I have worked on a political campaign for the last few months and the main part of my job was to call and tell people about the politician I worked for. My job had it's ups and downs and I’m sad it’s going to end after the election but I will always be thankful for these three things that it has taught me.

1. Telemarketers suck.

I even annoyed myself when I was working. I mean, I called in the middle of meals, I accidentally woke people up from naps and I seemed to always call when someone was extremely busy. All I could think was, "these people have a life that I am interrupting." However, sometimes I would call people and I could tell from their voice that they were lonely and just wanted to talk. Some of the people I called had been home bound for years because of sickness and old age, others had children who moved away and now they didn’t have anyone to spend time with and some were men and women who just enjoyed talking about politics, so for the next five minutes, I would make their day better by taking the time to treat them like they were someone I wanted to talk to.

2. It is easier to be mean to people when you can't see their face.

During my job I have had people call me names, yell at me, and just be plain rude and all I could think while they did these things was that these people most probably weren’t rude like this in their day-to-day life. But because they couldn’t see my face they had the courage to be mean. Because I was just some person somewhere that was irritating them they were OK with treating me like trash. What was really interesting is that people defend their meanness to telemarketers. One time, I accidentally told someone that he was being rude to me and he proceeded to explain to me how I should be thanking him for even talking to me and another time I mentioned that people were mean to telemarketers and someone close to me explained that telemarketers were annoying and invading people’s privacy and that’s why it's okay to be mean to them. Because, apparently, as long as someone else does something bad you can do something bad back, especially if that someone is just a bodiless voice coming through your phone.

3. It's hard to be mean to someone who is being nice to you.

I feel the need at this point to tell you that I am not a nice person. If you are being rude my first impulse is to tell you that you are. If I disagree with you my first impulse is to tell you you’re an idiot for thinking like you do. However, I can’t do that in my job because I would be fired, so I learned to sound as sweet as syrup while people were acting like rotten eggs, and I was surprised to find that when I didn’t acknowledge that people were being mean to me and continued to treat them with manners they would begin to be nice to me. There were many calls that started with an angry “Well, what do you want?” and ended with a sweet “Thank you so much for calling." It works the same way in everyday life and everybody knows that it works this way but it is so hard to ignore our hurt pride and be the better person, so when someone is mean to us we are mean right back.

These three things have changed the way I look at telemarketers and really my whole life and I hope that they changed your perspective too.