If I have to call someone I don't know, especially about anything even vaguely bureaucratic, I write down what I'm going to say before I call.

I've had a ton of jobs, mostly because I temped my way through college/grad school/shortly after grad school. Some of my non-temp jobs:

RA
Residence Hall Director
Maintenance Sec'y
Assist. Theatre Mgr/House Mgr.
Retail (Lane Bryant mostly, also Michael's)
Sec'y for Industrial Real Estate brokers
Reservations agent for a hotel chain
Substitute Teacher

Some of my temp jobs:

Folding turtlenecks at a dept. store during a sale
Checking in better bags and putting security tags on them at a dept. store
Answering phones at a jewelry store
Clowning for the grand opening of a drug store
All kinds of office work
Inventory at a fasteners place (I counted a shitload of bolts)

I don't have phone fear so much as phone white-hot-loathing. I can count the number of people with whom I can easily talk on the phone on one hand, and I'm related to all of them.

Jess is me.

I also have mild phone fear. I hate any time I have to make call to someone I don't know. Incoming calls don't bother me so much.

In the crappy job department, my first real job (not counting summers spent helping my grandfather on his orchard) was at BK. It sucked royally and being my first job I didn't realize just how much they were screwing us over.

1) Schedules were only made a day in advance (unless the regional manager was coming in for an inspection, in which case they'd be made two weeks in advance as required, but said schedules were generally meaningless) which meant good luck making any sort of social plans. When I did have a day off, I'd have to call in to find out when I was working the next day because of the whole day before thing.

2) When things were slow, we were required to punch out and go on break, but we couldn't leave before the end of our scheduled shift and would have to punch back in when things got busy again. People sometimes had to just sit in the break room for up to an hour at a time.

3) If you were on closing crew, you had to punch out at your scheduled time, regardless of whether you had finished closing out the store. However, you could not leave until you finished closing procedures and cleaning.

This was above and beyond the normal crappiness that comes from working in fastfood.

My second job was working as a ride operator for Six Flags (which I repeated the next summer)

Third job was working at Toys R Us as a floor stocker (and eventually cashier, which I hated). I started about 2 weeks before Christmas.

Fourth job was working in the Men's Department at Montgomery Ward. After my second Christmas there, I vowed I would never work another Christmas in retail again. I quit there to work for my current company shortly before Wards went belly-up.

Well, I finally found pictures of my parents' neighborhood by going to a forum set up by my old grade school.

I keep clinging to the hope that my parents won't have to completely tear down their house.

Work a campaign and that will kill your phone fear dead. Well, it did mine.

You know, erika, you make me realize that I really should do more phonebanking for candidates. I'll put it into my "giving platelets" category -- I don't mind doing it, and other people do mind (or aren't allowed), so I really should.

Of course, after a kind of crappy stick last week, I'm still looking like a junky, but whatev.

After being called"out my name" by pissed-off Repubs interrupted during their dinner hours, I fear no phone call. Seriously. Some of them are claiming character points they don't deserve, I might add. Unless that language is in the Bible somewhere hidden.

Didn't work for me -- if anything, working as a telemarketer (for Clinton's GELAC fund, for a week before I quit) made me hate the phone even more. (It didn't help that, as the new girl, I was assigned to the lowest gift bracket, which meant cold-calling senior citizens and asking them for money. And when I took "Oh, I'd love to help, but I'm living off of my Social Security check and can't afford it" as a reasonable "no," I got lectured by my boss on the Rules, which meant I had to ask at least 3 times before I could end a call. Did I mention I only lasted a week?)

My WORST ever temp job was the time I ended up doing document coding for a PR firm whose big client at the time was the maker of Accutane. After a half-day of coding hundreds of testimonies and case studies all of which CLEARLY showed a link between Accutane and teen depression/suicide, I decided I needed my dignity more than I needed the paycheck. I left early and called in sick the next day.

Wow, those are some awful things.