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You're the kind of person who has magneted to your refrigerator a yellowing cartoon of hostile space aliens threatening to "telemarket the Earth." You're the sort who gloats when the evening news features your local congressman crowing about new legislation that further limits intrusive phone calls. You're the type who hates all telemarketers forever and ever because more than once your soothing bubble bath has been rudely interrupted by a caller wanting you to purchase a time-share at the Tundra Lodge in northeastern Manitoba.

Well! The telemarketers of America want you to know they are not disembodied voices projecting from some soulless void. They are flesh and blood, human beings, even, and they have feelings too.

So you want to talk about rude, huh? Honey, you don't know rude until a little old lady politely asks you to hold a moment, only to return with a whistle, which she blows into the receiver with the lung power of an Olympic swimmer.

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What about 6-year-olds who officiously screen their parents' calls by saying, "I'm sorry, but Mummy doesn't have time to speak to a telemarketer." Click.

And people who say, "Could you call back in a half hour?" and you do, and the phone rings and rings and rings. Or, "Would you like to speak to Junior or Senior?" and you pick Junior and they say, "He doesn't live here." So you say Senior and they say, "Oh, he's dead."

Then there are the phone machines that start off, "If you're a bill collector, the check is in the mail; if you're a telemarketer, I don't need it . . ."

As long as we're talking about answering machines, let's not forget having to endure dozens of bad impressions of Ronald Reagan, somebody's personal rendition of "I Wanna Sex You Up" and innumerable singing dogs.

Perhaps it's time you changed your attitude toward the telemarketer, who has been dubbed the Fuller Brush man of the Information Age. Why? Because the odds are increasing that the voice on the other end of the line is no longer an irritating abstraction but, instead, your sister, your grandfather, your cousin, your neighbor, your best friend's new boyfriend. Telemarketing, the most maligned profession since used car sales, has burgeoned exponentially since the early 1980s and promises to continue to do so for the coming decade.

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Consider some startling statistics. Currently about 3.5 million Americans are employed by the telemarketing industry -- 85 percent of them the people who handle calls. By the year 2000, according to one estimate, 8 million Americans are expected to be telemarketers.

Telemarketing's image problem is partly a matter of definitions: We tend to think of telemarketers only as those people who harass us at home during the dinner hour, but the telemarketing industry is much broader than that. (Did I hear a collective sigh of relief that not every one of those 8 million Americans will be calling you at home?) It also includes inbound marketing, or 800 numbers, the vast array of pay-per-call 900 numbers and business-to-business phone sales. Most telemarketers will tell you that stockbrokers -- many of whom spend their days cold-calling on the phone -- are telemarketers who won't admit to being telemarketers.

And no matter how much we hate telemarketers, they must be doing something right, because we are buying from them at astonishing rates. In 1991 the telemarketing industry reaped $435 billion (industry revenues eclipsed direct mail more than a decade ago) and expended only $60 billion, making it an exceedingly lucrative sales venue in a nation suffering the throes of economic decline. IF TELEMARKETERS ARE VILIFIED BY cranky citizens and sound-biting politicians, they often are treated as dispensable lowlifes by their own employers. Take, for example, a 1991 guide for managers called Telemarketing Factomatic by Peggy Fielding and Garry Drummond. The guide advises: * "Don't agonize over the hire/don't hire decision of every applicant. Chances are that he or she won't work out anyway. If the applicants speak the language fluently and clearly, if they can write down basic information, and if their grammar isn't too poor, hire them." * "High intelligence has been found to be one of the least important traits for a successful telemarketer." * Don't hire "applicants who were fired from their last job for employee theft or other illegal behavior" or "applicants who are obviously intoxicated or drugged out during the interview."

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The book also informs the manager his staff must be trained not to use "patronizing endearments" such as Sweetmeat, Sugarlump, Stud, Honkie, Gringo or Bub.

Similar to Telemarketing Factomatic is Gary S. Goodman's 1987 tome, humbly titled Gary Goodman's Breakthroughs in Telemarketing, which states that among the best places to recruit telemarketers are bowling alleys, rock concerts, chiropractic colleges and video arcades.

Telemarketing has long been stereotyped as a college-student ghetto. Suzan Revah is a senior at the University of Maryland who began telemarketing for a home improvement company last summer. For about a month Suzan looked for a job waitressing or in retail. Finally, after embellishing her resume, she almost landed a job waiting tables at a Greenbelt restaurant. "But during the interview," she says, "the manager got onto the topic of uniforms. 'Tight skirts,' he said. 'That's what sells.' He was ooz- ing scum."

