Interview with the Receptionist
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Some people think it’s easy to be a receptionist. After all, what do they do all day long but sit in a nice, clean, quiet reception area and answer the phone from 9 to 5, right?
The monotony, the constant interruptions, and the lying imposed on receptionists by their bosses can be as demoralizing as any job, depending on your personality.
Sharon Atkins was a 24-year-old college graduate married to a student when she was interviewed by Studs Terkel for his book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). She found it terribly difficult to do the seemingly harmless tasks of a big office receptionist all day long and not let it affect how she felt about people, and how she communicated with them, both on and off work.
THE RECEPTIONIST
She explains how she began working as a receptionist: “I was out of college, an English lit. [literature] major. I looked around for copywriting jobs. The people they wanted had majored in journalism. Okay, the first myth that blew up in my face is that a college education will get you a job.”
Even she had a negative view of receptionists until she became one. And, her becoming one didn’t change anyone else’s view of her newly-acquired occupation: “I changed my opinion of receptionists because now I’m one. It wasn’t the dumb broad at the front desk who took telephone messages. She had to be something else because I thought I was something else. I was fine until there was a press party. We were having a fairly intelligent conversation. Then they asked me what I did. When I told them, they turned around to find other people with name tags. I wasn’t worth bothering with. I wasn’t being rejected because of what I had said or the way I talked, but simply because of my function. After that, I tried to make up other names for what I did: communications control, servomechanism. (Laughs.)”
She characterizes her experience as dehumanizing, turning her into a machine: “I don’t think they’d ever hire a male receptionist. They’d have to pay him more, for one thing. You can’t pay someone who does what I do very much. It isn’t economically feasible. (Laughs.) You’re there just to filter people and filter telephone calls. You’re there just to handle the equipment. You’re treated like a piece of equipment, like the telephone. [¶] You come in at nine, you open the door, you look at the piece of machinery, you plug in the headphone. That’s how my day begins. You tremble when you hear that first ring. After that, it’s sort of downhill, unless there’s somebody on the phone who is either kind or nasty. The rest of the people are just non; they don’t exist. They’re just voices. You answer calls. You connect to others. And, that’s it. [¶] I don’t have much contact with people. You can’t see them. You don’t know if they’re laughing, if they’re being satirical or being kind. So, your conversations become very abrupt. I notice that in talking to people, my conversations would be very short and clipped—in short sentences—the way I talk to people all day on the phone.
“You can think about this thing, and, all of a sudden, the telephone rings, and you’ve got to jump right back. There isn’t a ten minute break in the whole day that’s quiet. I once worked at a punch press when I was in high school. A part-time job. You sat there and watched it for four, five hours. You could make up stories about people and finish them. But, you can’t do that when you’ve got only a few minutes. You can’t pick it up after the telephone call. You can’t think; you can’t even finish a letter. So, you do quickie things, like read a chapter in a short story. It has to be short-term stuff. [¶] You try to fill your time with trying to think about other things: what you’re going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don’t have a very good one, and you bore easily, you’re in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel, how depressed I am.
“I do some drawings—Mondrian, sort of. Peaceful colors of red and blue. Very ordered life. I’d like to think of rainbows and mountains. I never draw humans. Things of nature, never people. I always dream I’m alone and things are quiet. I call it the land of no-phone, where there isn’t any machine telling me where I have to be every minute. [¶] The machine dictates. This crummy little machine with buttons on it. You’ve got to be there to answer it. You can walk away from it and pretend you don’t hear it; but, it pulls you. You know you’re not doing anything—not doing a hell of a lot for anyone. Your job doesn’t mean anything. Because YOU’RE just a little machine. A monkey could do what I do. It’s really unfair to ask someone to do that.”
Lying is a normal part of her job. “Oh sure, you have to lie for other people. That’s another thing: having to make up stories for them if they don’t want to talk to someone on the telephone. At first, I’d feel embarrassed, and I’d feel they knew I was lying. There was a silence of emptiness. There’d be a silence, and I’d feel guilty. At first, I tried to think of a euphemism for ‘He’s not here.’ It really bothered me. Then, I got tired of doing it. So, I just say, ‘He’s not here.’ You’re not looking at the person; you’re talking to him over the instrument. (Laughs.) So, after a while, it doesn’t really matter. The first time, it was live. The person was there. I’m sure I blushed. He probably knew I was lying. And, I think he understood I was just the instrument, not the source.”
