|
There appears to be a huge black hole in
the lives of many outwardly professional and successful people in today’s
fast and frantic world.
What compels a woman to phone a stranger for psychic advice
on the most intimate areas of her life? What makes a man in the most
respected profession phone a stranger to have his sexuality confirmed for
him? These are the things which bother me. Scotland has become more
cosmopolitan and savvy on the political stage or so the guy in the
pinstriped kilt tells us, so why the speywives? Despite being told we
enjoy more civil liberties and material wealth than we have ever had,
Western man, and woman are in the grip of an unprecedented paranoia about
our place in the universe.
Nature and commerce abhors a vacuum, there always were snake oil salesmen
and fortune tellers, ready to fill the void in the lives of any community
floundering about in the wilderness. In the absence of any real community
in our lives, people become more remote and isolated in their own insular
world. The void grows wider by the day. It seems that something must take
the place of the traditional rocks, like religion and family and
community. Those things were the providers of guidance and comfort in
times of trouble.
There is no doubt that the Psychic Telephone Industry has taken off in a
big way. New lines are springing up in rashes all over the country and
abroad, the cheaper ones cost about 60p a minute, the “exclusive” ones
upwards of £1.50 per minute.
The big cases of
blatant rip offs, make headline news.
The client, who spends £40,000 on her credit card in 3
months, makes it onto daytime television and the National press where an
almost indulgent attitude prevails. The poor single mother with children
in a high rise flat merely has her telephone disconnected quietly and
without fuss.
It is the topic at exclusive dinner parties. “My psychic” is talked about
in the same casual breath we used to discuss restaurants or hairdressers.
The churches shake their heads collectively and quote Biblical verse to
illustrate the folly of those easily duped and barely bother to hide their
jealousy.
Atheists adopt a typically humanitarian and liberal attitude to those who
are easily parted from their money, and meanwhile this industry bleeds the
cash cows and no one really cares. How often do the Inland Revenue take a
close look at the money generated by those at the top of the profession?
It was the experience of a close friend, suckered for hundreds that got me
thinking how I could infiltrate them.
The circumstances
of them being delivered into my hands couldn’t have been more esoteric.
A school friend I hadn’t seen since Simon Le Bon had his
own hair walked up to me and offered me a job reading tarot cards on a
psychic line.
When I first started to ask questions after successfully infiltrating the
company, several readers advised caution. Many of their bosses had bought
their way into this lucrative industry from the rather more unsavoury end
of the supply and demand culture. These people sold other decidedly more
basic commodities before they laundered their profits into psychic phone
lines.
So what exactly are the financial outlays? Very little in terms of
turnover. A person with £4,000, a couple of telephones in his bedroom and
a reader or two willing to work piecemeal for between 12p and 30p a
minute, can go under the umbrella of an established company by renting a
dozen phone numbers and start making money immediately. Most of them are
failed businessmen in some other area of trade. Their spirituality coming
late in life, after many setbacks, they are willing to sell the secret to
you for £1.50 a minute, plus V.A.T. on your telephone bill.
Despite thousands of years of civilisation the problems which affect us
most deeply are still almost exclusively emotional. The rejected wives or
husbands are still the most common clients. At their lowest ebb they will
talk for hours to the sympathetic listener who they believe can see into
the future.
Hope, however false comes at a shocking price, but like any addiction the
pusher skilfully leaves the user wanting more. The most insidious of them
claim to belong to professional bodies. The entire Telephone Industry,
psychic, sex, chat, or astrology, (many offer all of these services,) is
regulated by ICTSTIS, the watchdog company.
ICTSTIS consists of about seven part-time workers to handle
complaints and police a multi million pound industry. Even the fines are
derisory if anyone is ever tempted to breach guidelines. A quick look in
glossy magazines and the National press reveals Foundations, Associations,
and other official sounding bodies. These claims are deliberately
misleading. One of them claims to have a close connection with a College
for further learning. This strange educational institution appears to
exist to flog their worthless courses.
These supposedly professional courses and their
accompanying certificates are knocked up between the cornflakes and egg on
toast in the lecturers own home.
Most worrying are the hypnotherapy and counselling courses. These are
designed purely to help other fakes set up in business. Those in search of
spiritual help are more likely to believe the huge claims about extensive
counselling skills offered by so called professionals than the reality.
So just what is the
reality?
I have been amazed by the almost indulgent attitude of the
media to this most sinister of services. Those who use the psychic phone
lines get scant sympathy from anyone. They are merely depicted as deluded.
