Sheep, catering, and telemarketing

Our month in Queenstown passed in a flurry. When we first arrived, the name of the game was finding a job. We went to all the temp agencies we could find and signed up. The most promising one was called the Job Shop, and they existed with a singular purpose: to recruit backpackers to become telemarketers.

Desperate for cash, Mariah and I signed up immediately. We would begin training that Wednesday. We walked in that day and were immediately greeted by an onslaught of sounds: pumping "motivation" music, the "encouraging" shouts of supervisors, and the frantic chatter of dozens of young adults on headsets. A few silver linings existed that made it seem possible to last a few weeks at this job: free coffee, good pay, and a little white office dog named Dave.

As it turned out, even curly-haired Dave couldn't help us.
We went through the training and 3 hours of torture (aka actually calling people), only to have a 3-day holiday weekend before we would begin our first real 7-hour shift.

During this weekend we managed to get a couple catering shifts as kitchen hands/servers. These shifts were intense and exhausting, but compared to telemarketing they were exhilarating and fun.



We did have a bit of real fun that weekend; it was a holiday weekend, after all. We spent some time reminiscing about the Minnesota cold by checking out the Ice Bar:

We'd seen signs for something called "The Running of the Wools," so we decided to check it out. We weren't disappointed. It was basically a zillion sheep running through the streets of Queenstown... But perhaps an official description could be a bit more informative (taken from www.ruralgames.co.nz):

A spectacle not seen in Queenstown for decades will be staged again next February as more than 300 merino sheep run through the town centre to herald the start of the inaugural Hilux New Zealand Rural Games over the Waitangi holiday weekend.

The ‘Running of the Wools’ is planned as a dramatic celebration of the region’s farming heritage evoking memories of early settlers and highlighting the merino’s continued importance to New Zealand’s rural economy.

 It's as ridiculous(ly awesome) as it sounds:

After the weekend we couldn't wait to get back to work!!! ......not. We dreaded it and dragged our feet the entire way to the Job Shop, the words of our telemarketing coworkers ringing in our heads: "It was awful... I only made one sale the whole day... I don't know how long I'm going to last at this job."

We were clearly very focused on being good workers here.

The first day went okay. I fell into the trap of competition that they set, trying to inspire us to do whatever it takes to trick the unsuspecting Australians we were calling into accepting more information about funeral insurance. Who wouldn't want to learn more about funeral insurance, right? RIGHT??!!

We called and called, losing hope as our more experienced coworkers were racking up their "sales." By the way--a "sale" is when the caller successfully gets the callee to agree to receive a call from Vista Insurance representatives. In other words, we need to acquire some personal information about them and they need to say "yes" to several consent statements. It didn't help that I agreed with the people rejecting me--I definitely wouldn't recommend my friends or family to get funeral insurance, so how could I possibly convince other people to do it?! We were told to be pushier and pushier - if they say no, jump in with a new argument! If they seem hesitant, assume they want it! If they tell us that they're on their way home from their son's funeral, guilt-trip them to get funeral insurance! I wish I was joking.

Anyway, we tried our best that first day. By some miracle I got 3, and only was told to "eff off" one or two times. Mariah got a couple sales as well. As soon as we got sales, our normally condescending manager suddenly acted like we were rockstars, handing us vouchers for free drinks and talking about how well that went. Telemarketing is a fickle world.

The next day we were supposed to work another seven-hour shift. We woke up dreading it even more. We'd already used all of our energy on the last shift, and had barely survived... And now we were supposed to do it again? Suddenly our conviction to do "at least a week" of this turned into "let's just survive this one day." On our walk to work our discussions turned into hopeful talks about being fired. If we were fired, we wouldn't have to make the decision to quit and therefore not have a consistent income, which we sorely needed. But being fired would give us no choice! It sounded too good to be true.

We sat down in our seats, put on our headsets, and suddenly I felt a fury that I hadn't felt the day before. Telemarketing is DUMB. Good telemarketers are cruel! Most of our friends from training had already quit or been fired at this point. After an hour Mariah and I secretly agreed to quit after the 7 hours of tele-torture ended. When people said they weren't interested, I pleasantly thanked them for their time and hung up--which kept both ends of the phone happy. I happily made it to our second break, when James (the fickle manager) called Mariah and me to his desk.

"I don't think this campaign is for you," he said with an apologetic smile.

Our faces broke into huge grins.

"That's great!" I exclaimed, forgetting I was supposed to act a bit disappointed. He continued with his spiel, not seeming to realize that we were overjoyed (the typical telemarketer--never listening, always talking). He claimed that our North American accents made it more difficult, since the Aussies thought we were calling from really far away. He said we sounded great on the phone, but this particular campaign just wasn't working for us. He said he would write a glowing recommendation for any other job we would want. We suppressed jubilant giggles and thanked him. As the other telemarketers were commanded to get back to work, we collected our things and left with a spring in our step. We had two extra hours of freedom! It was too good to be true. We celebrated by lying on the beach and reading our books.

p.s. In case you haven't already, be sure to read Mariah's "Tele-torture in Queenstown".