Ones And Zeroes

Non-Fiction
Location - Melbourne, Victoria
Written - July 2007
[Another Dead-End Job Blues, in D-minor. I was confident this piece might be picked up by a publisher, but so far it’s been rejected by everywhere I’ve sent it to. I still believe it has promise, and may attempt another edit at some stage. If you have any suggestions or feedback the please let me know!]


I’m starting to wonder if the old ladies are right when they say it’s a sin to ring on a Sunday.

‘G’day, my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet, and we’re conducting a study on-.’

‘Don’t you people realize it’s Sunday? You call me all the bloody time… It’s, it’s an invasion of privacy!’

(‘Off the record m’am, I’d probably agree with you – such are the ironies of my existence.’) ‘Sorry to have disturbed you, have a good afternoon.’

And I’m talking to a dead line.

‘G’day, my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet, and today we’re just conducting a brief study on behalf of the –.’

‘Oh hello? Hello? Survey? Oh no, no. I am not interesting…’

(‘Being interesting is not a requirement of this survey, sir. It’ll speed things along for both of us if you have no complex opinions at all. We just need you to give a rating from one to five…’) I’m already typing in the code for ‘Refusal’ as I say, ‘no worries, enjoy your afternoon.’ A fresh number is being dialed.

We don’t use a regular telephone in market research. All the dialing is done automatically, by a computer.

‘9582-3641, hello?’

The older man says his phone number in a sing-song tone, as if he’s repeated it for years. I know the feeling. I feel like replying, ‘yes, hello nine-five-eight-two-three-six-four-one, this is one-zero-zero-one speaking, I was wondering if I could speak to thirty-seven-two-ninety-four there please.’ I have this supervisor who has a strange habit of addressing me by my full name. ‘Hello Thomas Rye!’ He says. I’ve started replying, ‘ah, call me one-zero-zero-one.’

‘Yes, hello there sir, my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet-.’

‘What?? Is this a telemarketing call? I have a house full of sick people, don’t call back!’

I don’t get the chance to connect on a level of understanding, and tell him that years of share-house living means I know exactly how it feels to live in a house full of sick people. Am I cold? Inhuman? No, I don’t think so. Maybe I’m just tired.

Next number.

You quickly learn a sense of detachment working in market research. The majority of people abuse you, or simply hang up, within moments of hearing your voice. When you’re in a good mood it doesn’t splinter you. You just say, ‘have a good night, Sir,’ or ‘M’am,’ and move to the next number. It’s part of the job to get flashes of everyday rage, people telling you to ‘fuck off!,’ rants about the evils of market research, people asking you to take them off ‘The List’ (which doesn’t technically exist – in most cases numbers are randomly generated, by the computer), and phones slammed in your ear, but tonight isn’t going so well.

In five hours I make 460 calls. For five completed interviews. Not including the time spent on interviews, that’s about one call every twenty seconds. I read out the introductory spiel two hundred times a night.

A computer screen becomes my scenery. I steal glances at my fellow workers, just to glimpse a human face. I see the mannerisms – weird repetitive movements. Some stand and sway on their feet. Some tap their legs up and down, for hours on end, to keep the circulation going. I’ve seen similar behaviors in mental wards. My habit is tapping my fingers on the keyboard, to a beat that seldom changes.

Every terminal is filled with Uni students, lost souls, and unemployable misfits struggling to make a buck. I don’t want to be here, I guess none of us do. I’ve yet to hear anyone tell me it was their boyhood dream to work on telephones. But I’m a student without qualifications, and this is one of the few types of work that people like myself can get. The only thing that keeps me dragging myself out of bed and into the cold, and rain, is the promise of travel. Of the Himalayas.

I put my headset back on.

‘I’m sick of you people.’

(What does that mean? You people?)

‘Well,’ I say, ‘Us people will leave you to your dinner, m’am, good night.’

Who are ‘we?’

