As I was cleaning up a spare computer to give to a friend yesterday, I found a cache of old files that I thought I’d lost to a hard drive failure years ago.

A lot of those recovered files are individual daily entries in what these days I’d probably call a workday liveblog, but which at the time I referred to as just “the worklog”. I wrote it at my desk, on an aging Palm IIIc cradled in a small keyboard peripheral for easy typing, making little time-stamped sub-entries throughout the day. At home each evening, I’d sync the text files off my Palm and upload them on some (terrible) custom blog software I’d written for myself.

My job at the time was as a “phone technician” at the (now-defunct) local call-center for one of the big market research companies. I made out-going calls, mostly cold calls, to try and either conduct or arrange for a time to conduct market research surveys with a mix of consumers, small business people, and IT folks at larger businesses. I did not like that job very much at all.

I don’t know why I started writing the worklog. But I kept at it for months; I haven’t checked, but I’d estimate I wrote somewhere on the order of 100,000 words.

This is the first entry in the worklog, from June 2003, unedited. I had been at this job for about a year at this point.

6/12/03

7:20 am
I’m pretty tired of clarifying with people that I’m not selling anything. Pretty much every time I talk to a receptionist, I say hi, blah blah blah, and they say, but we already have a contract for our printers, and I say, no, when I said market research I meant MARKET FUCKING RESEARCH, and they say oh, hold on, I’ll transfer you.

7:28 am
It bothers me when part of the work I do involves trying to suppress my natural reaction to another person’s reasonable statement.

Consider this: I call some law firm in Chicago, out of the blue — they don’t know me, and there’s a good chance they don’t know my company — and ask to talk to someone who works with their photocopiers and printers. After volleying the sales-call issue, I get transfered to M, who I explain the market research thing to. He then asks me what’s in it for him to take the 2-4 minutes to give me information about his company’s stuff. I till him that he’ll be contributing to the ongoing product development efforts of the companies that make the equipment he has to work with.

This is both the most honest and most reasonable thing I can tell him within the confines of the project rules; it’s not quite the truth, though, since what he could actually get out of it is a couple hundred bucks for going to a focus group week after next. But we don’t want to have people falsifying their answers just to get on to a focus group, so we don’t tell them about the focus group and corresponding cash until they’ve already qualified. (Unless the groups aren’t filling up on schedule, in which case we’re usually cleared to fess up about the focus group when we introduce ourselves. Which, in principle, invalidates our goal of quality data collection, but then we do what the client tells us.)

So I tell M this, and M tells me that he doesn’t feel he can give me his 2-4 minutes today. I say, well thanks for your time, and then I hang up and say, you cock.

But, what the fuck? He’s not a cock. He’s a totally reasonable guy who is no doubt sick of sales calls and probably has a rightfully annoyed attitude towards legitimate (erm) research calls. I call, ask for his time and info, and offer him nothing but a vague sense of participation in the great corporate process in thanks. I would expect anyone who wasn’t exceedingly bored and full of whimsy to say no. It’s the reasonable answer. How does he know, regardless of my assurances, that I’m actually just doing market research? How does he know I’m not HP, being fraudulent? For that matter, how do I know that the info I’m gathering won’t be used in ways I haven’t been told about? (Well, in this particular case, there is almost no info kept except about those who have given out such information specifically after deciding to do the focus group, but that’s not always the case.)

Given the steadily worsening state of corporate responsibility, probably the only sensible rule of thumb for most organization is to declare an outright ban on participation in research studies. Don’t give out free information to a non-verified source; if said source is offering you something in exchange for said information, be doubly cautious.

Which is paranoid, because as far as I can tell the company I work for is actually pretty even-steven and legit about these things, and often times we offer incentives specifically to address the fact that we’re asking some guy to take fifteen minutes out of their day to talk to us. We’ve even done actualy useful, semi-important work for state agencies (on rare occasion).

But even if my company is upstanding and good, most of the work we do is for corporate clients, in wide variety. Ultimately, the data we collect is presented to them — in some cases, they probably recieve not only our analysis but the raw data itself. On the phone, I assure folks that their data is confidential and safe and so on; in the long run, some large computer corporation could take the info we’ve gathered and do nasty marketing things with it, and all my reassurances would be so much bullshit.

And further assuming that my company is straight up and all of our clients behave themselves, what evidence is there that the same is true for all other market research organizations? And who says marketing, advertising and sales organizations won’t pretend to varying degrees to be doing confidential market research and then do their own nasty things with the data? What’s to stop ‘Jeff’ from [company that Josh doesn't work for] from saying, ‘Hi, this is Jeff from [company that Josh works for], doing a study on [whatever Jeff's company is conniving to gain a market at]?’ Nothing but ethical resolve, and I have no confidence in that as a regulatory power in the Free Market. People can and will do anything they can to get ahead, or get their company ahead. Not all people, but many. Enough to erode the trust and good will of everyone else.

