CROSSCUT a.k.a CROS SECTION OF A DEAD ROTTEN TREE, A BAREL OF SAWDUST

  http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/2010/09/crosscut-aka-cros-section-of-dead.html

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

CROSSCUT a.k.a CROS SECTION OF A DEAD ROTTEN TREE, A BAREL OF SAWDUST

now has a critical blog linked to it:

 

http://crosscut-commentary.blogspot.com/2010/09/crosscut-aka-cros-section-of-dead.html

 

 

 

Sunday, September 26, 2010

CROSSCUT a.k.a CROS SECTION OF A DEAD ROTTEN TREE, A BARREL OF SAW DUST

as I regard it will receive the occasional critique here since this allegedly civil outfit in fact squashes discussion and comment that is either critical or seriously amplifies anything posted there.

what makes me do this is not just the long letter to david brewster and mossback that i posted at:

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


but a particular piece by Brewster that I actually found quite unobjectionable but for the fact that he wrote as a tourist about

 

Dear Mrrs. Berger & Brewster,

Talking to my friend Lind Chalker-Scott, who is a Professor of Botany at WaSU and the author of the wonderful
 http://www.amazon.com/Informed-Gardener-Linda-Chalker-Scott/dp/0295987901/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284923162&sr=1-1

https://sharepoint.cahnrs.wsu.edu/blogs/urbanhort/default.aspx

at Tully’s at “Five Corners” Friday afternoon

brought back to mind one of Mossback’s infamies of more than ten years ago, details, dirty tails, rat tails galore anon. And since Mr. Brewster proved equally impolitic at the start of a venture I now think of as CROSSCUT A.K.A. THE CROSS-SECTION OF THE DRY-ROT, A BAG FULL OF SAW DUST… A BOG OF PLATITUDES, and since in the past two weeks or so you guys have really irked me with your story on “Babyboomers”, a senile topic if ever there was one, and these desperate calls for new ideas, including another World’s Fair, and are trying to involve, oh how generous, all of us in providing you with ideas that you so evidently lack, bereft, when you keep recycling the same dead topics, e.g. land-use, over and over year after year… since all of that… let me get a few other things off me aging chest.

http://crosscut.com/2010/09/13/mossback/20101/If-you-hate-Baby-Boomers,-this-is-the-article-for-you/

http://crosscut.com/blog/crosscut/19769/Crosscut-s-part-in-advancing-online-journalism-depends-on-members/

http://crosscut.com/2010/09/15/mossback/20112/Seattle-should-invite-the-world-%28again%29/

http://crosscut.com/blog/crosscut/19753/New-features-on-Crosscut/

I already shared with David my long letter to the departing President Emmert, regarding the nefarious Sarah Nash Gates, which you can also find at my Seattle Vista’s blogspot, Arne thought it one of my better rants:

http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/2010/09/open-letter-to-president-of-univerisity.html

That letter also touches on my curious involvement with thief Roger Downey in matters artistic, so I won’t need to get into all that except the mention that Roger in the later 90s, after Duff Wilson had not gotten anywhere with the powers that be at the Seattle Times in his following up a truly complete set of leads of mine and turning a very new journalism book, WRITE SOME NUMB’S, BITCH! [This was how the promoter for the Seattle Police Department’s then annual circus addressed his salesmen, Troy Emerson, an ex-prize fighter who had the looks of a blonde Jackie Robinson, and cut-lines, as he dicked them with his near permanent hard-on, fists full of hundred dollar bills in both fists, smell these, Sergeant Casey was the S.P.D. Circus Chairman, and his k-9 Beethoven, I kid thee not]  into a more regular kind of journalism, Roger suggested I submit the m.s. to Mossback at the Weekly, and Roger also warned me to make sure that Rick Anderson would not see it, and my covering letter was to that effect, since Anderson allegedly [Roger] stole no end of ideas; one thief knowing another I suppose. And I never even heard back from Mossback. Perhaps duplicitous devious Downey than cut me down at the Weekly, would not put it past him. He would then be like Sarah Nash Gates who was the subject of my letter to President Emmert, who meanwhile has commiserated with me and appreciated my joke about the language requirements for NCAA athletes that he would institute. Anyhow, how long does it take to say “no thank you?” Ah, Seattle the so polite that…

More on the subject of that investigation of telemarketing anon.