There are however only a very small select group of winners, the company
owners, or directors. The men and women, on the lines, the readers
themselves are equally shabbily treated.
Let’s be quite clear about this, anyone with the power to see into the
future would not be sitting desperately waiting for the phone to ring to
earn £5.30, out of the £35.25 gross, it has cost the client on their
telephone bill.
Many readers are disabled, or housebound caring for small children. Some
of them are so poor they only have incoming calls on their home
telephones. These are the ideal readers for these companies. Any
uncomfortable ethics can be starved out of them. The staff must fill in a
Self Employment Declaration form, totally exonerating the owner, or
Director of the company from any liability for their working conditions,
their tax or National Insurance contributions.
Health, particularly in many cases their mental health, is of no concern
to the company, until they make a controversial prediction to a vulnerable
client. Then the full weight of The Mafia comes down on top of them and
they find themselves blacklisted. Although the competition between
companies is fierce, a symbiotic relationship exists between them. Any bad
press for one company affects them all so a reader being bolshie or
mentally unstable is a problem for everyone. I have often listened to
pathetic young women attempt to disguise their voice and change their
names in order to get work after being sacked. It is useless. They need
the name on their monthly cheques to tally and they also have to use the
same telephone number. This is how they are identified.
Sometimes a sacking can take on a nastier, more personal tone. A female
reader confided in me that her male boss was propositioning her in the
most graphic sexual way. A mother of teenage children she was in the
middle of serious health problems and could no longer work at her job as a
secretary. Her boss revelled in her helplessness and used his position to
assault her long distance via her telephone. He also made sure she got
plenty of work and earned money. She found herself in an impossible
situation, dependent on her abuser for her mortgage money. After it became
known she had confided in me and asked for help, through I hasten to add,
her own indiscretion, she was sacked and blacklisted.
A client called to have a reading with the sacked reader and was told by
the boss, she had been sacked for “telling clients what they want to
hear”. The client called the line manager to complain bitterly.
“If she was so
crap, why did he keep selling her to me?”
Not an unreasonable question under the circumstances. The client had been
having readings three times a week for 6 months with the woman at an
average cost of £76.00 a time.
This story brings me neatly to the Holy Grail of the telephone psychic
lines. The dependent clients, God bless them. One client, a successful
solicitor, spent upwards of £2,000 with one company. The lady, despite
holding down a successful job was unable to form lasting relationships.
This was a source of much grief as she lurched between one heartbreak
after another. Five minutes speaking to this lady, convinced me that she
would be better employed seeking the help of a trained counsellor. She
mentioned she had real fears of abandonment stemming from a very insecure
childhood. She was so desperate for a husband and children of her own that
she terrified decent stable potential partners off. The only ones she
could keep for longer than two weeks were equally damaged men, unable to
commit to a healthy adult relationship.
Thankfully she took my advice and though we chat occasionally from time to
time she has successfully weaned herself off the empty promises of an
ideal man, born under the sign of Cancer with Capricorn rising coming into
her life.
The story could have had a very different, more sinister ending.
Emboldened by the frequency some clients consult them, one of the lines
decided to offer “psychic counselling.” This would take the form of a
pre-booked, naturally pre-paid 90 minute reading at a cost of £3.50 per
minute plus V.A.T. The idea was that the client could phone the reader of
their choice for brief ten minute psychic life coaching readings.
This is a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.
Amazingly, this was seized upon by those clients already in thrall to
false hopes and promises.
One of those people was seriously, clinically depressed. The client, a
woman, had been conducting an affair with a married man who lived several
hundred miles away. She lost her beloved mother to cancer after a long
illness and within days her lover confessed he would never leave his wife,
and left her. In her grief and isolation she found a friend on the psychic
phone line, willing to hear her problems for £1.60 a minute plus V.A.T.
She was immediately sucked into the world of telephone readings.
She was promised that her lover would return, he loved her really, and
that the spirit of her mother was giving her blessing. Her family and
friends were giving more pragmatic advice, such as forget him; come out
for a meal with us. Good, sound advice freely given with love from the
heart.
But the woman had been given hope from beyond the grave.
She desperately wanted to believe that her lover had not been toying with
her and that all his pillow talk had been true. The “psychic”, confirmed
this was indeed the case. And so began a regular daily relationship.
When nothing happened, and another psychic shattered her illusions
(without picking up the clients mental state) she attempted suicide.
