seattle-vistas: April 2010

the Seattle Times coming up with yet another "Orca Story"!*
and winning a Pulitzer for being so on the Police Beat reminded
me of the three or four instances where one or the other of the local rags might have won a more substantial Pulitzer during the 15 years that I have been in these parts. Most recently of course about the troubles at WaMu: anyone paying the slightest heed to what was going on at the local mortgage shops might, as I happened to about ten years ago, smelled the rats nests of greed! See anon. Ditto for the troubles at the Port of Seattle, which by the happenstance of some friendships and then taking interest in Port Commissioner elections and Port matters and conducting a long interview with the formidable and novelistically interesting Mic Dinsmore, which no one seemed to be interested in publishing, was then left to one of Tim Eyemann's proposition and Brian Sontag's subsequent investigation to air.
And I watched your and the P.I.'s reporters closely at the Port Commission hearings and saw them leave punctually on their clock at five after taking down the official reports and not waiting around for the sometimes late into the afternoon public question session. That might have made for two more substantial pieces of investigative journalism.
I forgot, wasn't there also something about finances at the UW? Medical billings.
Instead, as I noticed at once on coming here in 1994,
someone named Rick Anderson at the Seattle Weekly was helping
to run the then owner of the Seahawks out of town because he had an affair!
I knew I was entering the arena of pettifogging provincialism, Orcas indeed!
I myself once discussed with a reporter of yours, with Duff Wilson,
who now writes on sports for the NY Times, turning my very new journalism book WRITE SOME NUMB'S, BITCH! - which focuses on all aspects of telemarketing
- but particularly the aspect of raising fund for the various local police unions - into something more acceptable to conventional readers:
that would have raised quite a few eyebrows hereabouts where that led.
At the suggestion of Roger Downey I then sent part of the m.s. to Knute Berger who was then editing the Seattle Weekly, but never even heard back,that kind of lack of courtesy being one of the few that aggrieves me.
So you can imagine if someone like me, who spends most of his time in thelibrary, researching, happens on three possible stories of that kind,
there might even be others around. Below is the intro to WRITE SOME NUMB'S, BITCH! which was going to be turned into a documentary until the AG ran my "star,"
an ex-prize-fighter, who gave me the title with the way he addressed hismarketers, was raising the funds for the Seattle Police Guild Circus,
out of town. It has meanwhile become a fine script and the book delights many friends whom
I at least regard as halfway hip. Yours sincerely,

.MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/

TELE-MARKETING LINGO [from "WRITE SOME NUMB'S,
BITCH!"]

By Michael Roloff

Like any subculture, T.M. has a lingo of its own, and it makes its very
own contribution to "the language."
As a purely electronic undertaking, T. M., however, reduces its operatives
as well as those it operates upon to
ciphers, and perhaps for that reason alone T.M.'s linguistic contribution is
cipherous as compared to that of any real trade or an industry that grew out of
a trade or craft. You need not think of
anything as ancient as the fishing industry, which only became an industry with
the advent of the steam engine -- merely consider the automobile industry and
the multifarious additions, referential and metaphorical, that it has made to
the languages of the entire world: the
Mexican "yardero" for a big American cars that you bought by the
yard, either from a junk yard or to be
junked in a yard shortly after being subjected to Mexican abuse and neglect;
the Mexican "moffles” being the
transubstantiation of "muffler." -- Compared to either fishing, say, or the
automobile industry tele-marketing, which with the advent of predictive [that
is, “automated”] dialing reached is maturity some twenty years ago, is merely a
wrinkle, an off-shoot of marketing, of selling. It is built entirely around and
on tele-communication, and its usages do little else but add a wrinkle or a
double-entendre to an already widely used word.