So at least with the two of you, I don’t buy the crap about Seattle having manners. Rick Anderson was on my shit list as of the day I set foot in this city because one of the first things I read was his vendetta against the then Seahawks owner, because that man had an extra-marital affair, a term that has endeared itself to me because it implies that the state of marriage is an on-going affair. If only they were… How many fewer fat people there would be around… during my fifteen years here Seattleites have all got at least 15 pounds heavier, and I skinnier and meaner.

More on that and the book later on, and at the end I attach the intro to it, Introduction to Telelingo, a rather famous piece itself by now, and one of the sketches, the one on Billie, the clever Ferret might prove amusing. And several of the poems to which David had not the simplest courtesy to say  ‘not for us.’

Briefly, on the topic of “benefit accrual” if one joins the Cross Section of Dead Trees crowd, what might these benefits really be? Might I then with the so painfully other-directed Ms. Flores who wrote rather nicely about the Franzen lecture be part another upwardly mobile other directed generation??? Might we hook up with each other? Not that I have not much liked many of Mossback things when the moss was still green at the Weekly, but ever since you chaps cashed out… at least the Weekly has gotten a lot worse, and Crosscut never links to the only lively rag going, The Stranger, well, maybe once in a blue moon. I wonder why what with linking to every treacle from David Brooks and Joel Connelly and Ross Douthout ][sp?].

But let me get to what happened when you started up Cross of Dross. I sent you some long poems about the local birds and the local weather from my book "Steeped in Seattle [Better than in old Teabag anyhoo..]" Linda had liked it well enough to recommend it to her editor at the UW Press; John Felstiner, the Celan expert and translator, recommended it to Copper Canyon; Heather McHugh took a fancy to them, whom I came to know over another matter, and we were friends until I fell in love with her because of one or several of her poems, certainly not her barn door looks, that’s me, usually good poetesses laugh it off, and then I laugh at myself for being such a deep down beauty addict, but since I had already realized that Heather was an old-fashioned doormat masochist, her lack of humor did not surprise me. From David Brewster, who wanks on about the arts and farts in Seattle… - sometimes not uninterestingly from the establishment point of view, oh so high-minded, as soon as art is presented by an establishment it is dead, except for kids who experience it - nary an acknowledgment. And I’d rather… than shake your hand who first came to my notice when he tried to get Roger Downey banned from reviewing plays at A.C.T. because David’s wife was on the board, little good that has done for artistry in the theater.

Now back to NUMB’S BITCH, what you all missed would have set many parts of this town on its ears, the variety of police unions, especially their boards, many businesses, thus early on I got a very good several years every evening four hour shift look, or rather, earful of the extensive underbelly of Seattle and surround. I worked with Mary Ann Hagerty-Shaw of the A.G.’s office, a first rate employee then of our now Governor; with the Secretary of States’ exellent head of the Charities Division. Talking about authenticity, something that David mumbles on about so authentically. Astonishing the look I got at Seattle from that vantage point and some of the Aurora Avenue look it provided. The saga continued at about the book was being completed – it is so new journalism because it was written on the run or on the mouth – with ny finding someone who wanted to do a documentary about the whole business, and Troy, a showoff in his shorts, his Panamanian-German wife Maria and their two kids and Pugs crawling around the telemarketing office, a red mustang couldn’t wait to show off before a camera… But friend Marie Hagerty Shaw indicted him the second time he came to town to sell the Gatti Circus for the S.P.D…. and about the time were about to film… he had to scoot out of town. But at least it had been a good payday for me. I didn’t do anything with the script for the documentary until nearly three years ago, when I needed a good hunk of cash to get a new set of chompers… and I thought it would be really easy to turn the outline of a documentary into films scripts. What a delusion: to turn a documenatary into a scrip that has the same truth value…. Turned out to take me about six month, and nearly killed me the winter of 2008/9. But I also got a really good Brechtian play out of it,

 which plays with the idea of how to create truthfulness in a film. Through friend Jack Jolley I heard of a Seattle film maker whose work Jack had once backed, and when that film maker asked Jack what his interest in my project was, Jack said “I own it.”