Only the thought of her mother's heartbreak at such an act prevented her
from carrying it through. It was in this fragile state of mind that she
applied for psychic life coaching at £3.50 per minute plus V.A.T. Only
robust and thinly veiled threats about the very real possibility of
litigation prevented this blatant abuse of ICTSTIS guidelines going ahead.
I may have been undercover but I couldn’t sit back and watch that one go
ahead.
The most interesting thing to
watch is how the company owners and indeed the readers manage to delude
themselves they are in fact providing a necessary service.
Many of those who work in the industry have been face to
face readers, used to going out on the psychic circuit. The companies who
offer these services in pubs and clubs sometimes refer to them as charity
nights, where a local charity or nursery school gains some small token
payment from the psychic night. Naturally this makes them popular with
local young mothers and grandmothers.
I attended a few of these to compare the quality of the readings with that
on the telephone lines. The costs are vastly different. A face to face
reading may cost £20.00, with the reader earning on average £7.00 of that
for themselves, the agency taking the rest. The client however retains a
degree of control over the transaction. If her reading is not up to the
standard she has come to expect, then she is in a position to negotiate
with the agency. On the telephone lines the client is charged even if she
doesn’t succeed in getting a reading at all. The mere dialling of a
premium rate number is immediately charged to her telephone account, and
jumps straight into the account of the owner of the psychic line.
And here is the biggest discrepancy of all, at a face to face psychic fun
evening the reader usually lays down a number of tarot cards in what is
known as a “spread”. The reader will have a degree of autonomy here and
will be able to use the method they are most familiar with. As many
readers have gravitated, as opposed to graduated, to the telephone
industry, they find themselves in for a nasty shock. By public demand
tarot cards are banned. Apparently the psychic loving public prefers
mediums, those in constant conversation with the dear departed, or the
more euphemistically termed Spirit. The hearing of voices no matter how
vague and garbled is preferable to the shuffling of cards. Therefore those
who do use tarot cards are ordered to pretend they do not. Memo’s flew
thick and fast between the companies, who, let’s not forge,t are related,
sometimes by blood, but certainly by interests. Anyone still in possession
of the offending tools was told unceremoniously to get rid of them and
work on feelings. One would have thought there were quite enough raw and
emotional feelings zinging down the lines without adding those of a
fraught, Tarot bereft reader to the mix.
This caused problems for those readers genuinely attempting to convince
themselves they were doing an important public service. It is really the
only way a decent human being can justify how they make their money. One
reader, advertised as a healer working with spirit guides, was so upset
she threatened to leave unless she could continue using her cards. As she
was popular, she gained a reprieve because she could also be relied upon
to fill in any gaps if a reader went sick or failed to log on for a shift.
Despite this loyalty, it is rarely reciprocated. If a reader becomes ill,
wishes to go on holiday or has to care for children or elderly relatives
they find it difficult to get time off.
A failure to give
adequate notice is reprimanded by a series of unofficial sanctions, the
most painful being the withdrawal of credit card work.
This is the pinnacle of the career of the telephone
psychic, short of saving enough money for their own lines to rent.
The truly self employed can take time off within reason when they have to,
or subcontract the work. Subcontracting is expressly forbidden, as is
working hours which suit the self employed person.
The credit card client is
a valued creature.
This client doesn’t have mere twenty minute readings. This
one can go on and on and on. He or She must be courted like a shy virgin.
They must be wooed with beautiful spiritual advertising and the promise of
an appointment with something really special in the psychic department. In
reality, the same readers are used. Very occasionally names are changed,
Hannah becomes Circe etc. Those readers still under the illusion that a
human being should not be squeezed till the pips squeak, don’t get many
credit cards, therefore their income falls drastically. You are either in
or you’re out, and out is a miserable existence, pitifully hanging around
in an 18 inch radius from the logged on telephone. Those running their
lines like a Victorian Villain chasing fresh young things around the
bedroom have a degree of power not afforded to them in their other
ordinary lives. A substantial wage, as much as £600.00 a week can be had
by a female reader who can stomach being psychically flirted with by the
big boss with two phones in his bedroom. For a coy simper and a blind eye
to the implications, she can be the sole credit card reader on a shift,
tempting to someone desperate for money, but hardly soul enhancing.
