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> People are amazed at your "insight" because they can't imagine
> how much they have in common with the rest of the population.
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> Fortune tattling
>
> by Debbie Nathan
> e-mail feedback
> 8/4/99
>
> The phone rang, and as usual I grabbed it as fast as I could.
> "Thank you for calling the Psychic Network," I said, mixing my
> normal "come on kids do the dishes now!" voice with a breathy
> attempt to sound otherworldly.
>
> "I’m Deborah." (Deborah sounds more mysterious than Debbie.) "Can
> I have your name and your birth date?"
>
> "Teneecia, July 3," a small voice answered, and when she added
> the year, I saw she was 18 – the minimum age you must be to have
> your fortune read on the phone. I went into my spiel, which is
> designed to put the client in an accepting mood and rack up
> valuable minutes of 900-telemarketing time.
>
> "Teneecia," I started my singsong, "I’m a tarot reader. First
> I’ll choose a card to represent you, then do a general reading.
> I’m shuffling now; tell me when it feels right to stop. While I
> do the general reading you be thinking of specific questions to
> ask later on." As usual, I made riffling noises with the cards
> without bothering to shuffle, much less deal. I heard a baby
> crying in the background. "Ready?" I asked.
>
> But Teneecia (her name and month of birth have been changed to
> conceal her identity) didn’t want a general reading. "Please!"
> she begged. "My boyfriend got killed. My little boy’s father. We
> had words, and he left the house and got caught in a shoot-out. I
> never saw him conscious again. I need to tell him I love him. I
> need to know he don’t blame me for him leaving the house and
> getting killed. I need some last words. Can you hear him in the
> cards? Can you tell me what he’s saying? Otherwise I’m going to
> kill myself so I can talk to him."
>
> Job hunt
>
> I was brooding in a motel room in a strange city the first time I
> saw a psychic infomercial. I wasn’t as interested in the
> incongruously glamorous celebrity flacks – Dionne Warwick, Billy
> Dee Williams and others – as I was in ordinary people testifying
> to their life-transforming psychic interventions. An office
> manager said that her psychic told her if she went to a Christmas
> party, the first man she talked to would become her husband; now
> they’re married and expecting a child. A housewife who lost her
> cat found it in the exact place predicted. "She knew everything
> about me!" gushed another customer about the reader who correctly
> told her she wanted to attend computer school. The satisfied
> customers – mostly women – didn’t look like they could afford to
> shell out $4.99 a minute, especially not for entertainment.
>
> Afterward I learned that the biggest company, Psychic Friends,
> was taking in $150 million a year before it was bankrupted last
> year by competition from numerous smaller companies including
> Psychic Readers, Kenny Kingston and LaToya Jackson. By the late
> 1990s, these businesses had jacked the industry’s earnings up to
> at least $300 million annually. For this we can thank the Reagan
> administration; in 1984, the Federal Communications Commission
> lifted its 16-minute-an-hour restriction on TV advertising,
> paving the way for monster hourlong infomercials. Add to this a
> dramatic proliferation of 800- and 900-number marketing and
> computerized billing technologies. The result was an enormous
> "futures" market.
>
> At the time, I was a struggling freelance journalist, so I
> decided to write about the industry after working in it. As
> someone who’s so skeptical of the paranormal that half the time I
> can’t remember my astrological sign, I thought it would be
> revealing if someone like myself could do a good job as a
> dial-a-clairvoyant.
>
> Besides, my preliminary research revealed that the work paid $15
> an hour and it was steady. That’s a lot more than you can say for
> freelance writing. After years of cranking out articles for
> starvation pay, I’d gotten an agent and received assignments from
> slick national magazines. But by the late 1990s, journalism was
> as crazy as the telephone-psychic business; people were buying
> and selling magazines the way the rich used to speculate in pork
> bellies. Amid the wheeling and dealing, editors would come on
> staff, buy pieces from writers like me, then move to other
> magazines, leaving unedited articles behind – which languished in
> new editors’ desks and never got published. I was sick of the
> business, and beneath my psychic-industry muckraker bravado, I
> was fantasizing a change of trade.
>
> Shuffling cards
>
> To get my career as a psychic jump-started, I signed up for a
> nine-hour class with Grace, a bulky, fast-talking blonde who has
> had three husbands and five kids and makes a good living reading
> cards at psychic fairs. The tarot deck harks back to the
> Renaissance, when tarot was a game with no more spiritual
> significance than the modern pastime of bridge.