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Suzan wanted to quit after her first night at the home improvement company, but the boss talked her out of it. Then she planned to quit when school began in the fall. She is still there. "It does pay well," she says. "Of course, no one would do it if it didn't."

Like many telemarketers, she is working part time, averaging about $10 an hour and working 20 hours a week. "If it was any longer I'd kill myself," she says. "It's hard work to have somebody reject you every 50 seconds."

Almost worse than the matter-of-fact "no's," she says, are the excuses people make up. "People think they have to tell you stories of death and dying: Their husband is on dialysis; their mother has cancer; their grandfather just passed away."

Given that the average tenure of a telemarketer is six to 12 months (and who can blame them), the most typical telemarketer is a former telemarketer. Jim Bigus, now a U.S. Foreign Service officer, was a telemarketer in Chicago in his salad days. ("You were?" his wife says. "Oh, that's right -- I suppressed it.")

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Jim was hired, at minimum wage, to sell cemetery plots. His script -- all telemarket- ers work from a script -- was a sales pitch in the guise of a survey. The questions were 1) Do you own your own home? 2) Do your kids go to college? and 3) Do you own your own cemetery plot?

He was unable to sell any plots (" 'What do you mean?' people would say. 'I'm not even dead yet!' "), so he quit after two weeks when a friend got him a job painting a house.

Suzan's and Jim's experiences notwithstanding, some telemarketers actually enjoy their jobs. Just three hours west of Washington is the Harrisonburg, Va., division of TransAmerica Marketing, a Washington-based company. Increasingly, telemarketing operations are relocating to rural areas, which offer an inexpensive labor force that has few white-collar job alternatives (payroll is the industry's number one expense).

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For six years, Carolyn Swartz has been phoning 200 people nationwide a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. She took the TransAmerica job when she found herself divorced at 33, with two young girls to support. Carolyn is an aspiring country songwriter and performer, and when she calls a number in Nashville, "if they got a famous last name, I'll say, 'Well, are you kin to the great singer So-and-So?' " Thus far she has spoken only to a second cousin of Ricky Skaggs, but she remains hopeful. Like her colleagues at TransAmerica, Carolyn is very, very, very sincere and says nice things about almost all the people she calls. As you might expect, most telemarketers detest calling New Yorkers, who are brutally terse, but not Carolyn. "I talk Southern, and I think they like that," she says, though she is not so sanguine about all regions of the country. She's even written a song about her geographic preferences. But we'll come back to that. WHILE TELEMARKETING IS NOT A BIG industry in the Washington area, the nation's capital is a hub of telemarketing decision-making because of the density of politicians and nonprofit organizations -- two big categories of telemarketing users.

Other big users are credit card companies, which sell add-on services over the phone, and publishing companies such as Time-Life Books, which has one telemarketing outlet in the D.C. area and employs 700 full-time telemarketers nationwide. General Electric has a monstrous in-house telemarketing system, with 3,000 callers at 50-plus sites. The Washington Post also uses telemarketers to pull in 18 percent of the paper's new subscribers.

Telemarketing experienced its first major growth spurt during the 1970s, in part because the oil crisis made travel so expensive for the average salesman and in part because harried working mothers found it convenient to buy over the phone.

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Omaha rapidly became the nation's telemarketing hub after Northwestern Bell lured companies there to take advantage of the huge phone capacity it had built to accommodate a Strategic Air Command base. Nebraska was attractive for other reasons as well. Real estate was cheap. The labor force was inexpensive and had a small-town work ethic and an inoffensive Walter Cronkite accent. And Omaha was centrally located, allowing companies to call both coasts during normal business hours.

During the '80s, the industry grew even more rapidly as the public became comfortable charging merchandise over the phone and as long-distance rates became cheaper while postal rates continued to climb. Dallas and Denver became hubs in their own right, and Midwestern states continued to aggressively recruit telemarketing firms.

One reason telemarketers have a bad rep continued on page 28 TELEMARKETERS continued from page 16 is that the public imagines them to be dialing from a smoky cinderblock basement illuminated by a single naked bulb and littered with crumpled potato chip bags and cigarette ashes. In fact, many mom-and-pop telemarketing operations do look like this. But the larger operations are quite high-tech affairs.