In an effort to tempt a more up-market
clientele, the slightly tacky web sites and more luridly coloured adverts
had to be updated.
|
|
However since
the more lurid, in-your-face adverts appealed to a less discerning
clientele the problem was obvious. How to attract the wealthy and well
educated on the credit cards yet still pull in the bread and butter work
on the premier lines. The answer lay in two-tier advertising, and a
two-tier price list. Working on the assumption that snob value would win
the day, the credit card costs jumped by £6.00 per hour, reassuring the
client who wanted to disassociate herself from those who would gather in
each others' homes to call a psychic after public house closing times.
Many times over the last three years I have been approached by various
media representatives looking for stories. They usually peak around a high
profile case, where a client has felt so duped, so violated that throwing
caution and pride to the wind, they consult the press.
Not surprisingly this is extremely rare. It’s not like buying a bag of
fruit and finding something rotten festering there. Most people under
those circumstances would complain.
The mantra the industry repeats is as familiar as it is patronising.
“She didn’t like to be told the truth; she wasn’t ready to face facts.”
It is a brave soul indeed who will take them on at their own game, most
people slink off without a whimper. Now shame is added to the already
unhappy mix of emotions the poor client suffers from. Shame, at being
conned out of vast sums of money and being impotent to do anything about
it.
Tarot card readers are now out,
clairvoyants and mediums are in, but a truly holistic spiritual service
cannot rest there. After all, everyone is copying everybody else, hating
and envious of each other in equal measure.
Special offers are calculated to upset and demoralise, careful forward
planning is sabotaged, and price wars are staged, and sometimes, just
occasionally comes a flash of inspiration.
Most of the big companies stick to a tried and tested formula; the
relationship psychic reading, the one where the reader works out in about
ten minutes that if your husband/wife is not coming back, well, here’s a
lovely new partner coming into your life. Only the real sadists, (more of
them later), would send you off without a consolation prize.
The more established lines try to appeal to what they believe are the core
values of their clients. Many Christians secretly use the telephone
psychics, albeit apologetically and with constant reiteration of their
Christian credentials. Fair enough say the bosses, we are a broad
church. Everyone’s money is welcome, no matter which collection plate
clatters on the Sabbath. However the astrologers are working overtime and
some of the big pagan festivals like Imbolc and Samhain see a surge in
activity on the lines. This is a signal for information on Wicca and
spellcasting to enter stage left.
On the whole no matter our views
on Wicca, sincere practitioners do their own readings, or have a coven
member only too happy to oblige.
Wiccans have no silly notions about the use of tarot
either, like Mrs Average with her Blackpool pier memories of dark
mysterious strangers coming from over the sea. The unfortunate but highly
predictable result is that the appearance of spells for sale on a website
attracts those who have, let’s be charitable, totally lost the plot.
Now losing the plot is no requirement for having a reading
or indeed purchasing a spell, but it just makes it so much easier for the
companies. There was an unseemly scrap to get the most genuine spellcaster,
preferably a man, for as everyone surely knows, they have more powerful
energies? My job was to protect the identity of the great man from those
who would by-pass the office and try to deal with him directly, possibly
even poach him for their own nefarious purposes. In the process I was
privy to some rather bizarre requests from ladies with delightful accents,
and murder on their minds.
My job was to take bookings, not specifically to weed out
the crazies, but in all honesty, the bookings were few and far between,
the crazies were not. Some of the clients were desperate to cause the face
of their love rival to swell and break out in good old medieval pustules,
anything to make their lovers return. Even the cost, a bargain £250.00 for
a bag of something to put under ones pillow, didn’t put them off.
The spellcaster loftily refused to use his “white magic”
for ill. He acquired mythic status. I couldn’t even now tell you his day
job, it’s just too bizarre. My screening of these poor women was having
the opposite effect; the spells were becoming more and more sought after.
The final nail in the coffin came ironically through a reader, who fancied
herself an extremely powerful witch. It is hard to imagine spiritual,
genuine psychic readers with an inflated ego problem. They are among the
worst to deal with. It is possibly a knee jerk reaction to having to
justify their craft to those who cannot understand how anyone can pick up
psychic vibes from a stranger over the phone. The female reader decided to
go into competition with the resident spell man and undercut him by about
£30.00. During a reading where she was acting as an agent for the company
she casually introduced the idea in the clients head that perhaps a love
spell, worked on a waxing moon was just what this client needed.
