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Orianda Guilfoyle

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Posted Thursday, Oct. 28, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET

I have two words on my mind this morning: real estate. No, I'm not buying a house. (A funny thought if there ever was one--the average home in the city goes for about $300,000. I'd need to sell $6 million worth of ads to get a commission check that big.) I'm trying to "grow" the real estate section by promoting large block ads that list multiple homes. Sunday papers have pages and pages of these; agents pool together to purchase display ads with listings and photos. You've probably glanced over these, but if you're not in the market for a home, you dumped them in the recycling pile. Not so for classified reps: When we see full-page ads in other publications our eyes dilate, our tongues protrude, and huge dollar signs appear before us, just out of reach.

My campaign kicks off with a mass fax to every real estate broker in our database. Yes, I am freely admitting that I am a generator of fax spam--the stuff that inevitably uses up the fax paper or gets caught and gnarled in the machine. What else can I do? No one returns voice mail these days. Real estate agents, I've found, are a bit slower to get on the Internet and more likely to be protective of their e-mail addressees. And maybe they should be. Once they're in our database, they're fair game for all the adversault I feel like cooking up in PowerPoint.

With one keystroke, I've sent out more than 200 faxes. I lean back in my chair, feeling quite satisfied. Surely all this work entitles me to a break. I decide to be social.

Despite the fact that I've been here for almost three months, I don't know my colleagues too well. Hallie, who sits next to me, is a few years older than I am and possesses the loudest phone voice I have ever heard. This may well be an asset in classified-ad sales, where exuding confidence and control through high volumes is not a bad strategy, but it's a little difficult for me to talk over her, much less hear. It's an issue I tried to bring up delicately with my manager. Jokingly, I suggested that we put a little white-noise machine--the kind therapists use in their offices so that patients in the waiting room can't hear your deepest secrets--in Hallie's cube to try to drown her out. (I had one of these as a kid because my bedroom was next to the kitchen, and my family--I'm the youngest--liked to hang out in there after my bedtime and make as much noise as they pleased short of banging pots and pans together. It's still a sore subject, and to this day I can't get to sleep without total silence.) My manager took this seriously, and I believe there is a white-noise box on order.

That said, Hallie and I get along well. It's TJ, however, whom I've grown really fond of. (She didn't steal that account, by the way--false alarm.) TJ is in several 12-step programs and regularly attends New Age retreats. She's happy to talk about them, her personal development, her ex-husband, and her brother's recent major surgery. She also has a refreshing sense of humor and war stories from the trenches of Classy that even I, jaded rep I've become, find surprising. I stick my head over TJ's cube wall.

"Someone was peeing while on the phone with me," she says, taking her headset off.

"Peeing?"

"Well I hear this ... dripping sound as he's talking and suddenly I hear a flush."

"What kind of ad?" I ask, but I know the answer.

She sighs. "Adult. But he excused himself, which is kinda better than not."

My visit is cut short. One of TJ's clients has just arrived to pay for her ad. While most advertisers pay by credit card or mail checks in, a few actually come to pay in cash. These are usually the adult entertainers, and this one's no exception. I know her ad: She's "Totally Titillating." At $180 an hour, I don't think all she's doing is titillating. The thing is, she looks and sounds about 17. Younger than me. She's got chubby cheeks and is carrying a straw tote bag identical to one I own. I can't stop staring at her and I feel bad for gaping, but feel worse turning away and getting on with my daily business, thinking, wouldn't want to be her. I resist the urge to cry out: "You don't have to do this!!!" The girl greets TJ with a smile; I hear them laugh, but I'm too far away to make out the words. It occurs to me that this may be one of the only places where she is treated with respect, as a customer, and as such to be apologized to and fawned over when a typo makes it into her ad. My manager is very clear about that: All advertisers, no matter what category they fall under, are to be treated alike.

Classy has a separate entrance.

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Posted Thursday, Oct. 28, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET
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Orianda Guilfoyle works in the classifieds department at an alternative weekly in the Pacific Northwest.
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