I met Jack through my involvement in the Port Commissioners campaign in 2004. First I’d become an advisor to Dan Becraft, a self-made millionaire from the most unlikely abbatoir in Marysville, whom CitiCorp then wouldn’t let run, but through him I’d got to know the Democratic Central Committee and Suzie Sheary, the heart of the party that has to sell sandwiches at the Labor Temple because the rich candidates…. And if Jack had had the good sense to toss $ 50,000 into a last minute media blitz I expect Pat Davis who I first thought had been one of my Stanford Students, the clever sleaze bag would have been out one election cycle sooner. After the gander I got into the Port of Seattle during that campaign and afterwards I was not in the least surprised that Brian Sonntag’s Tim Eyeman initiated audit  produced the results it did. But compared to the total corruption of the political class in NY, Seattle is a lot cleaner, perhaps because there is less opportunity. In New York City, Calcutta on the Hudson, the city of thieves, the political class is a reflection of the electorate. Then I did a really nice long interview with Mic Dinsmore who brought along his minder, a Mr. Schaefer to Rice and Spice… but no one wanted it. And I do really good interview, treat you like a king, allow you to see the transcript and edit it, I have interviewed Nobel Prize winners, also published four and translated it will be three when Peter Handke wins in a year or two. And eventually Pat Davis didn't run again, and Alec Fisken, as fine a person as I have met in Seattle,
was defeated by a sleaze name Ryan under the banner of throw the rascals out, etc.

Let me stop here, I just saw a hippie I recognized from the Last Exit from years ago, a guitarist, Leif, pass by outside. Oh yes, the saga, Jack claimed to own something that, it turned out, he hadn’t even read, and wanted to option it, out of which he then pulled out. How Seattle, how philistine! And Jack must be the nicest philistine I ever met.

Good luck to you at Cross-Section of Philistism.

"Chicquita abracas a todos"
>
> 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
>
>  The Hubs, the Navel to Todos Handke!
>
http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

[and subb-logs, handke-scholar, handke-yugo, handke-discussion; handke-watch; handke-reviews]
> http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html
>

 http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
>
> "Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
>
> "May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug of filiality
> reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
>
> "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
>
> "Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
>
> "Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of experience."
> Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.

 "mais une marée de merde en bat les murs, à la faire crouler." Gustav Flaubert
>
> http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
>
> http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/ [has links to the sites and blogs I follow, weather, etc.]
>
> http://artscritic.blogspot.com/
>
> http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/

>
>

1] What a marvelous piece by Mossback! Just what the world needed, another discussion on those fathered by the G.I.s returning from WW II. Hot diggety, no wonder that anyone or a site so bereft of interesting ideas then seeks to enlist its readers to provide it with ideas, to do your work for you: "The headlines bring together some of the best, most thought-provoking stories from the region and beyond, so we are very interested to see what readers will suggest from elsewhere 

2] [By David Brewster

Crosscut.com is part of an exciting new development in the rebooting of American journalism -- member-supported, local, online media in the public interest.  I hope you will use this fall membership drive to become an annual member or to renew your membership. Just click here to go to our membership page (if you have trouble linking, it's www.crosscut/com/donate). Donations are tax exempt, as Crosscut Public Media is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit.

Membership in Crosscut has benefits to you, to the site, and to the community. As an annual member, you will be invited to free gatherings with fellow members, newsmakers, and Crosscut writers and staff. We have new-member coffees, parties (such as our office-warming party last year and our third-anniversary celebration), and discounted tickets and other promotions. These events are great networking chances, as well as ways for you to tell the editors and writers how to do better and where some good stories lie hidden

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!

                                                         T.M. LINGO 8 W.S.N.B.

