A Creative Writer's Phone Sex Operator Interview

One of the very first job interviews I underwent after graduating from college with my ever so practical Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing was an interview to become a Phone Sex Operator. Partake of some informational tidbits about me and then read more details about my interview. Ready, set, go...

Poetry is my passion and has been for a Iong time. My college degree is in creative writing, was especially attuned to poetry, and I had a fun and enjoyable college experience. After that, I was already feeling resigned to the fact that I was going to have to secure a relatively meaningless and dinky day job in order to pay my bills. At that time, not having been subjected much to the real world of work yet, I seemed to have some sordid glamour in the notion of sleazy or seedy or alternative day jobs. Day jobs of which one's mother might disapprove. My friends and I would sit around and chat about various questionable job options that might earn us some strange type of oddball street credentials and would not require us to remove our body piercings or normalize our vibrant hair colors or otherwise compromise our sense of self. One girl was fond of talking about how if only she had bigger boobs, she'd shake 'em in a strip club (as if large breasts are a requirement in such an atmosphere)--and one boy would wax poetic about the various delightful implements he'd have the chance to pilfer if he was employed in a hospital environment (to this day, I believe he has collections of catheters and speculums, plus he is now a nurse). As for me, the obvious choice seemed to be phone sex.

For several years, I had been involved in a scene that participated in a lot of public poetry readings and I made use of a breathy 900 number voice for most of my readings. Initially, it hadn't been my goal to sound sexy, but after people began to compliment my voice along those lines, I began to use that tone to my advantage (or so it seemed at the time--in more recent times, I decided it would be preferable for listeners to focus on my poetic content rather than on the sound of my voice, so now I usually read my poetry in a sound closer to my normal voice). However, during my aforementioned semi-naïve, post-college rap sessions, more than one person suggested to me that I should easily be able to hook myself up with a phone sex gig, simply by speaking in my sexy 900 number voice. So before I even relocated to my first post college locale, I had already begun to look into and seek out jobs in that realm and it wasn't long before I had lined myself up with an interview.

Several of my friends and I arrived to the established interview location at the pre designated time. The building looked like a large house. It might have looked like a small business had there been any kind of signage or labeling as to what kind of business was conducted within, but there wasn't. The windows were shuttered, the shutters were drawn, and the place did not even appear to be open. After some strange hesitation, I approached a door (also unlabeled) and knocked, but there was no answer. I returned to the vehicle and we were talking about what I should do next when another car pulled into the lot and a man emerged. The man looked like a stereotype of harmless sleaze. He had tousled hair and a messy beard and a sizable quantity of chest hair sprouting from his halfway unbuttoned Hawaiin shirt. A cheap looking gold chain or two was nestled in his chest hair. He made his way towards the unlabeled establishment.

Not yet ready to abandon the prospect of my phone sex interview and not sure how else to proceed, I climbed out of our vehicle and approached that man. Although he didn't seem to have prior knowledge of my interview, he was affable enough and escorted me inside the establishment. Much to my chagrin, we bypassed the area where the phone sex workers were actually working, so I didn't get to see or hear any of them, although I did glimpse one pair of slippers sprawled upon the floor.

He escorted me into a small room that didn't look entirely un-office-like, except for the content of the pieces of paper posted to the wall adjacent to the desk. He told me that he would fetch Brandy to conduct my interview. As I awaited Brandy, I gazed with considerable interest upon those pieces of paper posted to the wall. They included tips on how to keep your client on the phone longer, listings about how many minutes of phone time equaled how much pay, and descriptive notes on many varieties of kinky and fetishistic conversational topics. I tried to quickly memorize some of these notes in the hope of conveying them verbatim to my friends later. Then Brandy entered the room.

Brandy was a very tan woman, but her flesh was not golden brown so much as it was golden orange with a leathery look. Brandy was not particularly young. She had long, straight, bleached blonde hair and was wearing gold jewelry and a black outfit. Other than that, I can't recall the details of her attire so it must not have been incredibly flashy. What I do recall is that I felt like she was regarding me suspiciously from the outset of our interview, which ended up being quite brief. One of her very first questions to me was, "Have you ever worked in the adult entertainment industry before?"

Maybe I should have creatively lied, but I told her the dull little truth that I had not worked in the adult entertainment industry before and I'm not even sure if I used my 900 number sound when I said that. That combined with the revelation that I had a college degree only seemed to increase her suspicions. I think she asked me why I was interested in the phone sex operator job and I can't remember exactly how I responded, but I don't think my response sounded very convincing, because I didn't get the job.

As previously mentioned, I had arranged that phone sex interview before I had even moved out of my college town. Basically, Brandy told me to give her a call once I actually moved into her neck of the woods. Before that happened, I gave the matter a little more thought and figured that after the initial novelty wore off, selling sex via phone would likely become just as tiresome as selling any other product via phone. Thus, I job searched elsewhere and ended up in retail. In retrospect, part of me thinks that phone sex might have been more unusually appealing than retail, after all. I should have used my sexy poetry reading voice to chat with the orange B. about sleazy novelty and sordid appeal and my 900 number lust, but alas.