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"Is this going to be a positive article?" asks Elizabeth Griffin, the marketing director of Springfield-based Equitel Corp. Telemarketing companies are, well, touchy about press coverage. Among those who politely refused to be included in this article are Public Interest Communications (a marketer of politically correct causes) and the telemarketing operations of the Republican National Committee, Arena Stage and several aluminum siding companies. Equitel, one of the largest firms in the Washington area, was one of the few to acquiesce.

To find Equitel, you turn onto Industrial Road and, after passing a gravel pit, take a right onto Industrial Drive and another right at the industrial hardware company. Equitel is at the end of Commercial Drive on the back side of the headquarters of the Virginia Concrete company. You get the idea. Pricey real estate is not a telemarketing priority.

Equitel sees itself as a high-end boutique firm specializing in magazine subscription renewals and add-on services for telephone companies. The firm's management professes to run a "company of the '90s" where employees are not employees but "team players" and clients are referred to as "partners." In other words, no copies of Telemarketing Factomatic in sight.

The company says it does not make cold calls. "If you're calling out of the blue, it's an intrusion," says Richard Freed, who was recently promoted to president at Equitel. "If you're calling on behalf of a company that the consumer already deals with, that's a different story."

Freed, a West Point graduate and Harvard MBA, reflects the growing professionalism of an industry that -- let's face it -- doesn't even register yet on the respectability meter. What did his parents think when he moved into this line of work three years ago? "Well, frankly," he says, "they had some reservations."

One of Equitel's clients is Car & Driver magazine, which has 1 million subscribers nationwide. Equitel calls the subscriber list perhaps four times a year -- not just for renewals but to sell discount mutual funds, travel club benefits, collision insurance. This type of interdisciplinary selling represents the telemarketing of the future, industry executives say. The Car & Driver name gets the telemarketer into the loyal subscriber's figurative door -- allowing the caller to give a sales pitch for something that in fact is completely unrelated to the magazine. At the same time, the telemarketing calls help prompt subscribers to send in their checks at renewal time.

Equitel's calling floor in Springfield (the company has another location in Johnson City, Tenn., that accommodates 105 telemarketers) is about 1,500 square feet of muted steel-blue carpet populated by 36 padded carrels, each equipped with a computer terminal. On a Monday afternoon, several dozen simultaneous sales pitches merge with the piped disco Muzak into a blurry background hum. The first thing you notice about the room is that there are no telephones at all. Instead, each caller speaks to consumers through a thin, curved tube attached to a Walkman-like headset that is, in turn, attached to a computer terminal.

Equitel's telemarketers range from the temporarily unemployed and permanently laid off to those who need a second job to meet the mortgage payment. Among them are a med student, a PhD candidate, an employee of the CIA, an injured ex-roofer and a former real estate agent. All calls are dialed automatically by a computer known in the biz as a "predictive dialer" (not to be confused with the universally reviled autodialing recorded message machines). A given client's list is fed into the computer, whose dialing pace is determined by a programmable algorithm that factors in how many telemarketers are working, how long their script is and what parts of the country should be called at what time of the day.

The computer puts through a call to a telemarketer and flashes the customer's name on a screen only when it has been answered by a human being -- or an answering machine it thinks is a human being. Today it is dialing about 7,400 numbers an hour. About 1,800 of those are answered by phone machines; 240 are busy; 1,550 are answered by human beings; and the rest go unanswered after five rings.

"Hello, my name is J. Simon," says a 29-year-old telemarketer, beginning his 150th pitch of the day. It's actually Keith J. Simon, of Temple Hills. Today he is selling the "Answer Call" service for a regional Bell phone company. This is just one of two jobs for Keith, who works about 80 hours a week. In his other job he ferries the elderly, handicapped and mentally ill from destination to destination. Keith, who just bought a condo, says he couldn't afford to live on just his telemarketing salary.

"Can I be honest with you?" Keith says. "When I first meet someone, I don't tell them I'm a telemarketer. I say I'm a sales associate. I know I'm more than just a telemarketer. I'm not just selling. I'm providing customer service, listening to people's complaints."

In his soft voice, Keith riffs on the script -- when the person on the other end permits him to get past hello, that is. After each call, Keith presses a specific key that tells the computer the result of the call. There is a Man/Woman of the House Not at Home key, an Answering Machine key, a No key, a Yes key and even a Hostile Call key.