The Handsome Ferret

As I would learn, t'was essential to your success as a purveyor of "badge pledges" never, if at all possible, to identify your affiliation to the client for whom you were calling, on the messages that you left, especially that you were calling for the cops, not that is until the last moment: the business folk sensed an arm-twisting in the making and would never call you back. Being polite, they only called back if they thought there was a business proposition attached to that name that their secretary gave them or that they heard on their voice mail. "A Bob Able called." "What's he want?" "He wouldn't say." It was a telephone hold up, a blind-siding. "Once a year we call..." And once you had the mark on line, you would do all you could not to let it get off the line, you kept the fish hooked for dear life, you gave it no more than the requisite slack as you, grudging-obligingly, allowed your potential catch to, preferably, find the exact amount they could swim with happily thereafter on her or his own. You started with a full page ad, or if you were milking a steady supporter to a similar amount to last year's, you might say "You've given anywhere between 50 and 250 dollars during the past years" and ever so gradually allow yourself to be worked down into the standard abyss of the [appr. $ 125.00 to $ 175.00] business card sale, and occasionally, especially if you were “Rocky,” manage to get him to go up. - I once overheard Bill extract five dollars from someone whose firm was going bankrupt and whose wife had just divorced him, persistence I shared except not in that particular realm. And so Bill kept pointing out to me over and over that "I didn't get it,” or that "I still didn't get it." True enough: I refused to "get it" - I wanted the bleeding K.C.P.U. to do what we said they'd do, I wanted them to spend their share of the money that we raised for them on something approximating what they claimed they were doing. I was a "supporter of causes" from way back, that kind of jerk, and I hated Bill's awful truth that telemarketing badge deals had the sole purpose of keeping the tele-marketer in disposable untaxed cash, the better the telemarketer did, so might the however legitimate 10 % client.                                               From sly Bill I learned the photogenic detail of always keeping your telephone cord wrapped around your arm, so that if you stepped away from the telephone the cord would unhook the receiver and alert Pavlov to make another call to support his hungry family, except that Bill did not have a family, he merely had one or the other hungry habit: it was a detail worthy of Glengarry Glenn Ross. No one had the Zen of the scam better down than Bill who claimed he could have gotten into Harvard hadn't it been that the University of Houston's golf program had been his yen; if he hadn't developed arthritic phenomena in the soggy Northwest he might be that kind of pro. It sounded as though he'd had the talent and the smarts. “Rocky” might be crude and extortionist and threatening or sometimes ["I'm just an old guy"] charming in his wonderful, hateful, dwarfish, pit bull way; Mike Mailor invariably utterly professional and serious, and in obvious need what with child support; the cackling alcoholic crackhead ex-Marine Ron Badger, the most successful of the lot, the best "writer," the most straight-forward and convincing on the phone, but Bill - reputed, enviously, never to have made a cold sale, and to be living off other's hard-earned talent, and certainly never sharing anything with anyone - had his way of ensuring that the sucker would feel good about parting with his funds: that was the art, to give once a year to that once a year call, to be left under the impression that you were supporting a worthwhile endeavor, for the "thank you" to register resoundingly... "Once a year we call..." My sweet aging ass! If you were on Cain+Able / Support Service’s computer you would be called at least twice for each of their deals and that meant a minimum of six calls a year! And from a pool of Irish sounding names: the various Ables, “Rocky” at the Police Guild metamorphosed into Tim McCullough, an ex-King County sheriff of ill repute, at Cain+Able he had been Jim McLeary for cops and I forgot what for the Fire Fighters, Bill, Bob, John, Jim, innocuous, interchangeable first names were preferred, Hansens, Joneses, Johnsons, Smiths and Wilsons proliferated, Mailor turned into McGrath or McGraff, and I promoted him to detective-sergeant when I took a call on the call-back line for him.                   Bill Able, I concluded, would be a jewel to any worthwhile charitable drive, his voice transmitted a gravely, soft sandpaper intensity, if only also for his congested nasal passages. His "heartfelt thanks" [from the bottom of his ice-cold Barry Goldwater heart], the promised delivery of the "original" of the invoice [signed by "Leonardo da Vinci" himself] subsequent to the [of course!] immediately faxed copy for the preferred next day "pick" of the promised check, his pitch, too was worth recording for posterity, and certain proof that the suckers would not inherit the world. - Bill made up his rates as he went along, you could not quarrel with his assessment that most of the companies he approached were cash rich, the waste of cash was written all over them, it was a question of diverting some of it your way, and incidentally, to the client. Bill, as a day pro he called himself Bob, using his brother's name, both hailed from a part of Connecticut where when folks pick up the telephone at night they ask: "Cops or fire? 25 bucks, but don't dare you come pick it tonite." Like the owners of most of these