Telemarketers & Oral History Projects

A new TikTok trend - at least new to me- features videos of people taking calls from telemarketers or scam callers and purposefully misleading them. How? By utilizing everyday kitchen items. To jump on this trend, here is what you do: Grab your favourite soup pot and a wooden spoon. Place your phone on a flat surface, then gently place the pot upside down to act as a dome over your phone. That wooden spoon becomes a drumstick, and you, as the spoon wielder, reenact a childhood game of banging pots and pans, creating a beloved musical symphony.

However, that is not a symphony for the caller on the phone. But what this trend points to, whether the caller is a scam artist or a dedicated telemarketer, I have found that both have a valuable skill: patience.

These dedicated callers are willing to cold call individuals with a list in hand, perhaps colour coding as they go, highlighting the few potential clientele who will receive a second call amongst scratched-off names that comprise most of the list. The list looks dismal and disheartening for a telemarketer, yet hopeful once someone remains on the line for longer than a couple minutes. I imagine that sometimes a telemarketer will have a call that sounds promising; it contains friendly banter and interest in the product, but at the last minute, the sale doesn't close. The telemarketer might place an asterisk next to the person's name or number, intending to call them again, patiently waiting.

This picture I painted of the telemarketer has been running through my mind as I reach out to people hoping to generate interest for an oral history project. The patience required is a slow burn. Yes, patience is needed in my job as a teacher, yet oral history feels different. The patience I am used to is contained to a district calendar year, a concrete beginning and end. Oral history, which I am learning, often has an open-ended timeline. The public historian is at the community's whims and often plays the long game.

Not only is patience involved, but a level of explanation to prompt intrigue. A telemarketer is trying to sell an experience or a product as if someone is a consumer. Oral history is not about selling a product; I need to clarify that part, but it shares the dance of building rapport and intrigue. There is no compensation for the interviewee or step-by-step instructions stating that if they say x, y, and z, the interviewee will be rewarded with the most lavish experiences.

Oral history requires, to some degree, the removal of expectations attached to specific outcomes by the interviewer. There is an end goal in mind with a set list of questions, just like a telemarketer has a script, except this is where the two paths diverge. The telemarketer continues to sell, promising and convincing, holding to one singular story, one singular promise. The interviewer takes a different path, holding their questions loosely in one hand while signalling the narrator to take an alternate route if that is where their memory leads. All the while, the interviewer knows the destination yet takes a slower pace to get there.

With my newfound empathy for telemarketers, I will attempt to wait as they do - patiently.