabic and a few other languages and had been approached by some intelligence agencies about working for them as an analyst. This was pre-9/11. I have no idea why he was working there. One day, near tears after getting an especially brutal cussing out, I glanced over at him and he smiled at me and said "Let's quit!" In a daze, I followed him into the office. He explained we were both quitting and would be back in a week to get our last paychecks. The girl running the center didn't bat an eye- they had really high turn-over. He drove me to his place and made me some lentils and rice dish he had learned how to make on his travels. And then introduced me to his younger roommate he thought I would hit it off with. Doomed to "like a kid sister"-syndrome!