If the recipient of the call is particularly vitriolic, Keith will fill out a form quoting specific phrases from the complainant. These comments are passed on to the client at management's discretion, and frequently the complainant is excised from the company's calling list. The computer also can spit out geo-demographic reports that identify which area codes or Zip codes are responding particularly well or poorly to the product. Keith's calls are monitored periodically by Equitel management and by the client, who can patch into his telemarketing campaign from any point in the country.

Keith is having a tough time this afternoon. The woman seated next to him, June Thomas, leads the phone room with five confirmed sales for the day. June stands while she gives her current pitch. On the previous call, an elderly woman regaled June with a detailed account of the agonies of her recent cataract surgery and then said, of course, that she wasn't interested in buying anything over the phone.

"Hello? Mrs. Evans?" Keith is saying. "Oh -- it's Mr. Evans?" Chalk up another no sale.

"I'm not having a great day," says Keith.

A couple of "no's" later he speaks to a Mr. Kaplan. "You better talk to my wife," Mr. Kaplan says. Mrs. Kaplan seizes the phone. "Don't want it," she says. Click.

During the course of an hour, Keith has endured 45 consecutive rejections. "If you can get them to listen in a relatively calm way -- that's a pleasant call," he says, but he doesn't seem entirely convinced of this himself.

At 4 p.m. the Equitel day shift punches out. Keith is sticking around for the second shift. Today is the first of what will be two 12-hour days for him at Equitel this week. PERHAPS, FINALLY, YOU'RE BUILDING A little sympathy for the beleaguered telemarketer, but still hate those unbelievably obnoxious recorded telemarketing messages. Like the one from Las Vegas that inundated Washington phone lines last year.

During this call, a canned radio announcer voice informed you that you had won a prize if only you could answer correctly the following question, which went something like this: Who is the hostess of the popular nighttime game show "Wheel of Fortune?" Is it a) Mother Teresa, b) Margaret Thatcher or c) Vanna White? The machine paused for your answer, and whether you gave one or not said something like, "Congratulations, now please call our 900 number to collect your prize," and, sotto voce, "ONLYNINETEEN- NINETYFIVEFORTHEFIRSTMINUTE."

Actually, many telemarketers hate these machines too. In fact, the American Telemarketing Association's official position is that automatic dialers "should not be used in the absence of a live operator or a prior relationship." This is similar to what the new telemarketing law, signed by President Bush in December, mandates {see box, Page 15}.

Few companies seem to want to admit these days that they use automated message machines. "They don't like to stick their head out of the foxhole," says Andrew Lipman, an industry lawyer. Virginia Natural Gas and D.C. Natural Gas, like an increasing number of public utilities, use automated message machines for bill collection (and the new law will not change this).

Phone Base of Vienna is a company that admits to sending out recorded telemarketing messages for its clients. "I'd rather be called by a computer than a person because I can hang up on it immediately," says John Oakes, the CEO of Phone Base. "It's not some college kid trying to make eight bucks an hour who I have to feel sorry for." Oakes says that his operation already meets the major requirements of the new legislation -- mainly the prior relationship clause and the stipulation that such calls immediately disconnect should the called party hang up.

"If you look at the millions of outbound calls our company made last year, the complaints have been infinitesimal," Oakes says. He frames the automated message debate as a class issue. "Rich people don't like being called by a computer," he says. "But Joe Six-Pack prefers it."

The Phone Base computer is housed in a 2,000-square-foot, L-shaped ground-floor area kept at 72 degrees and between 34 and 40 percent humidity. The hook of the L is called the Fiber Optics Room. This is where a tangle of AT&T, MCI, C&P, ICC and Sprint cables feed into the building. The yellow cables, each about an eighth of an inch in diameter, represent 5,000 individual phone lines. They then feed into a huge box that changes the cables' current from light impulses into digital electrical impulses.

In the next room -- which is monitored through the windows of an adjoining control room -- are about two dozen six-foot cabinets, filled with telephone switches made up of yellow and blue circuit boards. These basically answer the phones and are exactly like the switches flown on C-130s to Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm to enable U.S. troops to call home.

Behind the switches are huge components called Voice Response Units, which collectively have about 55 million billion megabytes of storage. These are where the digitalized voices of such waning celebrities as Phyllis Diller and Bruce Jenner reside and speak the same message over and over again thousands of times a day. To the left are several video display terminals with keyboards. Here Phone Base customizes computer programs for each of its clients.

The major share of Phone Base's business is not in outbound automated message telemarketing but in inbound automated message telemarketing, or 800 numbers.

