I started work the next day. I was given a headset with my number etched into the side of it. Branded. In the supervisors’ office, where I punched in, there were always two supervisors on duty along with a receptionist. Always a man and a woman. I walked down the hall to my locker to put my purse away (actually, I still wore backpacks back then as if I were forever on my way to third-period science class). The talker floor was a huge dark room filled with cubicles. One side of the room had windows but that didn’t matter as the shades were always drawn to ensure twenty-four-hour darkness on the floor. There were usually about thirty to forty talkers working at a time. They sat in cubicles lined up one by one in about six rows with a computer sitting on every other desk. A talker never sat directly next to another girl because the caller wasn’t supposed to overhear the next talker. For the first week of work, I was to sit in the talker representative section. This is where the expert talkers sat and trained new talkers and helped them adjust to sucking a dick over the phone. These women I cannot remember by name, but their numbers are still as clear as day to me. Numbers 2, 5, 10, and 20 all helped me on my first week of talking. These women had been with the company since the beginning. They made the most money on the phones because the majority of their calls were requests from the same customers they’d been talking to since the ’90s. Number 2 was a Trinidadian woman with a slight accent on the phone but a thick “What the fuck did she just say?” accent in real life. She was the OG of the talker floor. If you were talking too loudly, she’d come directly to you and tell you to “quiet ya mouff!” Number 10 was much sweeter and my favorite, frankly. She was a black British woman. I would listen to her coo her accent into the ears of men who had been calling her for a decade. Every call was like a reunion for her. The majority of women on the talking floor were mothers. Some were college students who needed flexible hours. Most had more than this one job. Some were also strippers or dominatrices. Some were just there to make extra Christmas money for their grandchildren. Most, no matter their background, had been there for way too long, and none of them had moved up in the company. From the beginning, I was scared that I’d be there too long myself, picking up calls in the year 2020 from people I’d been talking to since 2005.
The company was founded by a husband and wife, a white couple who were almost never in the office. They were usually on their way to a cruise or just coming back from a cruise. The company’s staff was 95 percent women. Most of these women were black. Any woman who held a job title above talker was a smart, problem-solving woman with a huge list of responsibilities. There were a few men who worked at the company, all as supervisors or doing clerical work or as security. Each one of them was connected to a woman or women who worked there. A husband, a son, a boyfriend of a talker. Men were only hired after a woman who worked at the company vouched for them. When the phones were really busy, no matter what was going on or what department they were in, all of these smart black women had to get on the phones and pretend to be stupid young white girls for the pleasure of white men. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Or anyone else there, for that matter. That’s why we were all constantly being distracted by games to collect stars to turn into gift cards to buy stuff with. Everything was about how much money we could make so that we didn’t have to take a look at what we were really doing. It worked for me and it worked on me. But I told myself I wasn’t degrading myself for some faceless caller. He was the one paying to get all sticky and gross while listening to me recite Cosmo’s latest list of ways to give the perfect blow job. I was safely in a cubicle in a nice office building flipping through magazines and making a decent amount of money while pretending to be a gorgeous white girl named Melody with daddy issues. Sure, there were a lot of calls that were gross and degrading in a way that I couldn’t shake off. But what was I supposed to do? Quit? It had taken me so long to find this job in the first place. Quitting would just take me back to square one. I couldn’t afford that. In order to not walk away from the phones feeling tired and dirty, I had to allow myself to be convinced that I had the upper hand.
My therapist had an opinion about my new job. She didn’t think it was a good idea. She thought it was psychologically damaging and hurtful to all the work I’d done to get over my depression. I knew that she was right on one level, but I was actually really happy at that job. I was good at it, which gave me a sense of accomplishment, and I was able to afford to help my mom out with the rent, which made me feel productive. I was able to go out with my friends and not worry about how I was going to pay for dinner. I could afford to have fun. I couldn’t let what I said on the phones be real to me. Most of what I said and heard was hilarious, and it made me laugh. A lot. I was making fun of those men as soon as I hung up. If I was on a domination call, I’d make fun of them while still on the call. Also, I don’t want you to think that every caller was some terrible creepy man rubbing himself and wanting me to call him Daddy. When I first started taking calls, I worked Saturday nights from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. for the bump in pay, and the majority of calls that came in were from soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. Those soldiers were very polite and lonely. Not one of them wanted me to pretend to give them a blow job. They didn’t call for sex at all. They called because they wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t their family. For one, their loved ones were usually asleep at that time of night. But also they didn’t want to talk to people who missed them. Who were worried about them and wanted them to come home. One soldier explained to me that it was emotionally taxing to talk to someone you missed, who missed you, too. That wanting to be there for that loved one and hearing about all the things you were missing out on could make a person feel worse than they felt before they started talking. We talkers were paid to pick up the phone and be nice. That’s it. The average soldier would stay on a call for more than an hour. Sometimes two hours, until his prepaid card was out of minutes. The talker and the caller can hear when the system is going to cut the call off. At the end of the call, a soldier would always say, “Ma’am, it’s been real nice talking to you, so thank you for being kind. And remember when you go to bed tonight that we’re out here fighting for your freedom and fighting to make sure you’re safe.”
As I mentioned, the average caller was not a creepy old man with his hands on his balls. He was someone who just wanted to talk to a girl he imagined was pretty who wouldn’t reject him . . . and Charlie Sheen. Yes, a lot of calls were from creepy men who called me a bitch and a slut as I pretended to love it. It absolutely could be degrading work no matter how many “nice guys” called in.
My therapist was having none of it. She really thought I should reconsider this job. I asked her again what she thought I should do. She sighed very deeply, and said to me, “Gabby. I think that you are smart. You’re very smart and you know what this line of work can do to you. I believe you can figure out a way to stop it and still get what you want.” I said okay without really knowing what I was saying okay to.