Bereshith Barah

Your
god
created
the earth
and the airs
but nothing is said
about fire or water
in fact
his spirit moved on the face
of waters
that were
already there
he created light
but darkness
had always been
and always
will
be

Boiler Room

I just read an article about the recently popular IRS scams

http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/10/18/13276464/irs-scam-phone-cartoon

It rang a lot of bells for me since for two years about 15 years ago I was involved in what turned out to be a telemarketing scam.

A few years previously I had amassed what was for me a significant amount of debt. I had been working a second job and putting all of my part-time earning (less 10% for "abundant sharing" to the cult that I was involved in - another story entirely) into paying off the debt. I had recently changed my full-time job from sales rep for a newspaper to a manager at a grocery store and my boss at the newspaper kept me on part-time. Soon however, his boss changed and my position was eliminated. I soon found what appeared to be a pretty easy job: telemarketing.

After a suspiciously superficial interview I was hired. During my training I discovered that I would be selling a membership in ASDC, which at one time stood for Auto Savings Discount Club. At some point they realized that it had nothing to do with autos, didn't really provide any discounts or savings, and wasn't at all a club, so they changed the name to American Savings Discount Club.

What ASDC purported to be was an unsecured line of credit. For a fee, you became a "member" of ASDC which entitled you to draw upon this line of credit in emergencies simply by making a phone call. Having and using this line of credit allegedly helped rebuild your credit score. When we worked from decent caller lists, we focused on people who had been turned down for credit cards or car loans, i.e. people with bad credit. Once we got the prospect on the phone, we read our spiel, and once we had them hooked, we asked them for their bank account number and social security number. Initially I thought that no one was stupid enough to give out their bank account number, let alone their social security number over the phone. During training I couldn't imagine that I could ever find enough people who thought that this was good idea to actually make any sales. I was mistaken. People did it all the time.

We used to joke that we wanted to talk to people who were about 4-5 on the 10-point "ASDC Continuum", not too smart whereby they would never buy anything over the phone and would laugh at the idea that they would give out a bank account and social security number over the phone, but not so dumb that they couldn't understand what we were talking about. The shear numbers of people who fell in this range was staggering.

We were paid an hourly wage plus commission. $8.25/hour when minimum was $5-something. We were expected to get two sales per hour. We would receive $1.00 per sale if we averaged under two, $2.00 per sale for hitting the goal, and $3.50 for each sale if we averaged three per hour. I was good - I often averaged three per hour. So if I hit three sales, that was $10.50 for the sales plus $8.25 for just showing up for $18.75/hour for 20 hours per week for $375 a week for a part time job where I was making $535 a week at my full-time, 45 hour, managerial job.

What made me good? One thing that made me good was that I didn't stick to the script. I pushed the program in my own words, at my own natural pace. I didn't ignore legitimate questions by plowing through mindlessly, but answered them the best that I could. But the biggest "trick" was refusing to waste my time on people that I knew would not buy. Remember the "ASDC Continuum"? You tell pretty quickly if someone was too smart to buy over the phone. I would politely thank them for their time and move on. Never be rude. If someone was playing games with me, being a smart-ass, I'd also politely move on rather than wasting time going through the script with a comedian.

Telemarketing is all about talking to a huge volume of people and only selling to a small percentage. By weeding out the ones who would never buy quickly, this naturally increased the percentage of legitimate prospects. Let's say it takes 5 minutes to read through the whole script, and an extra 5 to get through the closing. To achieve that two per hour goal, you will likely talk to 10 people, 10 minutes each for the two who buy, which leaves 40 minutes, which at five minutes each gets you 8 prospects. This assumes a 20% success rate. But let's say you can weed out the duds in one minute each, you now have the potential to talk to 40 people in 40 minutes, rather than 8. Now you're not going to talk to 40 people, because some of them will be buyers. If you can still maintain a success rate of close to 20%, you will have doubled your sales per hour. (e.g. talk to 24 people instead of 10, 17% of 24 yields 4 sales, taking up 40 minutes, while you have only spent 20 minutes on 20 duds at a minute each - you have halved your unproductive time and doubled your sales).

I did this on a regular basis. I also regularly got in trouble for hanging up early and flying through unproductive leads, but I was also making a lot of money for me and  the company that I worked for.

Another key involved the verification step. We had a supposed third-party verifier, who would ask the  customer questions, recorded, to verify that we weren't just making up sales.  Sometimes the customer would panic mid-verification; I would take the call back from the verifier and sweet-talk the customer into going through the verification again. It almost always worked.

The problem was this: the program was total bullshit. When customers would call in to draw on their credit line they could not get through. ASDC was taking the money and running. ASDC was being investigated and ended up being shut down and was prosecuted for fraud. I didn't work directly for ASDC, but a company that was based in Lincoln called TSI, Telesales International (oh, irony); I don't know how much the TSI owners knew about the scam, but ASDC was their biggest client and where the bulk of their income came from, so that was the end of my job and of TSI.

So when people act surprised that someone would fall for such an apparently transparent scam like the fake IRS calls, I remember my days with TSI. I never knowingly lied to anyone. As far as I knew, while taking advantage of high credit risk folks, they were actually allowing people to draw on these lines of credit, but I did know that this was not something that I would pay money for, and knew that smart people wouldn't go for it, but lots of people did.

Don't Assume

Never would I say, when someone had something bad happen to them "I guess that praying thing didn't work out for you", or point out that, since there was no God, they brought whatever bad thing happened on themselves. I would never assume that whatever spiritual solace someone was seeking in a death, or an economic downturn, or an injury was the same as mine, and that I should impose my worldview on them. So I get a bit peeved when someone assumes that when I lose a friend or family member to death that what I believe is that "God took them", or "they're in a better place"; or when I lose my job or wreck my car or break a bone that "God has a plan", or "the universe has something better in store for you" or, worst of all "everything happens for a reason".

Well, my response is: God should have shared his plan with me before dragging me into it, the universe can consult me before deciding what is better for me, and really, what precisely is the the reason that everything happens for?

My current view, based not a theology, philosophy or wishful thinking, is that the available evidence does not support any entity, whether God, or angels, or the universe, or the damn tooth fairy intervening in our lives due to our prayers, incense burning, or just because we think that they ought to. You want to believe otherwise? Have at it. I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. It's not my job to stick a needle in the balloon of whatever gets you through the night, but it's also not your job to try to "comfort" me by proclaiming that my broken toe is part of a cosmic blueprint that I should just shut up and accept, or that you're praying for my toe to miraculously heal (then, a few weeks later when it does what it has evolved to do - self-heal - this "proves" that prayer works).

Don't assume that I think like you.

Consider yourself invited to ask, and we'll have a discussion.