>
> During the 1960s, when tarot first became mainstream, the emperor
> card suggested willpower. The empress connected you with maternal
> forces. And there were the four suits: swords, representing
> conflict; wands, for work and competition; pentacles – or coins –
> for material affairs; and cups, for emotions.
>
> But these days people don’t want abstract interpretations;
> they’re seeking quick answers to their $4.99-a-minute questions.
> So Grace reads the cards in a rivetingly concrete way. In class
> she slaps down the emperor and the naked lovers cards, surrounds
> them right and left by two "pages" – cards depicting medieval
> boys – and on either side of the pages, the four of swords,
> showing a person in bed; finally the pope.
>
> "OK!" Grace instructed us. "You’ve got your old man, two boys and
> the bed. Check out the lovers. And the moon, which means secrets.
> When this comes up in a spread, you know your client’s involved
> with a pedophile!"
>
> She taught us combinations indicating that your car’s fan belt is
> on the fritz, your son is dealing drugs and your daughter had an
> abortion.
>
> At the end of the course I still felt like a hopeless novice. So
> to get prepared, I offered complimentary readings to my most
> skeptical friends, including a research psychologist who makes a
> career of debunking shibboleths like the Rorschach test. By the
> time I met with him, I’d studied up on the utterly unsupernatural
> reasons why tarot cards work. A group of Israeli researchers has
> suggested the resemblance between tarot readings and the
> compelling story lines of the world’s popular folk tales and
> myths. The Israelis are right. The first time I shuffled, I found
> that by laying out a few cards, you weave a narrative as
> seductive as the most enduring legend, with your client as the
> hero.
>
> In any reading, there will always be some swords: conflict. And
> cups: emotion. There will be money problems, boredom with a
> relationship or a job. Temptations, weakness, insecurity, lust.
> Illness. Gambling, not necessarily with money but with someone or
> something you shouldn’t be taking a chance on. You’re involved
> with someone now, right? Well, I’m feeling lust around you.
> Meaning not necessarily that the sex is hot – in fact, lots of
> times it’s the opposite, right? – but that there’s an imbalance
> between your physical relationship and other forms of
> communication.
>
> You’re keeping from each other. The unacknowledged feelings add
> to some of the boredom – are you feeling bored with each other?
> Hmmm ... but this card shows you as a very strong, insightful
> person when you want to be. If you put your mind to it, you can
> make things better.
>
> People are amazed at your "insight" because most are so
> narcissistic that they can’t imagine how much they have in common
> with the rest of the population. My psychology professor friend
> knew all about "cold readings" like this, and he chuckled as I
> laid out his cards and recited a shtick not unlike the one above.
> But soon his laughter faded, and later he told me he was so
> devastated by my "accuracy" that he went home early that day to
> think about what I’d said to him.
>
> I figured I was ready.
>
> I called a few of the companies, and Ft. Lauderdale-based Psychic
> Readers Network immediately mailed me an application. Soon
> someone from personnel called and asked for a reading. I recited
> pretty much what I had given the psychology professor. "Great,"
> she said. "You can start immediately."
>
> Work rules
>
> Being a telephone psychic subjects you to the grueling pace and
> sadistic management style of a hamburger-flipping job at
> McDonald’s. My first day on the line, I had to memorize a long
> list of instructions: Always answer the phone by the second ring.
> Always say "Thank you for calling the Network, my name is
> Deborah." Explain that I’m a tarot reader. Never answer specific
> questions before doing a "general reading" that’s essentially the
> same for everyone but takes up a lot of time.
>
> If I did all these things, my employer said, the client would get
> "hooked" and stay on the line past the first two minutes that
> Psychic Readers offers free. Before automatically cutting off,
> the call could go on for as long as 55 minutes, which (after
> subtracting the two free minutes) translates into a phone bill of
> $264.47. If the conversation started winding down, I was supposed
> to keep it going by asking for a last name and address "so we can
> send you coupons for free and discounted readings." And at the
> end I must never forget to say, "For adults and entertainment
> only."
>
> All this was reinforced via the recorded "daily message," that I
> had to listen to each time I logged on to work. The Big Brother
> of the message is a Psychic Readers Network executive named
> Steve. He sounds like David Spade, minus the humor. "Come on,
> guys!!" he would whine. "You’ve absolutely positively got to get
> first name last name street name street number city name state
> and don’t forget zip code on each call! Otherwise you will be
> terminated! Remember, we have six callers monitoring you."
