Looking back, it is clear to me now that the only force in the universe strong enough to conspire to bring such a group together was telemarketing.

The job was simple enough. All I had to do was sit in a tiny cubicle for four hours a night and disrupt people's dinners with "an exciting new offer from The San Francisco Chronicle." It wasn't my first job—that was a disastrous turn at a full-service copy shop when I was 14. Still, I was happy to have a job that didn't require what I then considered to be manual labor (e.g. scooping ice cream or standing around tearing ticket stubs); I had it pretty easy. But my lackadaisical work ethic came with a price—namely, my soul.

It's hard to feel good about yourself selling stuff over the phone. It was tough bothering people, getting pushy with the weak ones, or even worse, manipulating those who don't know any better, but it happened. Nightly. I tried to live by some semblance of a code of ethics. But there's a reason there aren't too many 16-year old saints, and so I can't truthfully say that I didn't con a customer or two during my stint. In fact, conning was the norm. Even under the strictest standards, telemarketing has a hard-to-avoid stench. However, this operation had no standards, or if it did, it systematically ignored them. So, it was routine to find our telemarketers signing up a non-English speaker for "six weeks of The Chronicle for just $1.69 a week." Never mind that the subscription extended beyond that period at full price, unless cancelled. Most who worked there simply went along with their business, which in some cases included setting up drug deals using company phones. We often heard, "How did you get my number?" and "Take me off your list," but none of the telemarketers lost any sleep over interrupting Wheel of Fortune. In fact, there was no "list," just reams of sequential phone numbers, and photocopied White Pages.

Fifteen years later, in the era of Do Not Call lists, I wonder what's happened to the Gerhardts and Roses and Michaels of the telemarketing world. Where do they work? Is there still a place for them to all come together and make a buck? That time, however seedy, exposed me to a cross-section of society that I've yet to come across again. We like to believe that society is accepting of all types, but that's really not the case. But here, class and race and gender and the fact that you slept in a car didn't matter. What mattered was everyone came as they were. And they came to sell.