Call Me Now: 1-900 Psychic Lines

Everyone has that moment at some point where they are trying to think of a way to bring extra money into the home for one reason or another. That time came for us after the birth of our first son (our sixth child). I was a stay at home mother and my husband worked a rotating shift making finding child care horribly difficult. The other thing is, when looking at working outside the home you have to weigh what you are going to put out in child care against what you are going to make to see if it is indeed worth it. I decided I needed to look at my skills and see what I could do at home using them. Somewhere, I came up with working for a 900 psychic line.

Yes, 900 operators work from home. The first thing that you are asked to do is get a phone line with no extras on it (meaning call waiting, voice mail, etc.) on it. A second line is ideal. You are given a phone number that you call and a special pin number that you enter. You dial this number and put in your number when you are ready to work. After you are logged in, the system will route phone calls to your home phone. Best of all you make $.26 a minute. Yes, that is $15.60 an hour!

How much better can it get? You get to work from home, set your own hours and make $15.60 an hour.

Here's the reality.
You get calls routed to you based on how good you are at your job. That doesn't mean how many people call the company you work for and request your services. It is also not based on how good of a psychic or tarot reader you are. It means how long you can keep people on the phone. In order to work a lot of hours your call average had to be 20 minutes or more in one day. That means if you took 10 calls, they needed to average out to at least 20 minutes total. People with the highest call time averages would get calls sent to them first. If you had a bad day the day before you wouldn't get any calls. You are paid not for the amount of time you are logged in, but by the amount of time that you spend on the phone.

The adverts always promised the first three minutes free. The reason for that was that we were told to get their address and birth date. The birthday was to verify they were old enough to call (like people couldn't lie about that) and the address was where we could send them junk mail. We were told to tell the callers that if they gave us their address we would send them a gift for calling. That gift was either three or five tarot cards and an advert that said "Call 900-XXX-XXXX to find out what special message these cards have for you." For each legit address we were able to get we were given a $.20 cent bonus. Most of the people who called in were not interested in more than their free three minutes. They called mostly out of curiosity. That is why we were given ideas on how to keep people on the phone.

Some psychics would give out a daily horoscope that they pulled off the internet somewhere. Others would do lucky numbers based on numerology. Still others would describe each card that was laid down in detail. The point was, it would all take up time, and that was what it was all about. Taking up time. The first three minutes were free, it was up to us phone psychics to say something interesting to pull the callers in where they stayed.

Those that wanted to work for the company who had no psychic experience/ability were given scripts (http://www.courttv.com/news/feature/cleo/script1.html) to follow. I was never given one of these scripts. I actually had to ask for one. I did so only after other readers said that they were given scripts and I became curious. The thing was, I had to ask the other readers for them. My "boss" wouldn't give me one. He pretended that he had no idea what I was talking about.

There was also an unwritten rule that the readers weren't allowed to talk to each other, especially if it was someone out of our "group". There were many "companies" called bookstores that that hired readers for the same psychic network. It was tolerated when readers from the same bookstore would talk to each other, but it was really frowned upon when readers from different bookstores talked. Issues always came out of this because one bookstore would pay more than another bookstore and so forth. The reason for that was that the bookstore "owner" was allowed to take a cut of that $.26 a minute that we were to get paid. That means that the psychic line would send our pay to the bookstore we worked for and the bookstore had the option of keeping a percentage of it before paying us. That meant that readers from one bookstore would make $.06 an hour, another would make $.15 and the lucky ones would get to keep the entire $.26.

The day came that I couldn't do the job any more. I had worked for the company about five months, my boss was trying to get out of paying me and would send me random checks for random amounts. I had taken many calls from real people with real problems that decided that $1.99 a minute was cheaper than paying for therapy as well as lonely people who just wanted someone to talk to. Each call made me feel more and more guilty and I felt that I was helping take advantage of people even though I did my best to try to better the image of phone psychics. I was happier providing free readings for people who asked.