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How My Worst Job Became One of the Best Experiences of My Life
It started with a psychic and ended with people who pluck chickens, butcher cows, and clean toilets for a living.
Frankly, I don’t believe fortune tellers. But I’m always curious about what they have to say. That’s why I listened with a dash of skepticism when a psychic in Palo Alto, California, made the following prediction:
“Sometime in the future, you’re going to find a different kind of job than what you’re used to. You won’t want to take it, but it’s going to be very good for you.”
The kind of work I was used to involved sitting in front of TV cameras, speaking into a microphone, or writing stories for a great metropolitan newspaper. Glamour jobs. The psychic was a beautiful young woman, but I was sure her prediction was full of Shredded Wheat.
Fast forward to a suburban community about 40 miles outside Atlanta, Georgia, many years later. I had just been told by an A-list literary agent in New York that she’d been unable to find a publisher for the short-story collection I had written.
Having hit rock bottom in the available-funds department, I applied for a humble job as an interviewer at a contact center that specialized in two things: insurance claims and…
