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+---
+title: 'Telemarketer'
+project: 'Elegies for Alternate Selves'
+...
+
+It was one of those nameless gray buildings that could be seen from the
+street only if Larry craned his neck to almost vertical.  He never had,
+of course, having heard when he first arrived in the city that only
+tourists unaccustomed to tall buildings did so.  He'd never thought about
+it until he'd heard the social injunction against such a thing; it was
+now one of the things he thought about almost every day as he rode to
+and from work in gritty blue buses.
+
+Inside the building, the constant sound of recirculating dry air made
+Larry feel as though he were at some beach in hell, listening to the
+[ocean][], or more accurately at a gift shop in a landlocked state in hell
+listening to the ocean as represented by the sound a conch shell makes
+when he holds it up to his ear.  The buzz of the fluorescent bulbs
+overhead sounded like the hot sun bearing down all day in this metaphor,
+a favorite of Larry's.
+
+His cubicle was made of that cheap, grayish-blue plywood that cubicles
+are made of; inside it, his computer sat on his desk as Larry liked to
+think an [eagle perched][] on a mountainous crag much like the crag that was
+his desktop wallpaper.  The walls were unadorned except for a few
+tacked-up papers in report covers explaining his script.  When Larry made
+a call to a potential customer it always went the same way:
+
+"Hi, Mr/Mrs (customer's name).  My name is Larry and I'm with (client's
+name), and was just wondering if I could have a minute of your time?"
+
+"Oh, no, sir; I don't want whatever it is you're selling."  (customer
+terminates call).
+
+Larry had only ever read the first line of the script on the wall.
+Sometimes he had an urge to read more of it, to be ready when a customer
+expressed interest in whatever it was Larry was selling, but something
+in him---he liked to think it was an actor's intuition that told him it
+was best to improvise, though he worried it was the futility of it---kept
+him from reading further into the script.  So when Jane said, "Sure, I
+have nothing better to do," he was thrown completely off guard.
+
+"Um, alright Mrs ... Mrs. Loring, I was wondering---"
+
+"It's Ms, not Mrs.  Em ess.  Miz.  No ‘r,' Larry."  She sounded patient, as
+if she were used to correcting people about the particulars of her
+title.  But how often can that happen?  Larry thought, and he was suddenly
+deeply confused.
+
+"Oh, sorry, ma'am, uh, Miz Loring, but I wanted to know whether you'd
+like to, ah, buy some…" Larry put his head in his hand and started
+twirling his hair in his finger, a nervous habit he'd had since
+childhood, and closed his eyes tightly.  "Why don't you have anything
+better to do?"
+
+Immediately he knew it was the wrong question.  Even before the silence
+on the other end moved past impatience and into stunned, Larry had a
+mini-drama written and staged within his mind: she would call customer
+service and complain loudly into the representative's ear.  The rep would
+send a memo to the head of telemarketing requesting disciplinary action,
+and the head would delegate the action to Larry's immediate supervisor,
+David.  David would saunter over to Larry's cubicle sometime within the
+next week, depending on when he got the memo and when he felt like
+crossing fifty feet of office space, and have one of what David liked to
+call "chats" but what Larry knew were lectures.  After about half an hour
+of "chatting" David would give Larry a warning and ask him to come in
+for overtime to make up for the discretion, and walk back slowly to his
+office, making small talk with the cubicled workers on the way.  The
+world suddenly felt too small for Larry, or he too big for it.
+
+Quietly, with the same patience but with a [bigger pain][], Jane said, "My
+husband just left me and I thought you could take my mind off of him for
+just a minute," and hung up.
+
+[ocean]: 12-theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
+[eagle perched]: 31-mountain.html
+[bigger pain]: 11-arspoetica.html