The client pounced on this and provided her credit card details to the
minx which was then processed through a third party for several hundred
pounds more than originally agreed. Tact and diplomacy, and finally the
threat of a visit from the police to the third party’s rather more mundane
place of work, persuaded the witch to refund the money. However, not
before she had laid a curse, free of charge incidentally, on me. I am
happy to report that my features have not altered significantly apart from
a wrinkle which is threatening to appear, and I have since attracted the
attention of a agent for my book. Both incidents I put down to the passion
directed to the hefty curse and perhaps the famous Rule of Three.
The possible legal implications of
witches stealing money from the banks of clients was a worry, also the
possibility of unwanted wives turning up like Dark Age lepers at the
bottom of gorges.
There were also the howls of protest from those readers whose Christian
faith was newly set afire with talk of spells. All of these saw the
illustrious man out of a job. Down, but not out, he returned to his rather
less glamorous day job. Very few of the larger companies will sell spells
in little leather bags any more, not least because they hadn’t thought
enough about possible allergic reactions to the secret herbal ingredients
in the spells.
After magic, they flirted with Wicca and covens, until the Pagan Society
protested in the strongest possible terms about the inaccurate content of
the lurid coloured website and the liberal use of the word “naked”.
Apparently men over a certain, shall we say breeding age, can’t imagine
Wicca without the image of young, naked women.
It seemed easier to revert to good old psychic readings, with the slant
heavily on the relationship reading. The old ones are the best.
Of the many readers I have interviewed informally and formally over the
last year, very few have themselves been partners in healthy, happy
relationships. This brings me to the promised sadistic reader.
Imagine if you will, being confined in your home, unable to eat if you are
hungry (in case the phone rings and you have an unseemly large piece of
toast in your mouth). You may not watch television or listen to music, or
allow your frustrated offspring to similarly engage.
As they bicker quietly but savagely amongst themselves,
castigating you for not having a job like everyone else’s mother the long
awaited phone call arrives. You make furious signs, throat cutting signs
to the now silently but violently fighting children, their expressions
quaintly reminiscent of silent movie heroes being terribly injured.
The caller, a
lady with an impeccable cut glass accent is in dire need of your psychic
guidance.
Money is no object to the lady, she wishes to “fill you
in,” with the sad story of her life. She is married to an obscenely
wealthy, much older but impotent man. The caller is all woman, she has
needs. You cluck convincingly, sympathetically even, at first. She tells
you, as you check the smallest child isn’t actually bleeding yet, that her
lonely life spent playing polo and shopping, is only enriched by her young
lover, also married and fabulously wealthy. Their trysts at a hunting
lodge in the Scottish Highlands are all that she lives for. The problem
has arisen because her unreasonable old husband has sold her thoroughbred
hunter from underneath her so to speak. Will he, she asks you in worried
tones, buy her a new one? Remember, she is relying on your unique psychic
input, and you can’t even use your tarot cards. So far, you have earned
£3.00 speaking to this idiot. And one of the children may never be a
father judging by the look on his face.
Indulge me further, how do you feel,? What do you tell her? I
am using my own psychic ability here, and shame on you!
The insistence on
using “feelings”, rather than divinatory tools, is one way for the reader
to get revenge on everyone, the world, her boss, the whole miserable life
she is trapped in.
Many readers gain the reputation, indeed are marketed as,
straight to the point, no nonsense, allowing the client to fancy she is
getting the truth eventually from the psychic telephone lines. The client
is certainly getting the bile, fury and fall out of the readers own
desperately sad life. In truth if I had phone bills of £800.00 a month and
a credit card in meltdown, I would possibly be keen to find a “no nonsense
reader.” This may confirm to me that the reason my husband is constantly
in the company of his heavily pregnant secretary, is that yes, they are
having an affair.
What a relief to finally grasp that the reason they have moved in together
is not that he is sorry for her, and thank God for the reader who told me
that. This is not an extreme example, and I am not taking poetic licence.
On a humanitarian level, these lines are worse than the sex lines.
The man who calls a sex line knows exactly what he is paying for, and
let’s not be coy, how many men stay on for longer than the industry
average of 4 minutes. This figure was gleaned through interviews with the
“girls” on the lines I must point out, and perhaps, like their clients,
they boasted a bit.
The point is that the sex lines, cheap
and slightly sad that they are, stand head and shoulders above the Trade
Descriptions Act compared to Association’s of Practicing Master Psychics
or whatever name they dreamed up in their multi phoned kitchens or
bedrooms.