We are Trained Irritators. We are the force of disruption in the lives of people trying to watch ‘Desperate Housewives’ after work. We have a sixth sense for calling ‘at the worst possible time,’ we know when you’re sitting down to dinner. We will ring you when you’re in the grips of a life-or-death emergency, we will call you ‘just as you’re headed out the door.’ We’ll call at the moment of consummation on your wedding night. You’ll hear from us the instant you’ve found your infant son gleefully menacing his sibling with a syringe he’s found in the gutter. And my only question for you, the general public, is this. Why do you choose to answer the phone at these times?

But don’t mind me, I’m just jaded. I know I’m a Professional Pain-In-The-Ass, and that makes me defensive. I know you might be expecting a call. I know you have the right to rest your feet without being bombarded with inane questions. I understand that you may want to spend evening-time with your children. I don’t feel good about hassling you at these times. But I’m not asking for pity, for like the faceless Concentration-Camp Guard I must take responsibility for my choosing my line of work. I just have a few things to say about it.

We’re never too sure when our shift will finish. It depends on how soon we reach our quotas. When we’re released I look at the lights of the city. I’m walking to the tram when I see a workmate at the lights waiting for the man to go green. He’s an older bloke with frizzy gray hair, as if he’s been logged into the computer for too long and become electrified. He tells me he’s just worked a thirteen-hour shift. I ask how much he earns working for that length of time. ‘It isn’t enough,’ he says.

You can spot the ones who work those hours. They have a hollow look in their eyes, a distance, as if they’re gazing at an infinite horizon they cannot focus upon. They’re usually older, beating at some wall of debt with bare hands. There’s a sadness to them. I ask if he’s thought of returning to university. His passion is robotics. I suggest he could design an android that looks and speaks exactly like him, which could come in and work his shifts while he studies. I’m trying to make him laugh, but he doesn’t.

I think it’d be better if we were machines. But, of course, the public would never buy it.

I’m walking to work again. Past the strip-clubs, and underground, to the dungeon.

‘Okay, I’m willing to do the survey,’ a lady says to me, ‘but I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to say about the banks. I’m very cynical about it all.’

There are times when I drift off to sleep mid-survey. During someone’s impassioned diatribe I’ll find myself in a haze, dozing, or thinking of something else, only to snap to attention and ask the next question as if I’ve been listening the entire time.

‘…banks aren’t interested you if you don’t have any money,’ she says. ‘They don’t care. Their profit is their bottom line…’

‘Uh, sorry, just to remind you, m’am, I can’t actually record your thoughts verbatim at this point of the survey, if you could just give a rating between one and ten.’

‘Well, I’d say somewhere in the middle.’

‘Do you think you could give it a rating out of ten?’

‘Oh, about four or five.’

‘Is that closer to four, or closer to five, do you think?’

‘Well, that depends, I mean, when we were trying to get a home loan we….’

As the night grows long I begin to move to the rhythm of the machines. Where you don’t even really hear what they’re saying to you anymore. You just listen for the keywords. It might be ‘seven’ or it might be ‘completely dissatisfied’ - in a sea of other words - and that’s all you hear. You plug in the relevant responses, and ignore the rest. You ignore the tales of misery from the lives of ordinary people caught in the blackened gears of society. You ignore the ranting abuse aimed at banks which you have inadvertently become the voice of. You build to a hyper-caffeinated frenzy, just trying to get through the long survey as quickly as you can. And waiting for the keywords…

‘…which really frustrated us, so I think I’d have to give it a four.’

4.

In it goes. Next question.

I remind myself that I am lucky. That I have no debt. That I am saving to travel. I reiterate every comforting mantra that I know of, even as my mind and my voice begin to disconnect and I’m losing the last element of human connection involved. I speak in a drone. Like a machine.





I’m sitting on a tram, with a different set of headphones in. The music becomes a soundtrack to the frantic morning hustle. It’s sad to see the sea of suits and dead eyes, the peak-hour soup of elbows and knees, the cattle-truck madness of being herded to a fate we don’t understand. But we are bound for no slaughterhouse. It isn’t as dramatic as all that, for we will return tomorrow. Our bodies will move along the same routes, but our souls are elsewhere, only becoming increasingly more distant, more faint. Dulled by the dazzling fluorescence of trams, and work.