So I mostly sympathize and agree with anyone who would rather not take the time and risk to talk to me for a few minutes on a cold call for no stated compensation.

But it isn’t my job to be sympathetic to that notion. It’s specifically my job to try and overrule and persuade my way around that notion. The most productive interviewer is one who is unconcerned with the respondent’s desire to get off the phone. (Then again, that sort of short-term success leads in the long run to greater negativity toward the calling company and toward companies in general who call up on the phone.)

Rock, hard place. This is one of the fundamental things I don’t like about this job, then.

8:20 am
This is the best hold music ever: silence. It doesn’t get stuck in my head, it doesn’t annoy me every fifteen seconds with feedback. It just sits quietly with me and lets me think.

I’m calling the Schaefer Athletic Complex. Sounds like a sociological disorder.

8:23 am
Our sample-management scheme is kind of like a Wiki. Interesting that I never thought of it that way. Anybody on a project can, in their turn, edit any part of the company information that we all rely on to do our jobs. If I were so inclined, I could go on a campaign of name-changing, or phone-number altering, or creating of fictional job titles, or whatever. So could anyone else. A person could snap and start deleting all the information from each piece of sample in the database. It probably wouldn’t be unrecoverable — there are no doubt backups (well, little doubt) on a daily basis, and even if there weren’t we could always just reload the sample as was done at the beginning of the project. Still, it would be an awful mess (and someone would get canned in two seconds flat, of course).

But a more subtle attack, a guerilla campaign of occaional changes and minor edits, would probably go unnoticed. If something isn’t very obviously wrong, it probably won’t be noticed by most of the interviewers. This is partly because, on most projects, the communication between all the members of the interviewing staff is minimal. We’re not a tight-knit group of people working in tandem; we’re a loose collection of people working in a variety of styles that often contradict each other. To my knowledge, I’m pretty much the only person who regularly queries other interviewers and supervisors about anomalous sample. So it could be done. But then, what is the benefit? Anything suitably subtle would have little capacity to induce anarchy or even entertain other interviewers — and the chances of getting a joke across to a lot of folks are low, for a variety of reasons — and in the end it’ll all get deleted anyway.

In that sense, our sample is more durable than a random community Wiki, because there’s a strong financial incentive not to fuck everything up which doesn’t exist for random shits on the Internet. But then, our Wiki has no hyperlinks, a terrible interface, and the dullest content ever.

8:49 am
There are a lot of these King Sooper places in Denver. They’re pretty clearly not large office places, so they don’t really have much of any office equipment and, as a given I think, no document-delivery scanning devices on an intranet.

So why are we calling them? Oh, right. Because it’s cheaper (or at least percieved to be cheaper) to pay a bunch of interviewers to slog through a very general collection of business numbers than to go to the trouble of pre-filtering those businesses according to the project.

I say, have a means of knowing that in Denver King Soopers is a restaurant chain, and won’t have any networked scanning infrastructure, and so shouldn’t be in the sample several times for several different stores. Repeat for other relevant businesses in the area.

We don’t actually maintain our own list of companies all over the US for use on these projects. (Which is not to say we don’t have an extensive database of businesses and contacts; we just don’t use them for this sort of general project, and it’s not as extensive as it’d need to be if we were going to.) We purchase sample from a number of different sources, in a number of different formats, according to cost and need. Sometimes we’ll get very well-targeted sample, for businesses of such-and-such size, in industry foo, in some specific geographic region. However, that’s a lot more expensive than most schemes, so if the client isn’t going to pay for that, or there isn’t a need for that much accuracy, we’ll get more general sample. Maybe just (to be topical) businesses of any size in Denver and Chicago. Maybe just businesses smaller than 500 in the US. Maybe (and this is mostly for consumer work, when we’re calling poor bastards at home during dinner) just essentially-random numbers all over the US.

It’s a decision that is based on the percieved needs and wants of the client and whoever from our company is helping get the project off the ground. While the wisdom of any given decision is probably hard to determine, the direct affect on us interviewers is pretty damn obvious. More targeted sample is a hell of a lot easier to work with. If I can call a company for the first time and ask for Dick Monkey, the IT Manager, the receptionist will usually be a lot more, uh, receptive than if I ask for Whoever Handles Your Copiers. Which, in turn, is better than randomly canvassing homes in search of 18-25 year old non-professional hobbyist programmers.

However, it is clear that the mental wellfare of the folks doing the interviewing is the absolute lowest priority in the whole research process.