The "badge deal" aspect of telemarketing
depends upon the wizardry of some fine sleight of voice artists, many of them
criminal or living in that gray zone between the alleged legitimacies and
illegitimacies, certainly in a zone of comparative financial impotence, and you
would expect such wizards also to be verbally more inventive -- but there is
little to invent in as materially and experientially poverty-stricken a domain

as telemarketing.
"Predictive dialing," or anything approximating it, is a grind, a
chaining of human beings to electronic machinery and to "pitches” that
would be better off delivered by an unbroken record, as of course they
meanwhile are, and to expect of linguisitic inventiveness anything but a
reiteration and reinforcement of standardized cussing, would be making far too
great a demand. Imprecations, such as Troy Emerson's "Write some numb's,
Bitch," to his "day" and "nite" men, to get them to
"produce," signifies that that part of the trade's language, at its
best, is of the world of David Mamet's "Glengarry, Glenross." The
poetry is meager and desperate; in Troy's case, that of an ex-prizefighter, it also smacked of punch-drunk grandiosity.

A]:

A.G. = The "Attorney General," and its office, the bane of
telemarketers, at least in most states.

A.M. on a "Tap" [see below] = answering machine.

B]:

"BADGE DEAL,"
raising money for
cops, done, best as this writer was able to ascertain, by
criminals! A shake-down for police unions, benevolent associations veterans
associations. From this develops what is called the "badge book,"
journals that either do or not print the advertisements solicited and voice-
wrested from businesses to support allegedly civic-minded police & fire unions.

C]:

"CALLBACK", as in callback
line... As you
will learn, if
at all possible, it is essential to your success as
a purveyor of
badge pledges never
to identify your
affiliation to your service company, your telemarketing
affiliation, though eventually, at the right blind moment, to
the client, the "benevolent
association," for whom you are
calling, on the messages that you leave, especially that you
are calling for the cops: the business folk sense an
arm-twisting in the making and never call
back.

Being polite,
they will only return a
call if they think there is a
business proposition attached to
that name that
their secretary gives
them or that they hear on their voice mail. "A
Bob Casey called." "What's
he want?" "He
wouldn't say." It is a telephone hold up, a blind siding.
"Once a year we
call..." And once you have the mark on line, you do all
you can not to let it get off the line,
you keep the fish hooked for dear life, you give it no
more than the requisite slack as you, grudging-obligingly, beg
your potential catch to, preferably, find the exact amount
they can swim with happily thereafter
on their own. You start with a full page, or if you
are milking a steady supporter to a
similar amount to last year's ["you've given anywhere between 100 &
500."] and ever so gradually allow
yourself to be
worked down into the standard abyss of the [appr. $
125.00] business-card sale;
and occasionally, especially if you are extraordinarily talented, greedy
and vicious, manage to get the catch to commit themselves to a
bigger hook. A "call back"
line is a number reserved exclusively
for those call-backs, not for out-going calls. And all you say when the
call back line rings is:
"Good morning, after noon, whatever -- how can I help you?" The
answer to which, to any business, or police-affiliated
organization which fails to identify itself , ought to be: "By never
calling me again."

A CLOSER, good or bad, in
telemarketing is the same kind that he or she is in any other kind of business
transaction that ultimately demands a commitment, "earnest money," a
signature, strength of personality of will
to overcome trepidation, ambivalence, indecision, passivity, to nail the
sucker to the cross of his idiocy.

COLD, cold calling, predictive dialing, Cole Calling, Coles ...451
below zero calling. Some of the finger-do-the walking methods employed by
telemarketing are what is called cold-calling that is, calling straight out of the
telephone book or from the yellow pages, or from lists, or Coles Directory
which lists telephone #s by street addresses and neighborhoods. Coles is based
on the census, and it ranks households by income. There can be a real confusion
between Cold calling and Cole calling. With Coles you know the name, have the
address and neighborhood, and have a hunch of how much that name can afford,
with absolute cold calling you are flying blind. When cold-calling you concentrate your
telemarketing efforts on a single neighborhood; four-digit suffixes tend to be
geographically concentrated; and some operations have hawks cruising populated
four digit regions to do near instantaneous pickups of checks and to drop off the
receipt for whatever lie has been bought. Absolute zero cold-calling is cold in
every universal 451 below Fahrenheit respect: the potential customer is as
nameless and frigid as a corpse that is washed down a glacial stream, and the
telemarketer who tries to warm up that body to buy whatever is just as
anonymous or pseudonymous and frigid, no matter his or her siren song, as the
coldest intergalactic traveler.