Few of them have offices, just P.O box numbers; the ones
who do provide offices on their adverts show places of business uncannily
looking like private homes. They are indeed private homes, that’s why they
look like private homes. Clients are providing credit card details to
someone scrabbling around for a pen among the washing folded on the table
and the remains of a hurried breakfast. During my research, when I took
this sensitive information, I bought a shredder as the implications of
anyone’s name, address, and credit card details being tipped out of my bin
bag by a marauding fox were too awful to contemplate. I believe it is more
luck than good business practice which has prevented this happening more
often.
Many of these lines were born in Manchester. They are the spawn of the sex
lines. A lot of companies did in fact rent office space enabling readers
to actually “go to work”. Many of the girls I spoke to from the early days
told me that they never knew what line they would be working on until they
turned up for their shift. However one good thing, they told me was that
they were paid an hourly rate, something in the region of £4.00 an hour.
They were still of course classed as self employed, therefore removing the
owner of the lines from any expensive overheads like National Insurance
contributions or holiday pay. This failed to attract an articulate and
well educated workforce who would question business practices. Call times
were ruthlessly monitored, any reader failing to keep up with the industry
average was dismissed; there were plenty more hopefuls waiting in the
wings for a chance to earn an extra £100.00 a week.
Due to the fact that these lines catered
for a broad church in terms of sex, chat and psychic readers, it made
sense for a worker to be familiar with all three methods of keeping the
punter talking for extended periods of time.
There was no prim twenty minute cut off in those early
days; you could talk all night to the friendly Mancunian tarot reader/
dominatrix, depending on what hat she was wearing that evening. Many of
the “Big Boy’s” owning the lines today started from such humble
beginnings. All had one thing in common - the ability to fill the vacuum
at the heart of isolated desperate people, for spiritual guidance, an
orgasm no matter how lonely, or just a bubbly person to talk to.
One reader, a skilful intelligent man schooled in the esoteric use of
tarot cards, told me how in his student days, and falling victim to a
painful back injury (he was studying choreography) he gravitated to these
lines as a way of paying his rent. He was horrified at the abuse of what
he believed was an ancient craft, but like many find out late in life,
high scruples and a bailiff at the door are incompatible. He attempted to
train these girls in an acceptable method of divination. He was delighted
to find that once someone took a personal interest in them many were eager
to learn how to give a reasonable reading to the clients. His line began
to out perform the others.
He told me of his horror when crystal reading, was introduced. The client
would phone for a crystal reading, (I don’t know!) then be told to wait
while the reader went into a special room with the crystals to study and
ponder them. This gave the reader enough time to have a well earned snack
and cup of tea, perhaps a brief chat to other crystal readers, who knows?
Meanwhile the mark, sorry, client was hanging on the phone at 60 pence a
minute, plus V.A.T anxiously wondering what their crystals were up to.
You honestly couldn’t make this up. Paul still works on
these lines but he refuses to prostitute himself with long readings, false
hopes and fought bravely to keep his tarot cards, refusing to pretend he
was hearing voices instead of reading cards. He is the most popular reader
in the country, so they can’t get rid of him. Another company would snap
him up in a heartbeat, which both he and the boss know very well.
Aside from
students, flirting with Wicca in response to the violence of the modern
world, most of the readers tend to be middle aged men and women.
They are out of work for a variety of reasons and willing
to sit around all day indoors waiting for the phone to ring, so they can
earn, at most, thirty pence a minute. They are working in whatever
conditions they live in, and those are unlikely to be affluent leafy
suburbs. They will not be sitting in Zen like tranquillity meditating on
the mysteries of the cosmos, nor will they breathing in the aroma of
spikenard through an incense burner. They will probably be like our
“sadistic” reader, sitting with the children’s school calculator
desperately totting up how many minutes she has earned on her lonely
shift, and if there will be enough this month to pay her phone bill.
My problem is not with the readers; selling an intimate service is as old
as the other oldest profession. Even the line owner pimping for them seems
pale in comparison to our own shortcomings as a society.
The walls we have built around ourselves are impregnable, we hide our
emotions, deny our fears. To admit to loneliness and failure are the worst
sins we can commit in a culture that tests four year olds and dresses them
in clothing, the cost of which would educate a third world child for life.
We do not trust our instincts or our gods, who only become gods by
exhibiting the most human of our failings.
If we are willing to allow that vacuum to be filled by a stranger in
another kitchen a hundred miles away, at two o’clock in the morning who
can sneer at us?
The eyes of other cultures are upon us, and our decadence chills them to
the bone. There are no psychic lines in the Sudan or Afghanistan just a
constant struggle to live life, not predict the outcome of it. |