A friend tells me he’s worked so many 13-hour shifts of market research that he conducts surveys in his dreams.

‘G’day my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet, and we’re conducting a study across Australia on financial institutions, it takes about fifteen minutes if you’d –.’

‘Fif-teen minutes!?’

Phone slammed in my ear.

Sometimes I get utterly sick of the sound of my own voice. That’s a strange feeling. My voice becomes dry, husky. I cough in-between calls. My leg bounces on the floor.

‘G’day my name’s Tom, calling from the Telnet Group, and we’re conducting a study across Australia on banks and- .’

‘You people take up enough of my time and money as it is. Don’t call back.’

‘M’am I don’t work for a bank-.’ Dead line.

Only someone who works in banking could imagine that twenty minutes of inane questions about obscure banking concepts could possibly be an appealing prospect. Most of the questions are globs of financial-speak that roll off the tongue with all the finesse of an oral bowel movement. A few hardy individuals agree to do the thing - usually the elderly, lonely housewives, and people with money - but even then it’s just an exercise in profound mutual boredom. A few questions in, you can hear their voice droop.

Rote questions promote rote answers.

I learn they’ve just made the survey longer, so now it can stretch over twenty-five minutes. The banks don’t seem to understand that their survey to discover what people dislike about banks (‘why do they hate us??’) precisely embodies the very things that people react against – the uncaring stance, the instrumental attitude towards people, the greed… and it’s down to us market researchers to do their dirty work. We’re the voice of their attitude.

‘…is this survey going to go on much longer? I have to head out soon.’

‘We’re about halfway through…’

‘Oh, no, no. Sorry. I have to go.’

I have become the voice of their attitude.

They could slim the surveys down, make them more interesting, more human. More verbatim questions rather than scaled ones. But I can hear them say, upstairs, ‘how do you quantify that?’

All they want is a document to drop upon the desks of the decision makers, a document which says ‘47 percent of people presently say they are completely satisfied with our customer service. That’s up two percent from the last quarter.’ And then they huddle to discuss ways to slash employees whilst maintaining that perception.

They want statistics, not the truth - which might be harder to quantify.

‘G’day, this is Tom, calling from Telnet, tonight we’re conducting a study across Australia on financial institutions-.’

‘Why do you people always call right on dinner time?’

(‘Well, actually M’am, it’s because we’ve installed cutting-edge technology which can detect, to a precise level, the exact moment when you’re sitting down to dinner, so we can call at that very moment. Isn’t that neat?’).

‘Enjoy your dinner,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘I said enjoy your dinner, M’am.’ I’m hungry myself. I think about what I’ll eat when I get home. The shifts run late, so I often work on an empty stomach.

Why the paranoia?

Picture something with me. Imagine your friend is angry at you. And you, being a concerned friend, are understandably keen to understand, like the bank, why it is that they’re angry. Now imagine that in your efforts to understand, that you begin reading off questions from a premeditated script: yes/no, scaled, and agree/disagree questions. Your friend would, predictably, be left with an even worse impression of you than before.

Why?

Because you’ve gone about things the wrong way. You have subtly imposed your own thought structure upon them, your own way of seeing the world, when it is quite likely that it’s this very way of seeing things that has caused the problem in the first place. You have set the tone of conversation with rigid boundaries of your own devise. If your friend is angry with you, then you listen, right? You listen to their way of seeing things, even if it doesn’t fit your categories in some neat, quantifiable way.

In attempting to learn about their customers, these companies and organizations are perpetuating an image of themselves as cold, bureaucratic, rigid, and uncaring. They perpetuate this by the very means by which they seek to escape it. And so it goes on. A stream of ones and zeroes.

I do something I’ve never done before. At the end of the shift I approach one of the supervisors.

‘Hey, uh… I was just thinking, that uh… I think that the people who write these surveys should ask our opinion on them every once in a while. I think they’re out of touch with the experience of actually conducting them, you know? For a start, the surveys are too long… We could trim them down, or even divide them into two separate surveys. I’ve had two people hang up on me tonight mid-way through a survey… It doesn’t make sense to irritate the few people willing to do it by bombarding them for twenty-five minutes. If they have a bad experience, they’re less likely to do another survey down the track, you know? In which case we’re serving to destroy our own industry.’

