At 24, I was fresh out of University with my degree in Art and English and a brand new suit. Of course I had no idea what I wanted to do but nevertheless I chased opportunity to the big city where opportunity didn’t so much knock as refuse to return my calls. My first month I applied for waiter and tutoring jobs. My second month I expanded my search to include busboy, housecleaner, secretarial staff, and lifter of heavy objects. By my fourth month I wasn’t so nearly fresh-faced or enthusiastic and my brand new suit was already well-worn. I was also suffering at the time, without knowing it, from mono. So when, in my fourth month, I was offered a reasonably well-paid job with a phone sex company – I had really expanded my search by then – I was hardly in a position to say no.

I am being a little glib. Yes, I worked for a phone sex company. But I was a CSR. My job was to sell time on the lines. Which I did, and well. It was really the closest experience I had to working in retail. We had all sorts of tactics to upsell our product, that is, time on the line. I worked overnight. By myself. It was really very lonely. And just a little creepifying sometimes. Occasionally I was expected to monitor the lines for illegal activity but nobody took this too seriously. And it was, um, draining to do it. It might sound like fun at first, eavesdropping; but it quickly became very boring. I also had to process credit card orders, add more time to people’s accounts on the computer, and, once in a while, type up classified ads. I learned a lot. Mostly of the sex alphabet. I maintained an extensive list of acronyms which I am not compelled to share here.

During this time, there was a coffee shop next door where I regularly procured cranberry muffins. I can’t look at a cranberry muffin now without my stomach turning. For six months I barely saw the light of day and fed my weary mono-ruined body on coffee and lemon zinger tea and cranberry muffins.

Now I also had a toll-free number. And it so happened that at the time my mother was going through a particularly rough patch. Rougher than her regular rough. If her usual rough patch was the fine side of a cheese grater, at this time it was the other side, the side with which you could skin an elephant — if you had an elephant and if you wanted to skin it. And on one occasion fairly early on I quite mistook myself and gave her my toll-free number. And so it happened that while I was working overnight at a phone sex line that my mother would call me, mostly to complain about life and her luckless lot in it. And since she had quite a lot to complain about, she called often even though I regularly had to put her on hold to do things I shouldn’t like to tell her about.

After six months, I gave my notice. I missed the light of day. But also my perspective on the world was getting quite warped. It’s important to understand that I did this job really well. My sales were exponentially higher than my coworkers and two or three times higher than my predecessors. I also, while I was there, streamlined their databasing processes. And I would often type up other people’s work just because I was bored. So the company was quite disappointed when I gave my notice. Two or three days before my last day, and at the start of my shift, I was called into my manager’s office.

I was quite fond of my manager. He was a jolly fellow who didn’t take anything too seriously. We had had a few clients, and one in particular, who, for years would buy the minimum amount of time possible then eat through that quickly and then buy some more. And we had had a contest to sell that client in particular a larger block of time. And while nobody else could manage it, I, of course, did. And for selling this pour soul more time than anybody ever had before, my manager had taken me out to a rather nice dinner in which he learned that besides working phone sex lines, I also liked to draw, paint, take pictures, and write.

It was not a usual event for me to be invited into my manager’s office. It was not a usual event, in fact, for the manager to be around even. I was instructed to sit down. He looked unusually sober. He pushed across the desk an orange photocopy of a memo. “Have you seen this?” he asked. I picked it up. It was a memo that had been sent out about three months previous. The memo said that we should convince local clients to not use the 1 800 number. This smelled of ambush. A three month old memo. And the horribly comic strip way he had slid it across the desk.

With two or three more days left of my phone sex service, there it was. I was fired for abusing their 1 800 number. It was the only time I have ever been fired. My firing was of little consequence, I suppose. It’s not like I needed to put that on a resume. And as I said, I only had two or three days left anyway. It was all very odd though. My manager and my supervisor, sort of an alternate manager, both knew, and had known for months, and for which they had both jokingly ribbed me, that I was receiving calls from my mother. I also found out, a few months later, that the company’s accountant had been arrested for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And here again is evidence of that Silas Quotient that goes like this: If any person in the world would quite by accident end up working at a phone sex company and then end up getting fired from that phone sex company for talking to his mom too much it would be me. And this story, probably more than any other story I can summon, should satisfy my detestable high school counselor who always insisted that I needed a plan.

SS