Worst of all, the unnatural communication style at work has permeated her personal relationships: “I never answer the phone at home. It carries over. The way I talk to people on the phone has changed. Even when my mother calls, I don’t talk to her very long. I want to SEE people to talk to them. But, now when I see them, I talk to them like I was talking on the telephone. It isn’t a conscious process. I don’t know what’s happened. When I’m talking to someone at work, the telephone rings, and the conversation is interrupted. So, I never bother finishing sentences or finishing thoughts. I always have this feeling of interruption.
“I notice people have asked me to slow down when I’m talking. What I do all day is to say what I have to say as quickly as possible and switch the call to whoever it’s going to. If I’m talking to a friend, I have to make it quick before I get interrupted.
“I’ll be home and the telephone will ring, and I’ll get nervous. It reminds me of the telephone at work. It becomes live Pavlov’s bell. (Laughs.) It made the dogs salivate. It makes me nervous. The machine invades me all day. I’d go home, and it’s still there. It’s a very bad way to talk to people, to communicate. It may have been a boon to business; but, it did a lot to wreck conversation. (Laughs.)”
Yet, she prefers the devil she knows to the devil she doesn’t: “One minute to five is a moment of triumph. You physically turn off the machine that has dictated to you all day long. You put it in a drawer; and, that’s it. You’re your own [person] for a few hours. Then it calls to you every morning that you have to come back. [¶] Until recently, I’d cry in the morning. I didn’t want to get up. I’d dread Fridays because Monday was always looming over me. Another five days ahead of me. There never seemed to be any end to it. Why am I doing this? Yet, I dread looking for other jobs. I don’t like filling out forms and taking typing tests. I remember on applications, I’d put down, ‘I’d like to deal with the public.’ (Laughs.) Well, I don’t want to dealt with the public any more.”
She sees that other workers probably hate their jobs as much as she hates hers: “I take the bus to work. That was my big decision. I had to go to work and do what everybody else told me to do, but I could decide whether to take the bus or the el. To me, that was a big choice. Those are the only kinds of decisions you make, and they become very important to you. [¶] Very few people talk on the bus going home. Sort of sit there and look dejected. Stare out the window, pull out their newspaper, or push other people. You feel tense until the bus empties out or you get home. Because things happen to you all day long, things you couldn’t get rid of. So, they build up and everybody is feeding them into each other on the bus. There didn’t seem to be any kind of relief about going home. It was: ‘Boy! Did I have a lot of garbage to put up with!’”
Ironically, she blames her education for her inability to find a satisfying occupation before she goes right back to complaining about her job: “I don’t know what I’d like to do. That’s what hurts the most. That’s why I can’t quit the job. I really don’t know what talents I may have. And, I don’t know where to go to find out. I’ve been fostered so long by school and didn’t have time to think about it. [¶] My father’s in watch repair. That’s always interested me, working with my hands, and independent. I don’t think I’d mind going back and learning something, taking a piece of furniture and refinishing it. The type of thing where you know what you’re doing, and you can create, and you can fix something to make it function. At the switchboard, you don’t do much of anything.”
CONCLUSION
Atkins clearly needs to find a different line of work. She says she would if only she could just find something she enjoys doing. Do you believe her? First, she studied English literature in college. We can assume that she picked that major because she either liked it a lot or because she thought it would be the perfect major to help her get the job she wanted straight out of college, which was copywriting. (Why she didn’t check if in fact that was the right major for that job is another issue.) Then, when she found out that employers wanted journalism majors for their copywriting positions, she did not even think about going back to school to take journalism courses. Did she abandon her interest in writing altogether? Was there no other job she could find where she could use her education or interest in English literature? Instead, she “does not think she would mind going back to learn” how to take a piece of furniture and refinish it. She also says she was “always interested” in her father’s work as a watch repairer. But, will she really enjoy those lines of work? Has she thought those career paths through any better than she did her plan to become a copywriter?
Atkins’s only explanation for not having found her talent or even a strong interest to pursue in life is she didn’t have time to think about it while she was in school for so long. Now that she’s is a job she hates, she has plenty of time to think about it. But, still the best she can come up with is she “does not think she would mind” learning how to refinish furniture. Though she might not mind learning how to do it, I’m sure doing it for a living is another thing altogether and I’m sure she hasn’t thought about that, either.
Don’t be like Atkins and let yourself be pulled along life without a plan. Think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you hate your job, carefully plan your escape to a better job, like the Telemarketer did. Be awesome! Be your own hero!
Learn more intimate details about other U.S. occupations from people who worked in them for years from the other articles in the “Interviews With” series.
If you would like a copy of Mr. Terkel’s book: click here
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