When I graduated from college, I have to tell you, I never thought I would only be able

to find work as a telemarketer with Stixby lawn and garden.

A large landscaping conglomerate hell bent on weed whacking and rototilling as much of

the Midwest as they could handle.

Every Stixby's customer was to get a free ceramic lawn gnome crafted in Mr. Stixby's bearded

image.

The man was egocentric to say the least and had an infatuation with becoming the god

of lawn care.

My duty was to cold call people and businesses in order to drum up sales out of nowhere,

which went about as well as you would expect.

Our customer system was outdated and it tended to pull from an old, infrequently updated

database akin to the white pages.

I'd go through all kinds of prompts trying to ascertain that the person I called had a

yard in need of weeding, mulching, or other general landscaping.

It was about as mind-nubbingly boring as you could expect and my ear would often ache

from rubbing against the cheap headset connected to my old work phone.

I tended to hope that most collars wouldn't answer.

It was a lot easier to just rattle off a script on their voice mail and move on.

I've been working there for almost two to three months and wasn't really worried about

job security as I was still looking for something I could do with my communications

degree.

I had about an hour left on the clock before I could go to lunch, so I rang up my next

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