The crudest but by no means least profitable
absolute ice-cold-calling is done from permutation lists. In this instance, either the one-fingered
cripple or the nimble electronic centipede walks down the list of numbers of a
single exchange, beginning, say, with 777, and systematically scurries through every possible of its
permutations after the first fixed digits, from 777-0000 to 777- 9999, and the
many thousands inbetween. In that manner the frighteningly cold anonymities are
sorted into potentially warm and acquisitive customers, fax and answering
machines, businesses, domiciles, disconnected numbers, and the rigid finger of
the systematic, electronic centipede does so from pre-printed lists or from
electronically encoded disks. A successfully permutated list is color-coded
during the course of the cold caller's hunt, and such a completed list can be
as pretty if not more so than the most ancient tablets and than many forms of
abstract art. The accidental conjunctions of blacks and reds and green mixed in
with those many other day glow shades that highlight bring these finished lists
into a somewhat systematized direction of Jackson Pollack’s work, or as
thumbnail sketches for Rothko’s to come. It all depends on how you look at one
such product, whether you know that it is the result not of aesthetic
considerations but of one or of several marketers' labor, and of course it
depends on what color ink the telemarketers who "work" that list
employed.

Once a team of telemarketers has
beaten the last fax machine, and the last dead-beat out of just one of the many
sheets that make up one of these prefixes,
what remains are small white rectangular that then, courtesy of yellow
highlighter, are turned into what are known as "gold taps" -- the
idea being that all chaff has been eliminated and that there are real live
potential customer at the end of a "gold tap" once you reach it -- the telemarketer’s Eldora do. Once sorted
into the living and the dead, such a sheet’s leftover nuggets, as to be
expected, is expressed in the sublime anal form of the expression "gold
lists." Those who have never been
reached, who are not fax machines, voice mail boxes or the like remain... as potential nuggets whom the telemarketer,
appetite whetted, will try to cull on a fine Saturday or Sunday when they might
finally be home! And be there, ready to be picked clean, for years to come.

Bloody-mindedly yours.

With so much Cole and Cold calling going on you would expect its
opposite, having to do with "hot” calling, to have a T.M. wrinkle of some
kind, and of course it does: "This is a warm tap," "This list
has been burnt to a cinders." "That's a dynamite pitch you got there,
Reverend." "This is a smoking
office." "We were
smoking." -- However, because the telephone, the distance and evanescence
of the medium as combined with both its instantaneity, anonymity and
estrangements, is so essentially cold no matter how hot under the collar that
recipients of telemarketing calls can become at the sound of the warm siren
songs, TM is by and large a cold- hearted business except to the extent of the
heat produced by greed and competition amongst the marketers, and the
occasionally incandescent overloaded circuit boxes at the TM offices.

COPS, as in "are you dialing for cops or fire?" on a
"badge deal."

COXY, a greenhorn in the trade, possibly related to the British
"coxie" which is pretty much the same as the American
"cocky" -- telemarketing is an art, and just because you can pick up
and use a telephone...

CUT-OFF refers to the person who was contacted and made the
"commitment," the buck stops at the cut-off; the cut-off, the same
sucker, is whom you try to reach on the next go around.

D]:

"DAY MAN" or "DAY MEN" see under "Pros"
below.

DEAL, in these instances, can refer to a promoter's operation...
Hector's is a "strong deal" for it enables the marketers to write”
good numb's"... There are "Badge Deals", 501 [c] 3 -- e.g.
charity deals [see below], vet [e.g. veteran's] deals, etc etc., and each of
them mines one or the other human soft spot.

DUPE does not stand for the sucker on the other end of the line who is
so unspeakably duped, to whom something unspeakable is done or sold, whose ears
are suckered into this or that good cause. To dupe refers to the so frequent
occurrence of having his or her name duplicated on a list, be it paper or
computer, and thus being called to the point of distraction,
TV-media-God-instructed obscenity rudeness "just hang up," from just
one telemarketing operation. Unless you be a fly-by-nite operator, who hits
town for half a year and then moves on, it will be in your interest not to
unduly annoy your mark, and so duplications between lists, between taps and
lists, are meant to be "duped out,” meaning to eliminate replications -- a
telemarketing client such as a police department will be responsive
to complaints, so are some
Attorney Generals Offices, thus endangering a telemarketer’s deal. E.g.:
"This list has not been duped out" = it has not been double checked.
"Too many dupes" = i.e. the
marketer is wasting her or his time calling those who have been called once too
often, who are burnt out. This hurdle fails to inhibit the true scam artist who
will invent as many “causes” as a mangy dog has fleas.

