This is part of a series of posts about working as a phone sex operator. I high recommend Christi Olson's "So You Want to be a Phone Sex Operator" as a jumping off point as well.
I started working as a phone sex operator in 2008, after I lost my nannying job (I was working as a freelance journalist and the writing money was never enough on its own) and needed extra cash. I had a couple of friends who had done it in the past, and one of them sent me a link to an agency where you had to leave a voicemail in a sexy voice and if they called you back, you were hired. I was trained by a woman with a thick Long Island accent ironically named Virginia. She told me she'd worked as a phone sex operator (PSO) for 8 months, which made me a touch incredulous. Her agency followed strict FCC guidelines- no underage, no rape/molestation/incest scenes, no drugs, no bestiality. If the customer brought up these things I was supposed to steer them away:
Client: "Have you ever fucked a horse? Horses have huge cocks!"
Me: "You know who else has a huge cock? My Black boyfriend!" (Big Black Cock, aka BBC is perhaps one of the most overplayed tropes in phone sex.)
Client: "That's great! You should really try horse cock sometime!"
As you can see, easier said than done.
I had to purchase a corded landline and headset, presumably to prevent technical difficulties with calls (I use a cell phone now with very few problems.) Finding a corded landline that can accept a headset was a chore in and of itself, but at least it was a tax writeoff.
The Agency was convenient in that I could log in any time, as long as I did a minimum of 4 hours of calls each week. (I never did). Other agencies required that you work a set graveyard shift schedule where you had to be on the lines regardless of whether not there were callers. I would dial a number in California and sit on the couch, anchored by the horrible headset and landline, and wait to hear the beep that meant a call was coming through. BEEP BEEP and then I'd hear the "tag" for the type of call- "female fantasy" was the general line, and the recorded announcer sounded Midwestern and apprehensive, almost as if she were saying "Female...fantasy?" Not as bad as the tag for the "Blue Asssian!" tag, complete with "me love you long time" accent. Two more beeps, and the customer was on the line.
By the agency's standards, I was NEVER allowed to admit I was an actress on the lines, I had to pretend I was a fun loving young girl who had won free call time as a prize for a wet teeshirt contest (hahaha BULLSHIT). I wasn't allowed to take regulars, although I did get the same callers more than once on occasion. My phone was hooked up to dozens of different lines at any given moment, so it was always a crap shoot who I'd talk to next. It was hard work shifting gears with every call- one moment I was a sassy African American woman named "Ebony" (yes I fully understand the implications of why this is horrible, and there's a great vignette about this phenomenon here), the next moment I was supposed to be a "Spicy Latina" named Eva. Yes, I felt like an asshole a lot of the time and was quickly developing multiple personality disorder.
I was paid on the average length of my calls, as system that was deliberately designed to screw the PSOs. The only was to make decent money was to maintain a call average length of 12 minutes or longer. Virginia claimed this was easy- you just had to make a lot of small talk. This is bullshit- if a client isn't in the mood for small talk, he hangs up on you. Most weeks I wound up making $10 an hour, which was horrifying when a customer whines that he's paying almost $5 an minute to the line. The reality is a lot of dudes will call and hang up if they don't like your voice/persona, which destroys your call average very quickly. The irony is they would immediately re-route the call to my line when he called again, which meant I got very adept at switching names/voices when I got instant callbacks.(Sometimes all that it took to keep this kind of repeater on the line was saying I was a brunette instead a blonde). The other problem was there was no way to build up a client base of regulars, who are usually the big moneymakers in phone sex- the repeat customers whose quirks you know in and out.
I never considered going freelance (which I now do through a PSO hosting website) at this time because I was too lazy to build my own profiles and just assumed it would be too hard to build a customer base. I still regret this- I make more in an hour as a freelancer than I did in a week as an agency girl and it is just so much better overall.
I will be brutally honest and say the agency sucked. I had my line disconnected without warning my first day when I took an adult baby call from a dude who wanted me to pretend to be his mommy and cuddle with him. Yes, the administrators would "listen in" on your calls- I guess this was part of why there was such a huge pay cut between me and the customer- they had to hire phone gestapo to make sure I toed the party line.
There was no actual sexual content to the call, but I was now in trouble with Virginia for unwittingly violating the underage and incest taboos (I don't consider adult baby roleplay to be either of these things). Virginia gave me a sharp dressing down, and the line was re-instated. The second time my line was disconnected was because I refused to get graphic on a scat call- I just assumed that this would be an FCC no-no. I was wrong- Virginia now yelled at me for not pretending to poop in some dudes mouth. The third time I was disconnected, I called Virginia and she didn't answer- she'd conveniently gone on vacation before disconnecting the line. One of the other managers informed me that I was the "lowest performing PSO" of 1,000 operators. I didn't believe this for one minute- the market had just crashed and the reality was my call volume was the lowest it had ever been, one or two calls per hour, which meant a lot of unpaid time sitting on a dead line. (So much for sex work being a recession-proof industry.) I worked for the agency for a year, and it was time to go.
After a two year break I returned to phone sex as a freelancer five months ago, partly for the extra cash, and partly because I missed the weirdness, the customers, and the stories I got out of it- stories were what make the agency worthwhile, and while I vastly prefer freelancing, I get way less batshit crazy on my private lines.
But the stories will have to wait for the next post.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment