Prior to working at The Doctors Group, I had responded to a classified ad for people to do phone surveys. I called and was told to come in and fill out an application. The business was located in this building. It was at the end of the hall on the second floor. I arrived filled out the application, read a couple of scripts for the woman who was hiring and that was it. I was told if she wanted to hire me, she would call me back in a couple of days.
Those couple of days passed and I didn't hear anything, so I figured they didn't want me. That was how I wound up working at The Doctors Group. After I got fired from there and hired by Fiddler's Green, I didn't have to worry about applying for a job after awhile. However the Fiddler's Green season was coming to a close and I knew I was going to have to start a new job search. I wasn't looking forward to that.
As it turned out, I didn't really have to worry about that because I got a phone call from the woman at Phone Survey asking if I was still interested in being hired. I told her I could do it, but I had a commitment to Fiddler's Green, so I wouldn't be able to work the nights that we had concerts for the next few weeks. She didn't have a problem with that. I went back to the office and she wanted to hire me and set a date for my training. The afternoon I arrived, it was me and this other woman who were new hires. A man trained us. He was pretty straightforward about how we go about doing surveys. It seemed to be a lot easier than trying to set appointments for chiropractors.
The guy who trained me and another man were the night supervisors. The other man was one of those bosses who could be really mean and critical of your work. However, when you did your job right, he turned out to be a really nice guy. I found this out rather quickly. I took to the job so well that I actually got a raise before I received my first paycheck. I was kind of excited about being good at something for once.
I never really had a set schedule. Mostly I worked at night because we were trying to catch people at home. But we would have surveys that involved calling up businesses during the day. I liked those surveys better because it allowed me to have more of a social life.
I didn't get too much pushback from the people I called. It was my pleasant voice that helped me get a lot of surveys completed. However, I did have one woman who tried the old "can I have your number" routine. I actually gave her my phone number. "Well, can I call you at all hours and interrupt what you're doing?" "Why, certainly! I get awful lonely sometimes." She just hung up the phone. She never tried to call me.
One thing you need to understand about doing phone surveys is that they're really not supposed to take more than five minutes. Most people don't mind giving up five minutes of their time to talk about topics that interest them. The whole time I was there, we probably had only a couple of surveys that interested people: One that was commissioned by KOA-AM about local talk show hosts and another about cable TV service. But it seemed like the least interesting the topic, the longer the survey was.
We sometimes would get to do some pre-liminary run-throughs of the surveys before we did the official tallies. We would tell the marketing agencies that the surveys took at least ten minutes and that they should consider leaving out some of the questions so that we'll get more responses. EVERY TIME we made that recommendation, the surveys would come back with EVEN MORE questions and took at least 15 minutes. Then, the marketing agencies would get on our case about and inquire as to why the surveys were taking too long to do. I could always tell when a survey started out at five minutes, but then some head honcho would go, "While we've got them on the phone, let's find out about this, this and this." And they were too cheap to just commission a new survey. If they were a lot for this service, they were determined to get their money's worth on this one shot.
After a few months, I was promoted to a supervisory position. I didn't get to work as supervisor all the time, but it was a nice break to not have to make the phone calls every single day. At one point, the office manager told us that as supervisors, the company was going to pay for our health insurance. We were pretty excited about that. However, they never told us when that was going to go into effect. Six months later, we still didn't have insurance. The owner (who was not the office manager) kept telling us we had to wait for open enrollment, but wouldn't tell us when that was going to be. One of the other supervisors had something happen and really needed to see a doctor, but couldn't get a straight answer on whether or not she was covered. I think she wound up paying a lot of money to the doctor.
Aside from problems with the people we called and us not having health insurance, there were other work-related issues we had to deal with. The first was that work was not guaranteed. If we didn't have any survey contracts, there was no work and we didn't get paid. This would probably happen for one or two weeks at a time once every three months. (I understand it got way worse after I left.) Another issue was the break schedule. If we worked four hours, we got a 15 minute paid break. Six hours meant two paid 15 minute breaks and eight hours was three paid 15 minute breaks. We did not have scheduled times to take our breaks. If we wanted to, we could work seven hours and 15 minutes straight and take off 45 minutes early. However, if we went to the bathroom, we had to take those minutes off our break time. The owner tried to initiate a policy in which, if you got up to go to the bathroom, you had to go ahead and take a full 15 minute break at that time. The guy who trained me quit over that issue. The owner then changed her mind about putting that policy into effect, but the guy never came back. Come to find out later that the way she distributed the breaks was against the law as we're supposed to get a 30 minute unpaid break when we work at least six hours. On top of that, if the owner wanted to yell at you for doing something wrong, she would attempt to do it while you were on break. That was also against the law.
After I had been working there about a year, I was able to get a job working as a DJ at a nightclub in Aurora. It paid more money and I was tired of waiting for health insurance, so I just went to the office and quit. I didn't really turn in a resignation or anything. (This was during one of our down periods, so it didn't really cause much of an impact.)
Several years later, I went to the building, but another business was in its place. One of the problems the company had was trying to switch over to computerized surveying. The owner kept trying to contract with someone else to pay for all the computers, but I guess she just couldn't make it work.
I found out recently that the office manager who hired me had died some time ago. I found her daughter's Facebook page. Her daughter also worked there and was an occasional supervisor. One odd thing about her Facebook page is that she posted a photo of herself after she had apparently gotten beaten up. I have no idea what happened.
But I would eventually get a job that required me to make a bunch of phone calls and ask a lot of questions of people who were typically too busy to talk to me. That was when I working as a reporter for a newsration station in San Jose. I mean, I got plenty of rejections, but at least no one got on my case for calling them during dinner.
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