9:22 am
That’s more than 1800 words I’ve written this morning, inside of two hours while doing my job. Granted, it’s been a pretty slow morning on the phone, but still. Clearly, if I want to make significant progress writing at work during the day, I have the capability. Ranting is easier than writing fiction, but when I’m really into it writing fiction is just like ranting, so there you go.

The only problem with creative writing at work is that the constant interruptions could be awfully frustrating. It’s not a big deal when I have to stop a paragraph like this in mid-sentence; I can pick up where I left off easily. But if I’m in the middle of actually forging a sentence from the mud of the earth, so to speak, and I get interrupted for five or ten minutes, I might easily forget what I was trying to accomplish. That’s no good. Can’t really complain, though, about less-than-ideal conditions for surreptitious writing on work time. Furtive [Furtive? How the hell did I come up with that? I mean, it's a god word, but I had to look it up right now to remember what it means.] creation.

9:33 am
The recent drought of work seems to have ended; about two dozen folks are being briefed on new projects this morning. While it’s a little flattering and reassuring to know that, when work is scarce, I’m one of the folks who they still bring in, there’s a dark side to that — someone who they consider to be a very good interviewer may be someone they are less likely to assign other tasks to. I don’t think that was a factor in me not getting either of the two positions I didn’t get in the last few months, but I can’t know that for sure.

And here’s another thing that causes me conflict. Assuming that I’ll be at the company for a while, and won’t be jumping into a different position altogether, I’d like to have some other responsibilities than just interviewing. Monitoring, confirmation calls, whatever — something to change things up. So, in that sense, I should probably put in the word that, hey, I really would like to be considered for that sort of training.

On the other hand, I don’t really feel good about operating under the assumption that I’ll be here indefinitely. I don’t like my job, clearly. I suppose it’s possible that I would like a job other than my job, but do I have the patience to stay on here (as a temp!) for several years in hopes of moving up? I don’t think that I do. And so it almost feels like committing myself to a path I don’t want to follow, if I try and pursue further and varied training.

Which, I guess, is a sign of some hint of ethical behavior on my part. There’s nothing to stop me from pursuing training and then inconveniencing the staff here by bailing shortly thereafter. But I can’t help but feel that would be sort of shitty, and so I’m reticent from doing so even accidentally. Which, I think, is maybe very suckerish of me.

9:56 am
L’escargot.

Also, good morning and thank you for calling Blue Plate Catering. To speak to the operator, please say ‘yes’ at the tone.

10:28 am
Having already established that there are a number of King Sooper stores in Denver, I would like to declare that there are also numerous Osco stores. Whee.

I’m hungry. Half an hour until lunch. I should really make a point of stocking snacks, for just this sort of situation.

Also, I sure say ‘really’ a lot.

10:38 am
24 minutes to lunch. The clock on my Palm is not quite in sync with work. Perhaps I will change that right now.

10:38 am
Done and done.

10:45 am
Joy of joys, it’s another Osco.

Switchboard operators at hotels always claim pleasure when they transfer my calls. “Can I have Mike Jones,” I say, and the operators says, “My pleasure.”

I realize the implication is probably that it is not only a bother to her to transfer my call — she actually is happy to do so. But it’s sort of weird. You don’t hear people talking about “pleasure” so much in general these days. Seems, to me, like the word is falling out of use. I associate the word mostly with euphamism at this point. Pleasure yourself. Pleasure palace. Etc. But this operator lady is bringing it up in the middle of a phone call.

Here’s a parallel: expressing disrespect for someone or some process by miming the jack-off motion. Pleasuring yerself, again. So, maybe “My pleasure” is a cynical euphamism. Which is probably a ridiculous theory, but the end result is probably truthful — when a receptionist says My Pleasure, they sure as hell aren’t particularly overjoyed to be able to transfer your call, except insofar as they’d rather have you not be on the phone with them.

11:02 am
Changed my mind. 28 minutes until lunch.

Thing that annoys me: when a receptionist repeats back to me what I just said, in a questioning tone — “Management Services, please” responded to with “Management Services?” — but not because she actually needs clarification. Just as, I don’t know, stalling time while she looks it up. So then I start to say, “yes” or explain, but then she’s interrupting me to say “I’ll transfer you” or “please hold” and then transferring me. I hate that.

(However, I’m pretty consistently amused by receptionists who cut themselves off in mid-statement. It ends coming out like “please ho–” or “My pleasure to tra–”. It’s fun to imagine they didn’t actually transfer me, they just saw something awe-inspiring and were struck dumb. (Though a lot of them seem to be fairly dumb already, yuk yuk.))

11:12 am
I wonder if there are contests for worst hold music. What I’m listening wouldn’t win, but it’d be a contender. Bonus points for the heavy reverb on the lite-jazz marimba synth solo.

11:15 am
Tim just donated his lunch to the sewer system. He’s having a hell of a week. I’d like to take this opportunity to retract any comments that suggest that getting sick would be a good plan for getting out of the office.

