If you have ever watched Wile E. Coyote fall from a cliff, you know the quick and bumpy decent to the bottom of a canyon. Such was my fall from a professional job in this new age of outsourcing. First there was unemployment benefits with the accompanying mad search for a similar job. Then there was the panic of running out of benefits and the realization that there was no other similar job in this country....well, not without a line of hundreds of applicants ahead of me, all offering to work harder for less. As the months passed and the poverty and desperation increased, I came to realize that, outside of my field of incredible specialization, I was an unskilled worker.

I applied at retail stores and call center. The demeaning job interviews mirrored what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her book, "Nickel and Dimed." Finally, I "lucked" into a job at a toy store. It would have been a great job if it had payed about $10 more per hour than it did, but I could not be picky. My retail experience ended in 1987, and there was a proliferation of eager applicants with recent experience. I was about to settle into comfortable poverty when the announcement came down that nearly all toy stores would be closed shortly after Christmas.

When I called the unemployment offce on the day my retail job ended, I found that I was no longer eligible for benefits. There had been some change in the rules in recent years, but my pounding head would not absorb the details. All that I knew was that I would be going from a pathetic wage to none at all IMMEDIATELY.

My friends met me for coffee and found a sobbing shell of the former proud bohemian student loan slave. I demanded rhetorically, "What can I do to get a job in a day?" One of the 2 MFAs reminded me that there is always a market for sex and all that suggests sex. She directed me to the back of a local weekly paper to see the ads for adult entertainment workers. She had once done phone sex out of the comfort of her home on a part time basis, and it had helped her pay for grad school.

When I arrived at the plain and crowded office the following day, I was amazed at how unsexy it was. 16 women and 2 men were packed into small cubicles, all talking at once as a loud vacuum ran behind them. I was handed a cordless phone to eavesdrop on the calls in progress. The supervisor had chosen one that was relatively inoffensive. I auditioned by asking to "join in" on the threesome.

The combined fear of homelessness and shame of my desperation made the next few minutes seem remote, an out of body experience. I was given a new phone name, a list of codes that would clue me into the likely proclivities of the individual callers, and a sheet of questions that would likely keep a conversation going longer....and keeping a caller on longer was the goal. I was in a daze for the rest of the day. Yes, I DID have a full-time job, but it was not what I went to grad school for. It was definitely not what I went to Parochial school for.

Nobody introduces the new girls at this bizarre and toxic call center, so I had to work at getting to know the other inmates. Most had the same story: they ran out of welfare benefits, had been homeless, were in subsidized housing or were living in shelters and had kids to support. They did not have skill training to earn a living wage anywhere. Almost all were women of color who could fake a "blonde" voice. A few had different stories, like an aging B-movie actress who had been recovering from substance abuse and a string of violent relationships. Then there were the men who manned the Gay Gab lines. While the women were scolded and punished like petulant kindergartners, the boys got favored treatment. Supply and demand was the key to the obvious sexism. The company did not want to lose the men. Desperate women, on the other hand, were a dime a dozen.

Pay is the issue that most people ask about the most. From the leering security guard in the hi-rise office building where the boiler room was located to my few confidants, the question always arises, "But you make really good money, don't you?" They based this presumption on the knowledge that adult publications that carried the ads mentioned prices starting at $2.99 per minute (more commonly $3.99 or $4.99, but some going as high as $7.99.) The presumption was that the operators (or "actresses") were getting much of this. Nothing could be more erroneous! In fact, phone sex in these boiler rooms pays minimum wage, $6.75/hour. "Bonuses" can take you as high as $13/hour for the week.

But how does one determine a bonus rate? Theoretically, it is based on the AVERAGE minutes per call. This is problematic in itself, as most callers have been put on hold for a while and told to fiddle with a menu to reach a "hot slut" who will fulfill their particular fantasy or fetish. A small CRT screen in each cramped cubicle displayed the code the caller chose and a timer that showed the operator how long a call lasted and the running average for the day. Anything under 8 minutes was considered poor. Anything over 10 was good. The codes included, "F" for Fetish, "K" for kink, "T" for transvestite, "D" for Domination, "B" for Betty (an older woman, usually warning of a guy who had the hots for him mom), and "S," which I was told was "straight," but the callers told me meant "Southern" or "Slut."