deals, legal and illegal and inbetween, he and his brother boss were from out of town, like promoters of all kinds they all wore their kind of stylish clothes, in the case of Cain and the Able brothers suave soft leather jackets, well worn, or variously decaled or expensive shirtless sweaters, and casually drove Beamers [B.M.W.]; in the case of Hector, high grunge punk, clean jeans, and derive from the characterology of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross ["First prize is a Cadillac, second prize a set of steak knives."] Cain and Able, who had made their nut, did not seem driven by excessively unslakeable greed, cruise control was their speed, the Beamer was meant to stay well tuned, as compared to a fellow like the somewhat discombobulated dumbed-out semi-sharpie Hector and his City of Troy promotions, who was benumbedly awash in a sea of cash that in the form of wads of one hundred dollar bills he kept sticking before his sales folks noses, but greedy for more, and driven, but unknowing as to what purpose, or "the Reverend" who took the faux-modest tack of "we don't want to get rich, I want to do a little good and make a little money, too" while he stole from his own sales folk. Like those who ran their subsidiary offices around the country, they were from the East Coast New York, Connecticut, Atlantic City, Hector was from Madison, Wisconsin where his father had done the same thing for the local police guild, and from Chicago, and having an easy time of it with the dolts of the North West. Ely the Scam, I hear, was an army brat, an adjustable smart-ass like Newt Gingrich. From one P.X. to the other, I wondered whether Roman outposts had been like that.                                                    Save for the unhappy disadvantage of the fact that Bill got himself all the "taps" that were still warm [of proven givers who were potentially still giving] from previous sales, you could make of a Cain+Able/Able Company Services badge deal what you wanted, you could warm up as many stiffs as you liked, develop your own ideas, there was gold in them thar hills and a bit of gold dust among the stingy. But a Seattle Fire Fighter depending on the good will of the businesses of Seattle, as compared to that of its inhabitants would not do well re-establishing their relief funds if their social safety net should disappear. Bill's habit of getting himself, and sitting on, most of and the best taps did not endear him to the rest of the day men, it justifiably struck them as an instance of unfair and ultimately counter-productive nepotism.                               Don Cain, Bob Able's partner in Cain+Able, took seriously these complaints of the other day men and, during an x-mas break, cleaned out Bill’s desk. Without the least warning. Yet the only thing that seriously chagrined Bill about this untoward turn of events was that Don had also tossed some personal belongings of his, or had messed with them. It took Bill about a week to re-assemble his treasure trove. The stacks of computer generated three by five inch white 60-pound paper taps did not spare one single cubic millimeter of the various drawers of his desk. When Bill moved to his brother's Kent office, which fleeced the inhabitants of the South County not only for the King County Police Union but also for the Auburn and Kent Police Officers Association and Guild, Bill left his largesse spread out across three desks at the new Able Company Support Services room, and had Sabrina print out for him a brand new set of the thousands upon thousands of Cain+Able/ S.S.'s business taps.                          Having listened in on Bill, for some weeks, in the Cain+Able back-room [before Don disconnected the phones there and it turned into the Motel Cain+Able flop house] I kept being amazed at the seductiveness and persistence of Bill's spiel, who however preferred the by no means easy, definitely hard-earned, unregistered money of a commission man for a socially more productive enterprise, unless you regard, as you may and perhaps ought to regard, as being of inordinate overall benefit the employment of students and street people, of tinkerers and drifters and the down and out, and the purveyance of feel-good to the populace, and conviction to a goodly number of business folk that they were supporting a just cause in supporting the pseudo-police union K.C.P.U.'s various socially redemptive endeavors of "fighting" domestic violence, gangs, drug abuse, child neglect, of instituting community policing.                    Receiving a call back, Bill dragged the call back line, that and its fifty foot cord was located in the great vastness outside the day men's cubicles, into the flop house; he did not want to be interrupted, wanted to be free of the background noise and jokes, he wanted to have the victim, like a corpse, like a beloved, all to himself, for the fleecing and the devouring, and the intense expression that his handsome Ferret face assumed at those many times was reminiscent of that of a thief at work, a safe cracker whose laser was his voice; a kind of sexual excitement seemed to overcome him during the act of relieving the victim's pocket book checking account ["with all due respect"] of the highest possible amount; and Bill's face assumed an orgasmic glow of satisfaction upon a successful score, indeed Bill's memorably radiant smile, his exultation: Sotto voce Bill pitched, both sides of his neck raw from the punishing work of squeezing the telephone receiver against his shoulder while simultaneously writing out the invoice and taking notes: "Once a year we call... the right thing... the good guys,” each sale a kind of squeeze play in more ways than one.

