Chapter 34: Boiler Room

South Florida is full of boiler rooms. But I knew little about them. Unfortunately, I’d not seen the eponymous film or perhaps I’d been better prepared. Being a naïve, fresh college graduate, I didn’t know what I was diving into when I answered a newspaper job ad for a financial services company seeking salespeople. I had a whole different idea in mind when I put on a suit and tie and drove out to the office for an interview.

I was thinking I’d be in a palatial office building overlooking a lake or a causeway, watching boats cruise by, because it was Miami, after all, so when I got to a nondescript strip mall, with a couple empty storefronts, a liquor store and a Chinese restaurant, I was taken aback.

The company was next to the Chinese restaurant and one could smell and hear the crackle of cooking oil outside the office’s front door, which was tinted dark black and locked (you had to be buzzed in).

When the door unclicked, and I walked inside, I found the place way more basic and understated than I expected. Just a small, cramped office space, with rows of tables, lined up closely together, in three long horizontal rows, all with phones, stacks of white papers and guys (only one or two women were there) yelling into headsets. The way they moved, heads bobbing like pigeons, and how animated they were with those mechanical mouthpieces, they were something akin to angry robots. A few looked happy, jovial, their lips twisted into smiles, but most of them had bitter, twisted faces, sinking eyes.

No one acknowledged me as I stepped in. They seemed possessed, all lips and teeth, speaking in sales tongues. One or two eyed me suspiciously, with upturned lips, but most stayed affixed to their headset, ignored my presence.

The whole room was so alive with their chatter. It was almost deafening, the humming din of voices in their various stages of plea.

At the front of the room were a couple 60-inch flat screen TV sets tuned to CNBC and Bloomberg, and on the far end of the room were three small closet-sized offices that housed the bosses, next to those offices was a two car-length mini-meeting room.

I wandered like a lost puppy dog, not sure where to go or who to talk to. I certainly didn’t want to interrupt any of the chattering phone people. Fortunately, I spotted a man in the corner of the room, in the threshold of one of the offices, waving me over, as if I were a truck backing up into a parking lot.

The man, Rocky, one of the bosses, was a loudmouthed New Yorker, from Staten Island. He was a short, stocky, Italian American man, about 30 something, wearing a stylish gray pin-striped Armani suit, Armani belt and alligator skin wingtips. I noticed he wore a lot of gold- a chunky gold chain necklace with a gold crucifix, a shiny gold watch, and several gold rings on both of his big meaty hands.

He shook my hand, with a very firm, clammy shake, and had me sit down across from him at his smallish desk (that was empty, save for a stack of papers and a black office phone).

He leaned into his black leather swivel chair and smiled, smugly, at me, his face full of white teeth. He skimmed over my resume for a few seconds, and then lifted his intense blue eyes, locked them to mine, and posed to me an unexpectedly philosophical question.

“So, if I gave you a shovel, and told youse to shovel a big pile of shit, every day, for a year, and at the end of that year, you’d get $1 million, would you do it?”

I was slightly flabbergasted by his question. I wanted to jokingly ask if this would be my job, shoveling shit, because I thought I was here to interview for a sales job in finance. But I caught on quickly to his angle. He was gauging my drive. Would I go above and beyond, shovel shit if it meant becoming rich ... He wanted to know just how money hungry I was.

Bills mounting up after doing an unpaid internship, I was becoming very money hungry.

I told him I would shovel that pile of shit, and I likely would have shoveled that shit, in the balmy Florida heat, for that sort of cash.

He nodded and his grin and white teeth grew larger. Then he reached his meaty gold hand for mine, again, and offered me a job. I was to start immediately.

The company was pushing foreign currency investments, mainly selling stakes in euros. Every agent was to cold call numbers off a “lead sheet,” a list that had only the prospective client’s name and phone number. If or when they answered, we read off a script, and the script seemed to be about scaring the people more than anything.

The script was all about how the price of oil would skyrocket because of more cars on the road in China and events in the Middle East and how this would cause the dollar to lose value and the euro to appreciate in value.

That was the script, at least, I got, the first few days. There were other scripts saying the opposite, that the dollar would go up and the euro or the yen would go down. You never knew which script you’d receive when you arrived to work; you’d only hope that people would answer the phone and that they’d talk to you and not just hang up or curse you out, because that’s what most of them did.