>
> I lived in low-grade terror, and I was only part time. Imagine
> people trying to make a real living at this job. I met several of
> them at psychic fairs and in Grace’s classes. The vast majority
> were women, and few had more than high school or a year or so of
> college. They were working 30 or 40 hours a week on the phone,
> often trying to care for small children at the same time.
> ("Absolutely no putting clients on hold to change diapers!" Steve
> warned.) For the $4.99 these women earned each minute for the
> company, they kept only 25 cents – with no benefits.
>
> Cultivating calls
>
> The easiest way to make money as a phone psychic is by talking to
> callers who don’t require much attention. The lotto players who
> want numbers, for instance. I obliged them by counting swords or
> cups on the cards, always warning them that if I could guarantee
> the numbers, I’d be in Vegas, not on the phone. Or teenage girls
> on three-way extensions, inquiring about who on a list of boys
> would be asking them out. And men – good-natured "Home
> Improvement" types – wanting to know where they’d meet their next
> girlfriend: a bowling alley or a bar? These people were watching
> their clocks, and if they didn’t hang up by the time their two
> minutes expired, they seldom stayed on much longer.
>
> But the company makes you hate such callers’ thriftiness. Each
> week while I was working, a computer totaled up the average
> length of my calls, and if it dropped below 14 minutes, I was in
> trouble.
>
> You also learn to cultivate another kind of caller: the ones who
> jack up your average as they take you through a wringer of crisis
> and loneliness.
>
> They start phoning in the morning, when the kids are in school
> and the breakfast dishes done. The despair sets in then, and the
> balm is TV soap operas, with their strategically positioned
> psychic commercials. From 10 a.m. to early afternoon, my phone
> rang off the hook.
>
> Darlene, from Alabama, was a typical caller. She lives eight
> miles from the nearest town, thinks she’s pregnant and has a
> drinking problem. She’s worried about its effects on a baby but
> can’t figure out what to do because she’s so isolated and her
> live-in boyfriend is also alcoholic. I asked Darlene if she’d
> been to the doctor to see if she was really pregnant. No, she’d
> rather have the cards tell her. "Well," I said, "the cards show
> that very soon you’ll be going to a drugstore and buying a
> pregnancy test. I also see a car here – do you have one? No? Oh,
> you have a truck but it’s not running? Gee, I see the chariot
> card. It means you’re going to be asking your boyfriend to help
> you fix the truck. Because I see you doing regular traveling into
> town. I also see you seeking counsel there in dealing with
> temptation. Is an Alcoholics Anonymous nearby?"
>
> But calls like Darlene’s are nothing compared to the midnight to
> 4 a.m. shift, when people all over America toss and turn with
> desperation.
>
> Florinda, in Spokane, hemmed and hawed about her boyfriend not
> letting her see her friends. When I told her I saw violence
> around her, she broke into wracking sobs and confessed that the
> boyfriend was beating her regularly and savagely. Bobby, a tough,
> macho-sounding black man, had just found out who his real father
> was and was going crazy deciding if he should try to establish
> contact. "Please ma’am," he said softly. "Can you write a love
> letter for me to my daddy?" I won’t tell you what I said to these
> people; it’s pretty much what any person with a modicum of
> perspective would have said. But I will say that after I mailed
> my letter to Bobby’s dad, I knew I was getting addicted to being
> a phone psychic.
>
> I was utterly seduced by the chance to talk so intimately and
> tenderly to people whose lives are segregated from mine by sex,
> class and race. There were nasty ironies to this beauty, however.
> African-Americans, for example, comprised one in four of my
> callers, while they make up only one in eight of the national
> population. Is this any surprise, given that Dionne Warwick and
> LaToya Jackson act as psychic figureheads in exchange for
> royalties on each call? It’s just like how cigarette companies
> market tobacco to minorities.
>
> But here I was, a middle-class white woman bonding with people
> I’d never have a chance to talk to in everyday life. I felt brave
> and sensitive. Cheap shot, my friends said: I was hearing such
> confidences only because I was passing myself off as a spirit
> with supernatural powers. No matter; I was hooked. I found myself
> thinking of becoming a full-time seer. Maybe getting some other
> women together, setting up our own 900 number, dispensing with
> the cards and renaming ourselves The Nonpsychic Advice Ladies.
> Meanwhile, I got an assignment from a slick women’s magazine to
> do a story about my new work. Soon after, I got my first call
> from Teneecia, a day after her boyfriend was killed in the
> shoot-out.
>
> Working overtime
>
> Hers was the most profound crisis I’d ever confronted on the
> line, and at first I was terrified. Then, without thinking
> rationally, I sprang into action.
