The usual: in college, desperate for work in a saturated college-city market I worked for Vector Marketing selling Cutco knives–one of the more humilating periods of my life–and interviewed for several other “jobs” that turned out to be MLM sales (e.g., I think a knockoff perfume company called “observe l’essence”?). I also tried to sell cars. Holy shit the people I worked with were horrible humans (except 1.5 of them).

In a slightly less horrible vein I spent a summer (late 90s) in a call center for BellSouth.net, which mostly consisted of telling people to type their passwords in very carefully or reboot their computer. When someone found out I spoke Spanish I was given all Spanish, Portuguese, and even Italian customers, and released from all quotas and average call time metrics. This was good, because trying to work out what a Brazilian customer was saying on the phone was hard enough, but Italian (and maybe one time Romanian)? Took hours.

Oh, the scammy part of that was minor: we were in a faceless warehouse on the outkirts of Columbus, Ohio, but we were instructed to always keep websites open for Atlanta, GA and to talk about the weather, sports, etc. and pretend we were in Atlanta.

The oddest part of that job was that our floor of the warehouse/call center was shared with a brand new and kind of weird company that had just started running TV ads: priceline.com. We had breaks with priceline employees on a regular basis.