And poor me, there goes my conversation partner for the rest of the day. I suppose I’ll just type a bunch more.

12:03 pm
Lunch is now just a warm, spicy memory in my stomach. I’m getting perilously close to the end of Shadow Puppets, so I think I’ll refrain from reading it during my last break. Might not finish, certainly won’t have digesting time.

Overheard: “If my kid is in the street, I give ‘em a whuppin’!” Nice parenting.

I’ve overheard a lot of parents sounding like idiots, today. One girl was on the phone with, apparently, her son. She was insisting that he put his dad on the phone, and he seemed to not be doing so, and so she was basically having a pointless argument with a young child. And losing.

And someone else was implying that it was basically physically impossible for a child to have a conversation with a person in a car without there being something horrible afoot.

12:30 pm
It’s 12:30.

Something I like: phone directories that say “zed” instead of “zee”. I realize this wouldn’t be so novel outside of the US, but, hey, I don’t live outside of the US.

1:46 pm
Just wrote something called “Aesthete.” I like just writing short, random things without having a plan, but I worry about them coming off as awful. But, whatever, writing is writing. If I begin to worry less about awfulness, maybe that means it’s paying off.

Another thing I like: using the magnet in the speaker part of the phone’s handset to disrupt the magnetic field of my monitor’s cathode ray tube. The magnet in the phone isn’t too shabby at all; I remember, years ago, using lesser magnets to serious mess with the screens of old monitors. This was when I was working with Damon for the Multnomah Education Services District. We stripped down donated computers (mostly 286s and 386s, some working, some very much not), put together salvaged complete systems, and trashed everything that wasn’t worth not trashing. To this end, we had an excellent trash compactor at our disposal, a fifteen-foot-long tube with a yawning green mouth. We’d haul a bunch of boxes and monitors out to the compactor and take turns chucking them down into its mouth as hard as we could, hoping to get things to break or crack or explode. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

I have no idea how that paragraph started. Lemme go look.

Right. Magnets. We took apart some drives and salvaged some nifty magnetic bits, which we at one point held against the screen of a trash monitor for a minute or so, leaving an apparently permantent six-petaled flower of colorful magnetic distortion behind. It was a neat discovery, to me. Cemented the practical idea of magnetic fields in my mind.

It’s weird to me that most of the people in this office probably have no idea how a CRT works, or why putting the phone near the monitor would cause weird things to happen.

When I think about stuff like that, it’s really easy for me to get unhealthily self-righteous. Like, why should I, who knows a lot of trivial technical details about some things, not be treated with elevated respect and care as a result? Right. Considering the amount of time I spend bitching about my coworkers, I really ought to make it clear that they aren’t, in fact, a bunch of irredeemable jackasses. Some of them, in specific cases, certainly act like it, and I think in general there’s a lot less thought put into making things work for the entire interviewing team, but most of these folks are pretty decent people. Most of what comes out of me, in terms of broad, vague invective, is more a matter of perception on my part than an essential shitheadedness on theirs.

Which is not to say that some specific people don’t do really stupid or ignorant shit in specific cases.

End of disclaimer.

2:45 pm
One of my favorite quasi-supervisory people here is back in the office after being gone for a couple days — I had heard reference to her being ‘on vacation’ and had figured she was just kicking back for a few days. She’s back today, and I’ve seen her crying a couple times already, so I’m thinking vacation was definitely euphamism. The things is, know nothing about her or any of her relationships or background. The obvious guess is that someone died, but I have no idea if that’s a parent, a lover, a pet, or what. And I feel kind of weird about broaching the subject, especially when she seems to be getting a lot of support from people who’ve been here for years and know her a lot better. Something questionable about dropping by and saying, “hey, you look like the shit hit the fan. Sup?”

But I figure maybe I should anyway. Grab your balls and jump in, as Emma Howell once said. (Rather a different context, perhaps, but the sentiment translates.)

And, in other news: [In retrospect, I have no idea if I was just being funny here, or if I actually had something else to say that I completely forgot about.]

2:50 pm
It’s almost that magical sample-error time. Though I have no idea if it’ll be a problem again today. The project supervisor mentioned that the programmer dudes added a bunch of sample recently, so my dreams may well have been shattered. We’ll know soon.

Also, one of my cube-mates [Er, cube-neighbors? There is no good word for expressing this specific relationship.] donated a half a patty melt on rye to the Randomly Giving Josh Food fund. I’m not so hot on rye, but it was random and free and I am a big fan of patties, and of melting. Hopefully I can knosh on it during the sample minefield.

3:04 pm
Yep. Slack. Though the supervisor told us they do have some new sample; it’s just not loaded yet. Ah, well, it couldn’t last.