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Let's see... my life could be this

while there are zillions of guys out there suffering this

They could do this

But why do that when I am so happy to chat with a guy who has this condition

All he has to do is

with this To reach me

Okay...okay... me

And I will tell him slowly and in graphic detail what I would love to do to him

while he does this

and I get this

It's
So no more

Let's

and be glad we have such a great job!

Thanks all!
Umm....seriously, the thing is...these boards are most useful to new ops and those thinking about becoming an op. So what good does it do for someone to post saying you can't make a living, it's a lousy job, the economy makes it impossible, and, besides, those mean cam girls are stealing all the customers? Sure income can fluctuate, anybody can hit a dry spell or have a slump--whatever the economy is doing. It happens. We are like commissioned sales people or free-lance writers, photographers, consultants. Sometimes you are so busy you can hardly take a breath, and other times you sit around drumming your fingers. And once in a while you just get sick of the whole thing and feel like chucking it--but that can happen with any vanilla job, too. That's just the way it goes. Overall, though, once you get the hang of PSOing and find your place, you never have to worry about being out of work ever again.

You are just right on the money, Allie!

Peter Lewinsohn, a psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Oregon carried out an experiment in which he put pessimistic and optimistic people (as determined by testing) in a panel debate and had observers rate their personalities and likeability. The optimists were rated much more likeable, perhaps no surprise. But they were also rated much more persuasive than the pessimists. Who is more likely to become the more successful sales person?

Optimism has been repeatedly shown to be an advantage in a sales environment. And while paid phone sex is many things, it is first and foremost a sales job. Even in dispatch, you are selling yourself with each call. Hang ups, poor hold times-your salesmanship needs work.

Life insurance companies, which live or die (so to speak) by statistics, long ago developed tests to select job applicants most likely to succeed at sales. The gold standard was the Career Profile Test (CPT). This was empirically based-the closer your answers matched those of previous testees who had gone on to successful sales careers, the more likely, it was believed, that you would too. Only those who scored in the top 30 percent were even interviewed for jobs.

Despite this sort of testing, more than half of agents regularly quit within the first year. They just couldn't do the job. But it was accepted that that's the best testing could do to help find good sales people.

However, as psychology developed it created theory-based tests ("theory-based" tests are those like the SAT, GRE, MCAT), and one of them was based on a theory of optimism, the ASQ (Attributional Style Questionnaire). This theory said that optimism and pessimism are ways we explain the world and our success or failure in it. It predicts, among other things, that optimists will be more persevering than pessimists.

A test like the CPT can only discover aptitude and, perhaps, motivation. Both are very important to success. But nobody succeeds right away no matter how talented they are, or how strongly they desire to be successful. Some very capable people give up before they achieve success while others, sometimes not nearly as capable, persist until they are successful. Why?

The answer, as determined by years of psychological testing involving thousands of subjects is-optimism.

So you need three things to be successful: aptitude, motivation and optimism.

Optimism doesn't make a single big difference, but it makes countless tiny differences. A pessimistic PSO, for example, will say to herself, "I haven't gotten a call all day. This sucks! What a lousy job. The economy is in the toilet anyway and everybody is out of work or afraid they will be soon, so nobody's going to call. I might as well log off. And why even bother logging on tomorrow? It will be just like today anyway."

But the optimistic PSO will say to herself, "I haven't gotten a call all day. Gee, maybe there's some big car race or something, and then there's the Oscars. Everybody's watching those. But after they're over somebody might call. I think I'll stay logged in and see. And tomorrow will be better, guys who won bets will have money."

Who do you think is more likely to get a call?

As far as the life insurance industry, when ASQ testing was implemented, it was discovered that optimists outsold pessimists by 21 percent during their first year on the job and by 57 percent in the second year. By the end of the third year most of the pessimists had quit or been let go because of poor performance.

Similar results have been found among telemarketers, automobile sales persons, even commissioned sales clerks.

When things don't go well, pessimists say, "What's the use? This isn't working. Get real." But the optimist says, "Oh, well, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Tomorrow's another day." She is also likely to say, "Hmm. I 've been trying "A" and it hasn't worked. I wonder how trying "B" would do." The pessimist would say, "Ah, that won't work either. Don't fool yourself."

It's been determined by years of study that pessimism is largely a learned behavior. Children pick it up from their parents (especially the mother), teachers and other adult criticizers. It can be unlearned.

There is a huge body of psychological research on all this because the pessimistic explanatory style leads to depression. In the old days, depression was considered to be a manic-depressive mental illness, medicine treating it as a disease of the body, Freudian psychoanalysts considering it anger turned inward. But now we know it is a learned explanatory style that can be changed through cognitive therapy.

Women are prone to depression (about twice as likely as men), the result of pessimism. They are more likely to be pessimists than men because of their ruminative style of thinking among other things. Since phone sex is a woman's business, you will encounter plenty of pessimists and depressed personalities. If you are an optimist-or can train yourself to be one-then you have a huge advantage that will convert itself into pleasant numbers in your bank account.