She looks at me with a half-smile, as if she’s heard it all before. She says, in the nicest possible way, ‘well, I agree with you in some ways, Tom. But Telnet gets paid based upon the length of the surveys.’

She smiles again, before turning back to her computer screen.






I should have paid less attention in high-school. Become a farmer. I think I’d like that. But if I only talk of banks then I haven’t told the full story.

My main gripe has always been a feeling of moral repugnance at gathering information for bloated corporations. Sometimes I do surveys on child health, public transport, immigration and political issues. A council survey, asking questions about people’s local communities, seems more like something that could improve people’s lives. I don’t know if the councils will actually keep local parks tidier, or fix roads, or build new libraries because of the work I’m doing, but it’s easier to sit through an eight-hour shift in the belief that I’m doing some good.

In my job, I just ask questions. I’m not allowed to give my own opinions. But here I might humbly suggest to you, the general public, that every now and then, amidst the din of banks and ‘people trying to sell you something,’ there’s surveys being conducted that might even be worth your time. That might be one of the few opportunities you get to have your say, outside of elections. Just a thought.

Every now and then you hear a tale that cuts through the haze like lightning to your chest.

I listen to a white Australian saying we should have less immigration.

‘From any particular countries?’ I ask.

‘Yes, from Middle Eastern countries,’ he says.

‘Are you thinking of any Middle Eastern countries in particular?’

‘No, all of them. All of the Arabic countries,’ he says.

My next interview is a Lebanese man who’s lived in Australia for twenty years. He tells me that recently he’s been abused in the street, and bashed at the pub.

I listen to a woman tell me that there’s times when she runs out of food, and can’t afford to feed her kids.

‘What do you do when this happens?’ I ask, from the script.

‘The children come first,’ she says.

I listen to a bloke tell me that his ex-wife is threatening the lives of him and his children. He’s bringing them up as a sole-parent. He’s on the disability pension at the moment, for depression. I build a good rapport with him. I break from the script and thank him for telling his story, I say that most blokes aren’t willing to talk about divorce, which effectively means the male voice is under-represented. He beams when he hears me say that – I get the sense he doesn’t get much niceness in his life. At the end he thanks me, he says it’s good that surveys on the effects of divorce are being done. It makes my night to hear that.

When people are pouring out their hearts you cannot help but be compassionate, and pay attention. The people who analyze the statistics will never hear these tales, as they pore over the ones and the zeroes.

‘G’day, my name’s Tom, calling on behalf of the Telnet Group-.’

‘It’s Sunday, you know.’

‘Yes, I know m’am. Soon we won’t be making these calls on Sunday, you’ve probably heard about the new legislation. I know we can be a pain in the behind. I don’t mean to disturb you, I can leave you to it, if you want.’

But the old woman is home alone, and she says she’ll do the survey anyway.

I listen.

‘I’m married,’ she says. ‘But my husband is in an old-folks home, with Alzheimers. I looked after him for a year or two but I couldn’t keep up. I have no money left. The fees at the home are so expensive – I’ve been paying for his accommodation out of my pension. None of his family is willing to help out… It looks like I’ll have to mortgage the house.’

How do you code something like that, in ones and zeroes? It gets us talking. I hope the supervisors aren’t listening in.

‘I think you’re an incredible woman,’ I say. ‘My mother has Alzheimers,’ I find myself telling her, ‘so I have some small idea of what it must be like for you.’

‘Yes it’s terrible, terrible… How much longer do you have to work today?’

‘Oh, I’m almost finished,’ I say.

‘Well you have a great afternoon when you’re done.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Same to you. I’ve enjoyed our chat.’

For just a moment it’s not ‘us’ and ‘you’ anymore, but ‘we.’ We, who may share a moment of understanding. The anger is gone, along with the hostility that only reduces our world to binaries, like the computer I tap at, which does not listen, or care, because it cannot.

To be human, again - somewhere in the space beyond ones and zeroes.

‘Thank-you for your time, good-night.’