This is why I had to take control of my destiny: I saw a potential future in a heap of mutilated paperclips. I could not wait for fate to decide my outcome. After all, who is Fortunato? I wield the hatchet of my own demise. I can point it away from my eyes.
My first place of employment in Seattle was evil--pure and simple.
Sometimes it takes a great revelation for a man to notice evil, even in the simplest forms.
Toward the end of my time in Hell I started making paperclip people. These paperclips, I later realized, each sybolize an important character in a scene, designed to wake me up from my living nightmare and bring to my attention that this place was sucking the human soul out of my weakening eyes.
The links in the frame to your left are a story of my inner self screaming for release from the grasp of the evil Corporate America. Additionally, the story below--'A New Start'--is a magazine article I wrote for m0x magazine.
Click on each of the links in the left frame, from top to bottom to read the story. You can also just click on each image to advance to the next.
You can start here with
.by Adam Eisley (written 2002.05.30)
"This is it", I thought, "I'm in Seattle."
Opening the pages of Today's Careers, I vehemently searched for anything that could supply $300 a month for rent and leave something for food. The existence of a career paper was spark enough to give me hope in this new economy, leaving the small college town of Arcata, California to take a chance where a degree might prove worth more than fifty-cents over minimum wage. I didn't have a degree. I needed money for school and that meant work. Being a white, middle-class, male I wasn't eligible for much aid then, and even now--almost 22 years old--the federal government still considers me a dependent of my mother, biased only against my age. Sometimes I wish to have generations of oppression behind me, or the wealthy father that is expected of my classification, but then I remember all I've gained from earning a living with no support--things many people demand but comparatively few actually earn; things like respect.
I hadn't realized, at that point, that the best jobs don't need to advertise in Today's Careers and I settled for what was obviously--to the untrained eye--the most lucrative endeavor, telemarketing. The company that appealed to me most, with the biggest ad and the largest promise for hourly wage, was DialAmerica Marketing.
We called them 'benefit packages for your [name of bank] issued Visa/MasterCard'. We called them a 'convenience' or a 'deal' but never a luxury lest we imply that it was not 'a need'. The offer was for a discount card, to save on every dollar you spend at some of the leaders in global economic power. Yes, Sir/Ma'am companies like Disney and Anheuser-Busch will give even you, the lowest of the hierarchy, a great discount--never mind that all of the participating companies are owned by only one or two of the biggest. Never-mind because, of course, you always receive the information to claim your two 'free' airline tickets in the benefit package*. Never mind that you must stay some arbitrary number of nights in a specific hotel/resort and choose from forty specific places to visit with these tickets. After all, they're free*. It seemed that we could cover up the truth about an inept program with extensive use of words like 'free', 'benefit', and 'yes!'.
I began to exclaim asterisks instead of exclamation marks when talking to my friends. I began to degrade the English language with subterfuge and obfuscation. Then DialAmerica made me a Supervisor of a sales team. It was not three into the fifteen months which I spent working for the damned, and already I was a leader of intrusion into the home's of the naive. The job perked up--a fifty cent raise pushed me up to $8.50 an hour (no commission but only 2 of 40 in the office made any commission, anyway). Now I could claim upper-low-class, and with less dreary hate to look forward to during my workday, I lost inspiration; I stopped doodling; I stopped writing stories; I started making paperclip people.
One month before I worked up the ambition to quit, we recieved a few samples of the 'trial benefit packages', which the corporate office had been highly reluctant to let us see. We read the fine print. We read the truth. We found out that for years no one had been telling the whole truth. Telemarketers, on tape, had said that all you needed to do to cancel was call the 1-800 number. We never told them that in order to not be charged the $59, $69, or $79 annual fee they must also reply by mail* and, of course, read the special instructions of what must be sent back and not--against common appearance--be thrown away. "Nobody told us," we wailed, "We can't be blamed!". I calculated the amount of money I made for Bank of America, Capitol One, Wells Fargo, First National Bank, all by telling their customers that they could trust their banks. Our office made at least 100 sales per day. That makes 26,000 per year. Multiplied by an average of $69 makes $1,794,000 a year--from our one branch, out of dozens. I stress the word 'makes' because this money was not earned, it was created out of deception.
I just recently finished reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. This would have been a great book to have read before my time as a telemarketer. The outline of the book is simple: it's the battle between those who trade the value of ones own production for the value of other's, and those who seek to gain power over the producers by threatening them with moral obligations. At DialAmerica, we desired benefit for abstinence in production. We expected more than we gave in return, only because with the mindset in place, we were unable to do any better. 'We can't help it. Nobody can blame us. We aren't strong like them. It's society's duty to help me because I am weak. I don't contribute because I am unable. I'm still Human!"
Are you? Are you, really?
