There's a laundry list of reasons for hating the daily newspaper in your area. The primary reason for readers of real alternative media like Eat the State! is that daily newspapers are little more than advertising rags encouraging blind consumerism. About the only reason for picking up a daily is to observe how much its editorial content contrasts with what is really going on in our local communities and the rest of the world. This same criticism can be leveled at most weeklies also. However, most weeklies are available for free. The circulation of dailies are paid for by subscriptions, and that means most dailies engage in the dishonorable business of telemarketing. Thus, we can all add another reason why we all hate the daily newspaper: Those constant and annoying telemarketing phone calls attempting to convince you to subscribe. My journey into the hell of telemarketing on behalf of the newspaper industry began innocently enough. I was nearing graduation for my degree in Journalism from Colorado State University this past Spring semester and I was running out of money. I had a conversation in a downtown coffee shop with a local teen and aspiring novelist who had just received his GED. He told me about his job at a telemarketing firm called Circulation Services, Inc., located in downtown Fort Collins. Employees work three hour shifts and can work a maximum of 13 in a week. CSI sells newspaper subscriptions for newspapers across the country. My friend working there told me about how easy his job was. Given the high level of turnover at CSI, it was a sure bet that I could have a job there in a matter of days, he said. I only needed to be available for a three hour block of time for the entire week, he said. About the only skill anybody needs to land a job at a place like CSI is the ability to talk over the phone. I thought I would put aside any moral objections I might have about being involved with making mostly unwanted phone calls to people since I needed to start making money immediately. A few days later I began my first shift as a telemarketer after an hour long "training" session with one of the day shift managers. I would be working a position known as a "TSR," or Telemarketing Service Representative. I began calling it "Too Stupid for Real employment." The only thing you do at CSI as a TSR is sit in a cubicle with a keyboard, monitor, a headset for talking on the phone, a telephone connected to the computer system, and a plastic object shaped like a triangle used to hold the scripts for each newspaper we sold. The phone calls are placed at random by computer. The monitor tells you the phone number that has been dialed. If I made a sale I would enter in the code for transferring it to a verifier. If I did not make a sale, which was the case about 99 percent of the time, I would enter in the code for the customer's objection. "NI" stood for "Not Interested," "OP" stood for receives "Other Paper," and so on.

The most important aspect of a TSR's job is reading the scripted pitch. A typical script would read something like this: Hello this is Rick calling on behalf of the Seattle Times and Post Intellegencer, How are you today? Great! The reason why I am calling you today is to help the carrier in your neighborhood build his/her route by offering you the Sunday Times-PI for only $1 a week. That's 50% off our normal newsstand rate. That includes all of our giant circulars, coupons, blah, blah, blah.

I would eventually shorten my pitch down to just the offer the paper was making. I figured I was wasting my time reading a long-winded and very contrived sounding script. I did well as a telemarketer when I tried. I could make anywhere from six to eight sales in a three hour shift as long as I was trying. It eventually became unbearable for me to show up for work at all. From the questionable morality of the job I was performing to the questionable ethics of trying to sweet talk somebody into buying something they probably do not want in the first place to the blatant illegality of calling people back after they tell you not to, I was fed up with my life as a telemarketer after a few weeks on the job. It did not take me long to conclude that I was being paid $8 an hour to harass people over the phone. I quit after about six weeks in the first week of May. One aspect of the job that bothered me was the insistence that we TSR's use a list of scripted rebuttals to the objections we would receive from customers, starting with the line: "Is there any particular reason why?" Shortly after I started, I almost completely stopped making rebuttals to customer objections. There was one rebuttal I absolutely refused to do after I realized how downright fraudulent it was. One of the typical objections to buying a newspaper subscription is that the customer is subscribing to the competing newspaper in the area. I was required to rebut this objection by stating that "there are studies that show that people who have time to read one newspaper have enough time to read a second newspaper." Yeah, sure. A study funded by the newspaper industry is not going to reach the conclusion they want it to. My heart would literally sink every time somebody would say, "This is the tenth time in two weeks you have called me and I am not interested in subscribing to the paper." People have a right to not receive telemarketing phone calls but I doubt most people even know it. Federal law requires all telemarketers to honor requests by customers not to be called again. When you receive a telemarketing phone call do not blow up at the poor peon on the other end of the line and do not say, "Sorry, not interested." Just tell the individual, "Please, put me on your do not call list." They have to honor this and if they do not, sue the hell out them.

This brings me to the downright illegal practice of calling back do not call requests that CSI is engaged in. Whenever we received a do not call request we were instructed to say, "It takes us two to three weeks to update our system and I apologize if you receive any phone calls in that time period." If this is the line you are given by a telemarketer, then ask to speak to a supervisor and have him/her remove your number from their system immediately. They can and they have to do this. We were being instructed to lie to customers at CSI. I was told by a former manager that it would take about 20 minutes at the most to remove all of the do not call requests from the system at the end of the day. So I know that CSI is illegally keeping do not call requests on their system just so they can call back for three weeks after a do not call request was made. Quite frankly, I hope somebody at CSI reads this. They can threaten to sue me all they want to and I would be happy to expose their unethical and illegal business practices in court. They know they are violating federal law by calling back do not call requests and I would be more than happy to demonstrate the fraudulent nature of citing studies as proof of anything. Do the right thing by not becoming a telemarketer. Keep telling them to not call you again. If they do, sue them. Call your local newspaper's circulation department and tell them to worry more about putting together a better paper rather than making harassing phone calls. And by all means, support efforts at building alternative media like Eat the State!!