>
> "Teneecia! Your boyfriend’s in the cards! He’s saying he’s in a
> wonderful, peaceful place and that he knows how very much you
> love him. But Teneecia, he’s saying he wants you to stay where
> you are, alive, and be a mother to his baby. OK, are there people
> in the house with you? His family? You’re real close to them?
> Good. He wants you to stay with them all day. And spend the night
> with them. Understand? And I want you to call me anytime; here’s
> my home phone. Forget the psychic line, it’s way too expensive."
>
> "Really?" Teneecia responded. "Oh, thank you, you’re my psychic
> friend." I hung up and wept.
>
> She called many times in the next few weeks. Always, she wanted
> to communicate with her dead boyfriend. At first I obliged,
> telling her over and over that her lover hoped she would pick up
> with her life. But when she called late one night in terror that
> her boyfriend’s ghost was lurking at her bedside, I realized I
> needed to wean her from the cards and from me.
>
> I called the hospital where the boyfriend died. A social worker
> said Teneecia could come in anytime for counseling. But Teneecia
> didn’t want to, she told me; she preferred the tarot. "The cards
> aren’t picking him up so well anymore," I demurred. "He’s getting
> farther away. But I do hear him saying he wants you to work on
> getting a job."
>
> In fact, Teneecia disliked being on welfare. But she said that
> decent-paying jobs in her hometown, Grand Rapids, are far away
> from her house and she didn’t have a car. There was little to do,
> she said, except hang around the house and grieve for her dead
> lover.
>
> I found out what she meant after the women’s magazine bankrolled
> a trip to meet Teneecia in person. Grand Rapids is heavily Dutch,
> highly prosperous, and the international headquarters of that
> icon of self-reliance, the Amway Corporation. Yet amid this
> heartland spick-and-span, Teneecia lived in a ghetto. In her
> neighborhood, a third of the predominantly African-American
> residents live in poverty, and the unemployment rate is more than
> four times higher than in the city as a whole.
>
> Losing interest
>
> Teneecia was still losing her baby fat. Her boy, now five months
> old, was a bundle of smiles and activity. Teneecia spent ages
> upstairs, putting on makeup and her best dress for a visit to the
> cemetery. I waited in a living room bravely furnished with cheap
> brass knickknacks. I stared at "The Young and the Restless." A
> telephone psychic ad came on the screen.
>
> I’d brought a tarot deck, thinking Teneecia could solve her
> unemployment by working at home as a phone psychic. It turned
> out, though, that she was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist
> family who think fortunetelling is satanic. "I don’t mind having
> you read for me long distance, but I can’t have this in my
> house," she said.
>
> She also lost interest in me – now a real person with a face,
> age, race and a tangible as well as decidedly earthly persona.
> Now we weren’t psychic buddies; she was a poor, unschooled black
> adolescent, and I was an assured, middle-aged white woman. I
> started feeling uneasy.
>
> After the third day I figured it was time to go: time to get the
> devil card out of the house, Teneecia out of the cemetery and me
> back on an airplane.
>
> The mailman came that afternoon with a letter telling Teneecia
> that Social Security would be sending the baby money from his
> deceased father’s account. Finally she was getting something
> real. "My psychic friend," she said as she hugged me. "You’ve
> helped me so much." Still, I hoped she’d never again call a
> psychic line.
>
>
>
> Walking papers
>
> I dialed Psychic Readers Network when I got home. I wanted to
> talk to them about their business and about people like Teneecia.
> Nobody got back to me. I sent a note informing them I was
> resigning.
>
> So I went back to journalism. Even though the women’s magazine
> got bought by a magnate, my editor quit, and my story never got
> published.
>
> Since then, fate has frowned on my old boss. Last year, Psychic
> Readers Network almost went belly-up, after some big
> long-distance companies started refusing to carry the psychic
> firm’s phone charges because of customer complaints about phony
> and inflated bills. As well, the Federal Trade Commission began
> investigating Psychic Readers for deceptive advertising.
>
> Recently I ran into some of my former colleagues at a psychic
> fair. They told me the psychic talk field is depressed, so
> they’ve gone into another form of 900-telemarketing: phone sex.
> Same money, slightly different spiel. And the work, my friends
> say, is much easier.
>
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> <Picture>
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> Debbie Nathan is an investigative reporter for the San Antonio
> Current. Send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>From http://www.metrotimes.com/19/44/Features/culFortune.htm
A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said
it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your
own reason and your common sense." --Buddha
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
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It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
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"Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart
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Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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