Another code on the screen was "900" or "800." This indicated whether the caller would be billed thru his phone company or thru his credit card. The reason this was significant was that the FCC would not allow sex talk on a 900 line. It was too easy for children to access a 900 number. They often did. However, the 900 numbers were advertised as sex lines too, so the whole call became about distracting the caller until his time ran out. We were not supposed to tell them flat out that they had been misled. If they fool hung up, the company made less money off of them.

One of the things that made the job tricky was that the menu offered to the callers allowed them to switch between operators if they were not hearing what they wanted. This would hurt the average of the girl who initially got the call. Some callers would "star out" on one girl after another, costing every one pennies on her weekly rate every time they did it. Enraged workers would shout expletives every time their callers would star out on them, especially when they had invested a lot of time and energy on a caller before losing him. You see, the system of pay is not a direct reflection of the numbers on your crummy little screen. They have changed the terms of pay so many times that it is impossible to know what the day's real average until the numbers are posted the following day. Who says low-income women are bad at math? Each time the women caught onto a new pay structure, the system would change again, disorienting the workers and finding yet another way to underpay them. Nonetheless, all of our eyes fixed on the numbers as if we were playing video poker in Vegas. The rage and tension were always palpable. Everyone was worried about being late with rent or losing their kids.



Low income women have very unstable lives. Kids get sick, boyfriends or relatives decide to kick them out in the middle of the night, and they have little room to slide. So their incidence of tardiness and absence is usually pretty high. I learned this from my husband who used to manage a boiler room call center. So employers of the working poor are highly punitive, creating unreasonable penalties if a woman chooses to take her kid to an alternate but far-off sitter rather than leave him alone with a drunk boyfriend. The penalties at the adult call center I worked at included taking away your "bonus" for the week if you were late more than once, or if you missed more than 2 hours of work that week. Thus, nobody dared take a sick day. Nobody dared leave an hour early to go to a job interview elsewhere. Sick women sneezed on the headsets and each other. I was seriously ill several times in the 3 months I was there, but I did not take even an hour off of work because I could not afford to make minimum wage for the week.

Some of the workers did not have control over losing their bonuses. On the last day of the work week (Sunday) the supervisors made it a habit to send home workers for minor infractions (wearing sweat pants, being caught checking their voice mail messages between calls on their cel phones). Losing a few hours on the last day of the week meant that a woman who had worked very hard all week in anticipation of $13/hr would now get $6.75/hr. The rage manifested itself sometimes in violence (a worker who was suspended for arguing about this policy came back to beat up the supervisor who sent her home) and sometimes indirectly, as in the constantly filthy bathroom, overflowing at each toilet and stinking. There was no maintenence man on weekends, so we waded in filth on Sundays.

Another element that "mysteriously" affected our paychecks was the spate of "silent" callers who madly starred out on one girl after another on Sundays. We strongly suspected it was the owner calling to lower our pay rates at the last minute. We sat in angry frustration watching the numbers on our screens drop every time this jerk bored of taunting us. The owner's son in law was the resident enforcer. His petty recriminations included demanding that the girls sit up straighter, sit closer to their desks, stop chatting with each other between calls, and not take so many bathroom breaks (which, he suspected, were just an attempt to get out of working.)

The constant tension of wondering if we were getting good or lousy paychecks led to many of the workers using depressants to manage the work. If it "helped" the person perform, the supervisors turned a blind eye, but if it hurt the performance, suspension could result. Women descended to the parking garage to mutually ease the tension with substances. I would have liked to join them, as my own stress level was incredibly high, even when I was not on the job.

There were breaks, a 10-minute in the morning, another in the afternoon, and a 30 minute lunch. If you were one minute late, you got hassled incredibly. But when you got sent to lunch only 2 hours into your workday (because that was what was convenient on that day for the supervisor), it was hard to find a place to serve you lunch. Mc Donalds was still serving breakfast. Sometimes I got sent so late that the places that specialized in lunch were closed. In the middle of the lunch hour, you needed more than 30 minutes to stand in line and to eat. Obviously, they tried not to send more than one person at a time on breaks. So you did not get much time to commiserate with co-workers...or organize. There was no mercy for people who were late because they were being stalked by a pervert who knew what kind of business we worked at (and this did happen.) EVERYTHING was blamed on the workers, even things that we had no control over. It was a helpless feeling.