At Phone Base, 800 number calls are first answered by the computer. A digitalized Bruce Jenner, for example, picks up calls about NBC's pay-per-view Olympics cable service, which is advertised in slick prime-time TV ads and in glossy magazines such as Esquire. Eventually the call may be kicked over to a live operator down the hall in a fluorescent-washed beige version of the Equitel phone room.

On a rainy Tuesday morning, the room, which can hold 30 telemarketers, is populated only by three bored-looking young men. The presence of a soiled Redskins deck indicates they have only temporarily abandoned their card game. Nearby on the floor are the remains of a thrice-read newspaper. Not much pay-per-view Olympics demand today, apparently. IN ADDITION TO GENERAL HOSTILITY from the public, telemarketers have two main nemeses. The first is Dear Abby. One tirade from her, boy, and the Federal Communications Commission swims in 1,500 complaint letters. The second is a man from Illinois named Bob Bulmash. You may have read about him in the Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

Telephone his organization, Private Citizen, and you usually get the answering machine: "If you're sick and tired of having telemarketer junk callers barging in any time they feel like it," Bulmash's recorded voice exhorts, ". . . we'll mail you information on how to join us to FIGHT BACK."

Bulmash tells of one investment firm he claims recently harassed him for a period of several weeks, calling him up to five times a day with bogus telemarketing spiels. He flew to New York, showed up on the company's doorstep to complain in person to management. He wrote letters to, among other places, the New York Stock Exchange, the FCC, AT&T and the FBI. They all wrote back to tell him they weren't going to do anything. "Not going to do anything?" Bulmash says. "I've got the evidence! I've got the tapes!" WHAT REALLY GIVES TELEMARKETING a bad name is fraud.

It's true, telephone scammers pick the public's pocket at a healthy pace. They sell fake Salvador Dali prints for $3,000 apiece, all-expenses-paid vacations to Hawaii that somehow get billed to your credit card without your consent and shares in nonexistent oil wells in Okla- homa. It's sort of hard to put a positive spin on the fact that a couple with the improbable names of Teresa and Marc Suck- man milked 135 school districts of $2 million for colored pens that were never delivered.

It's not clear, however, that telemarketing has a higher fraud rate than any other industry. Different authorities estimate that annual telemarketing fraud is anywhere from $3 billion to $15 billion. That's a big chunk of hip cash, to be sure. But look at it another way: Even if it is $15 billion, that's still less than 4 percent of gross annual sales. "Telemarketing fraud is more prevalent than in the past, but the telemarketing industry has exploded too," says Charles Owens, chief of the Economic Crimes Unit at the FBI, which keeps no separate statistics on telephone fraud. No agency does, apparently.

Owens and William Esposito, chief of the FBI's White Collar Crimes Section, say that the popular scams of the moment are loan consolidation schemes (doing a brisk business because of the recession) and counterfeit bank drafts (once the rip-off artist gets you to tell him your account number, he makes a legitimate-looking withdrawal with the aid of an encoding machine probably obtained during a bank liquidation sale).

At any given moment, Esposito estimates, his agency is investigating 500 telephone scams. "We could jump that up tomorrow to a thousand if we had the manpower," he says. "Unfortunately, in the white collar crime division we have to concentrate on other priorities."

Such as? "Well, such as various savings and loans scandals, BCCI, public corruption . . . ," he says. "You get the picture." Savings and loans? BCCI? Suddenly $15 billion seems an awfully puny sum. BUT WAIT. LET'S NOT END THIS MES- sage on such a negative note. After all, we've been trying to lower your blood pressure by reminding you that telemarketers are human beings. So let's ring up Carolyn Swartz at TransAmerica one more time.

Defying songwriter Steve Goodman's dictum that all great country songs are about prison, pickup trucks, trains, gettin' drunk or mama, Carolyn has written a song about, yes, telemarketing. She sings the lyrics to me with classic country inflection -- over the telephone, of course:

My job requires me to call around, all over the U.S.A.

I talk to people on the phone, lots of them each day.

But the Western states, I must say,

I just can't understand.

They're short, abrupt, in a big hurry,

No time for their fellow man.

(Chorus) Southern hospitality, you can't beat it anywhere.

Sometimes when I'm talkin' on the phone,

City dudes just don't care.

They're cold, harsh and so callous

-- have no friendly words at all

But that Southern hospitality surely does beat it all.

It doesn't get any more human than that.

Teresa Riordan is a Washington-based freelance writer.

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