DRIVER -- in the parlance of
telemarketing refers to the "picker" [see below], frequently also
described as a
"volunteer," -- as in,
"We will have one of our volunteers stop by to pick up the check and
deliver the [original, tax-deductible]
receipt". A courier of that kind who appears once too often at one and the
same office to "drop off" one of these receipts for one too many
deals can be shown the door, can have the cops called on him; but a good driver
will have ample identification,
"Search and Rescue” obviously being the best of them. If you wanted
to get a good idea of the businesses of a city you would find yourself such a
driver and have them show you the ropes.

F]:

To FAX, as in "we will fax you a copy of the invoice..." The
introduction of facsimile transmission has been a huge boon to telemarketing,
if only because the backside of the invoices of legitimizes scams, which show
disclaimers and Secretary of State or Attorney General devised percentage
figures, are not faxed with the front. How the advent of e-mail will affect the
profession remains to be seen,

FIVE-O-ONE-THREE-C DEAL
[501 {c} 3] = a deal where the buyer has the option of a
complete charitable deduction for the contribution... E.G. not just apparent but real legitimacy, a
good cover, like Newt Gingrich's Lincoln Brigade! A scam artist with a 501-c-3
certification can get rich quick.

K]:

A KICK-OUT on a badge deal is not a mule of some kind but means that
the sucker changed his mind, for whatever reason. Kick-outs produce temper
fits, sorrow, tears, depression in telemarketers. And is marked as K.O. on a
computer readout where it can mean that someone either didn't pay, that the
receipt came back marked wrong

Address or was returned the invoice saying they had changed their mind,
had said no in the first place; that is, that it had their name and an amount
put down by a telemarketer on an hourly salary who is writing "wood" [see below], had only wanted
to look over the information, were over-billed; usually it means that they
didn’t pay. At Cam-Ty/Support Services'
computer readout of the 1.2 million "resie" base in and around
Seattle K.O. $ 1.00 meant a wrong address.

L]:

LISTS are list of
"taps"... good and
bad... burnt to a cinder, dead, beaten lists... live.... A "tracking
list" is where and how a tele-marketer, of whatever legitimate or
illegitimate deal, keeps track of her or his "sales", so as to,
possibly, keep the promoter honest. “Tracking” lists are the sales -persons’
property, and have considerable value --
anyone who bought something once is a potential second or third sale. Lists,
like individual "taps" are traded, just as, say, magazine subscriber
lists among magazines; or Title Companies sell the lists of mortgages to
mortgage refinance businesses.

M]:

"MATTING” is how the check in an envelope is left under a mat and
a driver-dicker-picker-courier-volunteer picks it up from under the mat in
exchange for the receipt; metaphorically speaking, a "mat" can be a
mailbox, a milk bottle, any place where you leave a check made out for deposit
only.

MOM AND POP operations, easy hits for a badge-deal telemarketer , their
specialty, Mom and Pop, as compared to companies with complicated “human
resource” officers and charitable giving” boards, are genuinely, humanely,
civic-minded, have genuine sympathy for firemen, cops, vets, and so are
eminently exploitable.

A MARK is either a "resie" or a "biz" in the cross
hairs of a telemarketer.

N]:

In telemarketing a "NUMBER”
does not come without a name! -- unless you’re "calling" someone absolutely "ice cold." Hector's
refrain, "Write some numbs, Bitch!" refers to dollars.

N.A. on a "tap" = No Answer.

P]:

To "PICK” does not refer to
cherries but to checks, which are "picked up" in exchange for the
receipt, the driver of the vehicle is the PICKER...

