I sat there in my pyjamas, headset against my ear, and knew I was not doing the right thing
I
’m not psychic. During the six months I spent working as a telephone psychic, my only supernatural gift was the ability to sound fascinated by a stranger’s love life at 2.17am. Yet for hundreds of billable hours, I sat on my living room floor wearing plaid pyjamas and a telemarketing headset, charging callers by the minute for insights into their lives. Perhaps this made me a con artist, but I wasn’t a dangerous one.
When it started, I’d recently quit my job as an editor at a publishing company to write a novel while doing telemarketing shifts from my kitchen table. Instead of knocking off a bestseller, I found myself cold-calling strangers about energy bills while gripped by writer’s block and an inconvenient yearning to have a baby.
“Work from home!” an ad popped up one day among remote data entry and content moderation jobs. “Use your intuition to help others find clarity!” The phone psychic description claimed there was a rigorous application process and demonstration of skill was required. I lay awake that night wondering how a psychic job interview would play out. Did candidates need to commune with the interviewer’s dead relatives? When I sent in the application, I was probably looking for meaning just like the people who called the hotlines.
