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Confessions of a sweatshop psychic shill! |
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In 1990 I landed a gig working for the first psychic 900-line in Los Angeles. The office was on the fringe of glamorous Beverly Hills, had plenty of windows and little cubicles with rows and rows of clairvoyants, numerologists, tarot card readers, and yes, astrologers, plugged into phones for hours on end, counseling woeful callers with lives (and jobs) even worse than ours. Initially, it wasn't a bad gig. For a start, we got paid reasonably well--meaning, we were paid an hourly wage just for showing up, plus a small commission for each minute we spent on an actual call. So yes, the incentive was there to keep callers on the line; but you didn't have to do that to make a decent wage. I think we were being paid, like, ten bucks an hour plus commission or something? Or eleven dollars? Anyway, it certainly beat working as an office temp. Or
did it? As time went on I got thoroughly sick of hearing variations
on a few basic questions:
Does he/she care about me?
There were some cool things about the job. For instance, you could pretty much choose your own shifts. I don't think I ever worked later than midnight, and I only did that a few times. I did work Saturdays, but that was kind of fun--there were lots of calls to keep you busy, and when you weren't on calls there were some cool people around to gossip with. I met some guys who turned me on to the Mountain Astrologer magazine, for instance, and some people who taught me how to do interesting prognostications using playing cards. Sadly, this Eden, this Shangri-La, could not last. The repulsive money grubbing insects who ran the show (they were later embarrassingly exposed on 20/20 or one of those other magazine shows) increasingly put the squeeze on us to "get our minutes up or else," (hmmm--in retrospect, there may have been some deeper issues involved there) and the emphasis of their television advertising shifted away from personal growth and crisis management and toward "lucky lotto numbers" in a big way. These kinds of callers wanted to get their numbers and get the hell off the phone pronto; there was no easy way of extending the call. I mean, I'll be the first to admit I'm not the greatest at that anyway; my little mental calculator is sitting there having a heart attack at how much their phone bill is going to be, so I'm trying to be real efficient. But with the lucky lotto callers, there was no chance! So eventually I got the ax due to my low numbers, which was fair enough. But I still needed a job, and didn't want to go back to my old secretarial career. So eventually I got hooked up with Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends Network as a "telepsychic" working from the comfort of my own home. This was a much less cool gig. First of all, you had to get a second phone line installed in your house that you were only allowed to use for the Network (you paid to install and maintain the line). Also, no hourly wage--just commission. Lousy commission. But worst of all, they insisted that you work these hideous shifts, including mandatory weekend hours and (the worst) late night shifts. I am not a night owl, and some of the most hideous hours of my life were spent listening to people whine about their financial problems (at $3.99 a minute) at 2:00 a.m. for the Psychic Fiends Network. All I can say is, thank god for coffee and Nick at Nite. Don't get me wrong. I like to think of myself as a nice person, a caring person, an empathetic counselor. But when literally almost every call involves the same kinds of people asking the same questions, and when I have to attempt to answer those questions intelligently and thoughtfully with absolutely no preparation--well, that's not the kind of astrology I'm used to. It was frustrating, and boring. I got burned out. Parenthetically, I remember attending a panel about 900 lines at a UAC conference. I thought the panelists had some interesting things to say, and I was eager to share my experiences. But when I innocently broached the subject of burnout, every last member of that panel--and a number of audience members--turned on me like rabid wolverines. The implication was that I just didn't know how to handle my shit. Well, I suppose they were right: I really don't know how to handle monotonous, lowest-common-denominator, assembly line astrology day after day, ad infinitum. Presumably they were all well versed in the art, but I seem to have missed class that day. I refrained from sharing the stories of no fewer than three fellow phone psychics who called me as clients during my tenure on the Network. What did they want to discuss? Burnout. Some of my callers had a
bit of an attitude because they assumed I was getting rich at their
expense. Little did they know, the only ones getting rich were the
owners of the network. If I was on the phone 60 minutes out of an
hour, they stood to make (60 x 3.99 =) $239.40. When I was working
on a commission-only basis, I could earn a maximum of (60 x .33 =)
$19.80. Not shabby--but of course, I was rarely on the phone 60 minutes
out of an hour; it was usually more along the lines of, say, twenty minutes
to an hour. Total for my four hour shift:
I finally ran screaming from Dionne and her cadre of telepsychics in 1993 and never looked back. Basically, I'd rather clean people's toilets than do that kind of astrology, and in fact I have done that and made better money, and enjoyed the work more as well. I know there are some who
will say their telepsychic experiences were much better than this, that
they made fabulous amounts of money doing richly rewarding astrology in
their spare time from their thriving private practices. Well, good
for them. I look forward to reading all about it on their
web pages.
©
1999 April Elliott Kent
All rights reserved 
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