PITCH, the; or "to pitch"... He's got a lousy pitch does not
refer to the frequent smoky timbres of these voices, but to the line they are
pitching, to the written pitch that is meant to get the dolt on the other end
of the telephone to "buy" the deal... "This is a dynamite
pitch." "Billie's got a great pitch." "I pitched him cops
last week and popped him for a buck-and a quarter, and this week I got him to
go for a quarter page ad for the fire fighters." The art of the profession
is in the pitch, and its delivery.

A "PRO” in this line of
work refers to someone who knows the ropes of a badge or scam charitable
deal. When encountering the words
"pros" or "day men wanted”in the wanted ads for telemarketers
you can be certain that the deal is a scam, which is easily confirmed by
calling the number that goes with the ad.
If all that the person answering the telephone says is "Good day,
what can I do for you," you can be certain that they are eager to conceal
who they are and what they are up to.

R]:

"RELOAD” in this instance is the metaphoric use of a term from
hunting, which ought, actually, be "re-shoot", or "kill
again;" for what is being "reloaded" in this instance is not a
gun but the bank account of the telemarketer, not by means of reselling the
mark on the deal into which he bought once before, but by simply saying, a la
Dave Barnett: "We thank you for your past support for X. As we did last
year, we will send you your pledge and ask you to mail it to us with your check
within seven days." RELOADING is
the nearest thing to simply saying: "Send money." It helps to have a
gentle, pleasant, laid-back, richly sincere voice, a la Dave Barnett, to be a
successful reloader.

RESET in T.M. Lingo means to
re-schedule a pick-up of a check that for whatever reason was not ready, or
that, frightful thought, is about to "kick out" [see above].

"RESIE" -- short for
residential, i.e. victims of nighttime telemarketing, the abbreviation says it
all.

To "ROUST" is a
variant on to rouse, in telemarketing it applies to rousting a potential
deadbeat to pay up. This kind of "rousting” is not done by a roust-about,
a cowboy of all trades, but by a driver. An attempt is made at the end of a
deal to "roust" all unpaid invoices.

S]:

SALE is a sale is a sale... even when all that occurs is an exchange of
money for nothing but a receipt! & “feeling good.”

SMOKING, as in "smoking
office" which not only refers to the fact that 99 % of telemarketers smoke
but that this is a "smokingly" hot deal, it's hot as in hot shit.

T]:

"TAPS” does not refer to what is blown at the end of a hard days
work but, usually, to an individual slip of paper, frequently a receipt or paid
invoice, with name, address and telephone number and a previous sale recorded
on it, and, preferably, with the name of the "cut-off," the person
who makes the decision whether to "buy" or to "t. d." the
proposition. A tap of that kind has bought something once, and anyone who
bought something once is a potential sucker for a second go around. Taps, being
"proprietary", are the
"gold” mines that telemarketers hoard, trade, sell... it is their livelihood... the coin of the realm... and like old mines,
taps bear the various adjectives that

Describe their worth: taps from
hell, gold taps, mediocre taps, taps that never paid, fresh or burnt warm
taps...Taps burnt to a cinder. Taps are stolen, traded, copied….

TD means a turn down, usually marked according to what was turned down.
TD cops, BT Fire BT S&R [Search & Rescue] TD Vets... etc. ad infinitum.
Plus, sometimes, the name or initial of the sales person.

V]:

A VERIFIER is someone who makes sure that the sales person isn't
writing "wood," confirms the address and telephone # on a written
sales slip or invoice, and the time for the "pick-up" or who tries to
ascertain the credit card number.

W--

WOOD, as in "he/she writes a lot of wood" does not mean that
the marketer is a good woodcutter, but is on salary and writes fictitious
sales, collects salary for two weeks, and then moves on to another stop along
this particular easy street. Which is why operations with salaried employees
have verification processes; and thieving promoters prefer employees who work
exclusively on a commission basis! What they do unto you they do unto each
other.

*

[It never fails: when things get boring run an Orca story.
What a surprise it was initially to see that such a peace+love claiming city
as Seattle to have adopted killer whales who will think nothing of
butchering a dozen of their cousin porpoises for sport as its pet! What a
great way to use one's news source!
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011609220_orca15m.html]

seattle-vistas

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Dear Mayor McGinn,

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Dear Mr. Boardman, the Seattle Times coming up with yet another "Orca Story"!*

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