CODA:

Showing this sketch to Bill, the only thing that seemed to elicit his interest was that he was called a "handsome ferret" & the description of the clothes he wears. The rest passed him by. Bill is rumored to be a cocaine addict, but I would not venture even a guess whether his various nasal problems derive thence, since he is obviously allergic to the infinity of molds and mites and pollens that thrive in this particular rain forest. Bob Able, who read the sketch, too, was interested whether I didn't also have something about him, but I didn't, at the time, not until Stumptooth Garzanti arrived on the scene, fresh out of Rikers Island in N.Y. Too much of a nice guy, Bob promised to do something outrageous some day to qualify for inclusion, the closest which he came to doing getting a severe case of bruised ribs from allegedly “horsing around” in a sandpit on an 18th hole! But my opinion of Bob Able holds, not that he is an innocuous nice fellow. He is as intent and intense about making money as Bill, but appeared, best as I could tell, to go about it without allowing himself the indulgence of anything as unprofessional and self-destructive as cynicism; working around him for a while you’d never guess at the depth of appallment that resounded from the voice of the A.G.’s Mary Beth Hagerty Shaw when she pronounced the name Bob Able.                        Mentioning to Bob that all it might take would be one story and the K.C.P.U. trough off which his firm was feeding might melt away like a block of ice on a hot summer's day, he got back to me somewhere down the line with the statement that now and then the K.C.P.U. threw a x-mas party for kids but didn't make much noise about it - perhaps that is why no one has heard of the K.C.P.U.'s $ 125,000 K x-mas party for the children of King County. Bob's fate was that he knew that of the $ 125,000 a year that his firm raised for the K.C.P.U. only one tenth, at most, went to the production of the "public safety journal," and another equal amount went into the union quagmire general fund and thence into the pockets of its two secretaries and lawyer while he himself kept the hard-earned rest and kept his brother, generously, in disposable cash. His fate was that he needed, or thought that he needed "pros,” to beat the money out of the business community, and whatever fatal connection, it was an East Coast connection, existed between him and Stumptooth Garzanti, the dark angel with two skil-saw blades for a mustache, with black stumps for teeth. The business agent of the K.C.P.U. applies fairly constant monthly pressure on the S.S. to increase the flow of funds, which pressure, via Bob Able, is then transmitted "down through the ranks."

Señor Heron



Still still

There on two stilts

Reed thin in the reeds

He stands




Posing for Mr. Audubon's

Fine line pen

His light blue grey eminence

Nearly indiscernible

Within

Grey blue

Water green

Sleek reeds.

His magic cap, thinking:

"You can't see me, Senor Darwin, as little as you can see cousin Robin. I have adapted beyond recognition,


I am part sky part water."



