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Today, I feel old. Stretched thin. And a bit like someone who’s spent the day panhandling, except I haven’t exactly been doing that. More like telemarketing, though I’m not selling anything anyone wants. Somehow people who make endless phone calls trying to convince you to change your internet service are more successful than me, and I’m selling mental health. Or behavioral control, depending on how you look at it. Then again, when you can control your kids, maybe you get mental health as an added bonus.
But whatever, because no one wants to talk to me. I’ve left what feels like a hundred voicemails for a hundred people that will never, ever call me back. Because people in this business don’t. We’re all competitors, which is stupid because we’re working toward the same goal and insurance pays us all anyway. This isn’t like a real market, where only one salesman is ever going to come out on top. Insurance covers all of us so we can all work together to provide one bit umbrella of resources and support and services. Except we hate each other, like opposing branches of the military or something like that. I dunno what that makes Youth Villages. But DCS is definitely like the Army.
I hate marketing. It feels dirty. I imagine that maybe car salesman, unhappy and unsuccessful ones, feel like this. But not those creepy door-to-door religious types, because they believe in what they’re offering with their pamphlets and their plastic, lobotomized smiles. I don’t really believe in what I’m selling because it takes too much work from people who aren’t me. It’s like… like diet pills. We’d all be happier if diet pills were successful. One pill, a glass of water, and poof-- instant thin. But nope, it doesn’t work like that. You actually have to exercise and eat right and go to all of this trouble, and who wants trouble? Give me instant gratification. Let me lie back on a couch, exercise my demons, and win sanity back in an hour, none of this therapy three-times-a-week bullshit.
I think I miss having cases. Sure, the houses were dirty. The drives were long. And most of the people were really, ridiculously difficult to work with because of that whole instant gratification thing I mentioned up there. But at least I felt like I was doing something, not just sitting around, making stupid phone calls and updating a marketing grid that no one looks at but me anyway.
You know, no one ever tells you that this is what your job is really going to be like. All of those classes in school where you learn about beautiful theories and high ideals and you end up feeling like a used care salesman. How does that happen? And more importantly, who can I yell at about it?
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