My days off (Mondays and Thursdays) were not peaceful as I knew I would be returning to the torture in the morning. There were no holidays, as men called even more on Easter, Christmas, and other days that were "supposed to be" festive. The office was never decorated for holidays. There was never an acknowledgement of the special day. The boiler room was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When shifts changed, the workers were hustled to grab headsets off the departing worker and told that there was no time to sanitize the equipment until they had settled in. In this way, germs travelled even faster. The urgency was incredible, as the calls came in fast. There was no time to rest between calls. Our voices were often worn out from 26 minutes of faking orgasms with one caller when another popped up and wanted someone who sounded fresh and eager. Unless we wanted them to "star out" and cost us money, we had to fake energy. It was often impossible. Then there were "party lines," a real scam to maximize profits. One girl had to entertain up to 6 men at a time. If any left, the pay would go down. And of course, most of them DID star out. They did not find it economically sensible to sit there listening to 5 other men being pleasured for $2.99/minute. If you had 5 starring out while you spoke to one, your pay really took a dive.

Another question commonly asked is, "But you get to have fun while you do this, right?" Certainly not. We have to make it sound like we are having fun. Most of the women there confessed to me at one point or another that they were rape, incest, or molestation survivors. I had been sexually assaulted myself. Reliving the horror up to 40 times a day took its toll on my sanity. I found myself angry, shakey, unable to focus and with broken sleep patterns. It was not a matter of being able to put it out of my mind. It was a matter of adrenaline running out of control no matter what I thought about.

Keeping a caller on the line required concentration on their fantasy. It was not possible to just space out till it was over. Most were lousy conversationalists who needed the woman to do all the work. They were in a huge hurry to finish what they came there for, so you had to really be clever at picking up on cues that would help distract them or engage them. It was necessary to be a bit of a tease, not a skill that an MFA candidate usually specializes in.

Some callers had very sick, abusive fantasies. They really wanted to hurt women, to make them bleed and suffer, then to hear them beg for more abuse, call themselves worthless sluts or whores. They wanted to hear gagging and choking, shrieks of pain. Many of the girls had nightmares about callers. Some callers had taboo fantasies about sisters, animals, or children. We were not supposed to indulge such illicit talk, but the callers would star out on us if we did not indulge them. It cost US money to enforce the rules of the company! But if we were caught crossing the line with taboos, we might get suspended.

It was particularly upsetting when an incest survivor would get a call from a step dad pleasuring himself in his stepchild's room, sniffing her undergarments and bragging about how he had a spot to peek at her from another side of a vent in the shower. He wanted hints on how he could sneak in at night and molest her. There were others who held crying children on their laps while they demanded talk about molesting babies. The young mothers in our call center were horrified. And I am horrified at a society that pays a man with sick tendancies well enough that he can afford 26 minute calls to indulge a pederasty fantasy while a mother is so devalued that she has to sit and listen to this while her own child is (hopefully) under the care of whoever is cheapest while she fights for the rent money. The imbalance and injustice was a constant topic when I encountered another girl on a break.

I was able to escape via a temp job. I pray for all the girls still there who are trying so hard to get out. I am still dodging my student loan companies. I have been involved in clinical trials for psychiatric medication, worked retail, done phone sex, and sold everything of value that I have to keep a roof over my head. The entire time, I have been subsidizing my low wages with the remains of my savings from when I had a good job. I am down to the last $200. Without my professional job, life is not what it once was. I am in constant desperation.

I pray that some miracle will bring jobs back to the USA. When I hear a pundit say that the export of good paying jobs just forces the rest of us to be innovative and creative, I want to force him to take 3 months of phone sex to pay his bills. Let's see how "creative" Greenspan is when he has to outwit porn magazine readers for 8 hours a day in sleezy conditions at a crowded office with oppressive practices. Is it really better to have welfare moms being undermined psychologically every day, made tense and jumpy than to just give them benefits? Does every person who was employed in an industry that has been exported have an opportunity to transition to another equally lucrative job? Like Wile E. Coyote, I hope to shake of the blackness, to step out from under the anvil and go on. But for now, I am still falling. And the worst part is hearing the commentary of those who invalidate my efforts because they simply cannot believe that someone can fall that far.