Then he flies off, creaking in the wind,

Scrapes his way hoarsely across the sky... 

grey…  elegant metal file... 

turning into just one vanishing line.




A niche bird,

[A specialist,

Nay, a super-specialist]

A solitary aristocrat

Or pair – “lifers” who don’t seem to tire.

With the thinnest of funnels 

Nearly a foot in length

to be picky with


To probe the slimmest of cavities. 

To stand in the nichiest places..

To probe the most finely meshed nets…



Zap
And another baby salmon
Zap
Another frog
Wriggles down his elongated gullet

Everything about him is elongated…
But when he start to fly and slowly begins to spread,
and slowly starts, to wave his heavy-seeming, mournful wings, like rain curtains in the wind, oh what a leaden rhythm that is of his waving of astonishingly wide, substantial width of wings… wide enough it seems
to lift much heavier loads than his spindly being...

No fluttering ever…
Occasionally he glides…
Just above the water
The perfect submarine hunter
Glider...

Infinitely boring Boren.... from one long dreary end to the other, from South Seattle all the way, for three endless-seeming miles, to Denny. An authentically faceless drag strip.

And what has Denny ever done to your eyes except regrade its way all the way from Capitol Hill down to anonymice Western Avenue ?

No Firs on Fir Street !

No Spruce on Spruce .

No Alders on Alder.

No Pines anywhere on Pine. And definitely no cherries of any kind on any part of Cherry Street , you must be mad.

Just guess what does not happen on Lenora?

No bells ring in Belltown or on Bell . No dogs bark.

No virgins on Virginia , imagine that!

No Johns of course not, not in Seattle , we lock em' up, on John Street .

No ancient walls on Wall Street, not in Seattle .

Dexter , what's a Dexter anyhow: one of the original criminals, that's what.

Aloha must have been someone's wish to be farther West....

Guess what: neither Dears nor Deer on the truckway Dearborn .

No mercy to anyone on the decade old congestive failure known as Mercer Street .

No, no no no Aurora on Aurora Avenue that runs neither to sunrise nor sunset much less a Borealis! Nothing but.... and

if a wise man ever walked on Seneca we have yet to hear of it.

And Mr. Jackson's after hour bars were closed down a long time ago on South Jackson . And not much Jazz since.

But you can buy no end of Terry Cloth on Terry, only kidding.

At Interlaken the land is hilly and, using an experienced imagination, you can see the Swiss Alps across Lake Washington . But then Interlaken, which springs to life on the wealthy side and runs East West, suddenly leaps North and hops the Ship Canal, no not the birth or any other canal that there might be, but what folks here call "The Ship Canal" which has the occasional barge on which hundreds of crows occasionally catch a ride to the Arboretum: becomes segmented, segments that lose more and more continuities, of any kind, as it segues on North, to Wedgwood and beyond, whose only wedges are of the traffic kind.

Montlake Blvd is a Blvd. indeed, and it comes to a full stop at the Montlake Bridge across the Montlake Cut that was dug by Chinese slave labor, then run and shipped back out of town.

But Union unifies what? And the homeless and destitute on Pike are certainly Pikers. What's a Yessler? Is it just a name, or something that yells deep in its heart? It begins so promisingly at Pioneer Square with its many hued 19th commercial century brick architects... and inclines sharply upward into a nowhere, a launching site to nowhere, or possibly a great slope for sledding if it would ever snow again...

So few peopled streets. Just a few blocks stretches here and there.

There's a Republican but not a Democratic.

No Duck Lane, Crow Haven, or Goose anything despite the merry voracious fowl. And at the heart of it the huge generic downtown canyons. So few truly peopled streets. Just a few blocks stretches here and there.

There, he perches on top of the huge spruce tree...



There, he lowers his substantial spread, cushioning himself,


Segueing into Mr. Audobon's preferred profile, on the crown of the huge, wide bower of the weeping willow and ghen cries his heart out…

==================

SEATTLE STREET POEM #2

Infinitely boring Boren.... from one long dreary end to the other, from South Seattle all the way, for three endless-seeming miles, to Denny. An authentically faceless drag strip.

