The art of the con

I enjoyed this story about how George Santos cut his teeth in a Queens boiler room:

But gimmicks like this go only so far. Call-center culture is not for the timid or easily cowed. The good representatives have something innate that no number of prepared scripts can beat. Back then, Rijo listened in to a few of Santos’s calls in his capacity as a supervisor. And the outgoing new kid was good.

He was an upseller, the currency of the land at a place like Dish, which had more than 13.9 million U.S. customers and was the nation’s third-largest pay-TV provider at the time. Key to its business model was, as Dish business filings put it, “better educating our customers about our products and services, and resolving customer problems promptly and effectively when they arise.” In other words, hustling on the phones.

This kind of customer-service work is challenging and often rote but also good training for a would-be con artist—or even a politician. Certainly that was true for Santos. The Dish representatives had to learn how to size up a mark—a customer—quickly, while they pitched the many movie packages available with just a mutter of one’s credit-card number. They had to be able to expound on the wisdom of purchasing insurance, sounding authoritative and adjusting their pitches effortlessly. If movies weren’t the customer’s style, there were also pay-per-view soccer matches. And the fabulist-in-training learns that it takes real skill to hold a story together. It’s cognitively hard to spin and even harder to lie.

This is, however, giving me traumatic flashbacks to how long it took my to cancel my TiVo subscription.