True Employment Tales

In the early and mid '90's I lived in Knoxville, TN and one of the jobs I had there was working for the alternative weekly newspaper there. I was the assistant to the woman who was in charge of the classified ads department. She and I got along about as well as the Serbs and Croats were getting along during that time. I think she thought I was gunning for her job and so she tried to keep me at busy doing crap stuff for her but part of my job was also to sell ads. She gave me a file full of "leads" for ads but the leads were crap. The leads were all phone numbers to companies that wanted to advertise their phone sex lines but the publisher of our paper didn't want to take those type of ads because he thought they made his paper look sleazy.

Not one to turn down a challenge I began calling some of these phone sex companies and I pitched them on our paper. Invariably I'd get some person at the companies excited about advertising with us but then I'd lose them when I told them the list of words that they could not use in their ads in our paper. The list included the following words: hot, wet, wild, woman, sexy, and horny. Most would hang up on me after they found out they could not use any of those "overly descriptive" words in their ads. One guy at one of the phone sex companies told me to give him an example of what he could say in place of "Hot Wild Wet Women Want to Get You Off!" I calmly told him we could run, "Excited Moist Feral Females Would Like to Talk to You Now!" He said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

One day I finally struck pay dirt. The company in question was an advertising agency in Boston that bought ads for a bunch of different phone sex companies. My contact was a jaded sounding woman who I'd say was in her early 30's, she was nice and quite understanding of my predicament and when she found out some of her clients would have a virtual monopoly in our paper if we could come up with acceptable wording she jumped at my offer. We talked back and forth and we finally came up with a winner, it read "Super Models Want to Chat With You NOW!" We also ran "Pretty girls are waiting for your call!" She must have been pretty pleased with the results because after the ads ran for a couple of weeks she called me one day and said she wanted to run those ads in our paper indefinitely. When her company sent us a check for 6 months worth of ads I made a copy of it and I put in on my boss's desk along with a note that read, "Thanks for the great phone sex company leads! They really pay off if you're smart enough to stick with them!"