And what has Denny ever done to your eyes except regrade its way all the way from Capitol Hill down to anonymice Western Avenue ?

No Firs on Fir Street !

No Spruce on Spruce .

No Alders on Alder.

No Pines anywhere on Pine. And definitely no cherries of any kind on any part of Cherry Street , you must be mad.

Just guess what does not happen on Lenora?

No bells ring in Belltown or on Bell . No dogs bark.

No virgins on Virginia , imagine that!

No Johns of course not, not in Seattle , we lock em' up, on John Street .

No ancient walls on Wall Street, not in Seattle .

Dexter , what's a Dexter anyhow: one of the original criminals, that's what.

Aloha must have been someone's wish to be farther West....

Guess what: neither Dears nor Deer on the truckway Dearborn .

No mercy to anyone on the decade old congestive failure known as Mercer Street .

No, no no no Aurora on Aurora Avenue that runs neither to sunrise nor sunset much less a Borealis! Nothing but.... and

if a wise man ever walked on Seneca we have yet to hear of it.

And Mr. Jackson's after hour bars were closed down a long time ago on South Jackson . And not much Jazz since.

But you can buy no end of Terry Cloth on Terry, only kidding.

At Interlaken the land is hilly and, using an experienced imagination, you can see the Swiss Alps across Lake Washington . But then Interlaken, which springs to life on the wealthy side and runs East West, suddenly leaps North and hops the Ship Canal, no not the birth or any other canal that there might be, but what folks here call "The Ship Canal" which has the occasional barge on which hundreds of crows occasionally catch a ride to the Arboretum: becomes segmented, segments that lose more and more continuities, of any kind, as it segues on North, to Wedgwood and beyond, whose only wedges are of the traffic kind.

Montlake Blvd is a Blvd. indeed, and it comes to a full stop at the Montlake Bridge across the Montlake Cut that was dug by Chinese slave labor, then run and shipped back out of town.

But Union unifies what? And the homeless and destitute on Pike are certainly Pikers. What's a Yessler? Is it just a name, or something that yells deep in its heart? It begins so promisingly at Pioneer Square with its many hued 19th commercial century brick architects... and inclines sharply upward into a nowhere, a launching site to nowhere, or possibly a great slope for sledding if it would ever snow again...

So few peopled streets. Just a few blocks stretches here and there.

There's a Republican but not a Democratic.

No Duck Lane, Crow Haven, or Goose anything despite the merry voracious fowl. And at the heart of it the huge generic downtown canyons. So few truly peopled streets. Just a few blocks stretches here and there.

Northwest Weather Poem # 5, with Links
Puget Sound regarded as a huge sink to slide into
and Seattle as the not so small drainage pit, the sinkhole's drain
by which I do not mean to say that it is a dump in many other respects thanthis!
A sink  wide open to all sides, to the Northsoutheastwest sire, especially to the South West, West and North West Pacific... only to the occasional incursion from the East, from Montana..
even from up North it occasionally pours a sack full, it drops down from Canada. -
 Just the other day:
Ah! It looks as though we will have a good day [you detect that tad of uncertainty in the stated proposition],
the jet stream is swooping up from the sou-west, no baggage on its train, so it appears, nothing but clear blue on the US milirary Navy Sattelite's Photo site,
http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat_products.html

nothing that might drift over from the West or North West,  and the entire, rainless, apparently cloudless air mass, it's all moving east, why worry, leave that Bumbershoot home....
and then, you are downtown, and you step out
downtown at Paul Allen's 600 Plaza at King Street Station... 
why, it's raining, it starts to pour: your eyes travel  up the length of the campanile of the station, doggonit, there's a mess of clouds and its coming in from the North! I don't believe this. How did this come about? I didn't see anything of the kind coming on the Navy's photos?
 I can't get on line.  I look at the Times projection of the nation's weather: there it is, a ribbed rubber, those small scallop pencili