I recently stumbled across a wonderful essay on MSN's online magazine, Slate.com. Apparently one of their columnists was on a quest to try different jobs and report back on her experiences. In the article referenced below, she describes what it was like when she worked for a psychic hotline.

I found her essay hilarious (but also kind of sad.) I KNOW that what she is describing is true because in 1991 I briefly worked for one of these places myself. I've also had friends who did readings at similar places. From reading this woman's article, it doesn’t appear that the industry has changed any. Heck, the pay rates haven’t even increased!

From Theater to Psychic Work

In 1991 I was still working as a theater actress and filling in the gaps in employment with psychic reading work. Eventually, I veered off the path of professional acting and moved into giving readings full-time. I really liked helping people to sort through energy blockages, relationship issues, and spiritual matters with my readings, and I found myself very comfortable with my new role as a healer. I was outgrowing my old identity as, essentially, a circus clown.

I felt a lot more self-respect after I abandoned those cattle call auditions where hundreds of women turned up, usually landing jobs only if the agreed to sleep with the directors. I was unwilling to do that and lost a lot of work because of it! The people I really loved in the theater were the gay male directors. They didn't want to date me, they just wanted to ask me where I bought my clothes. And they made great bosses whenever I could do a show with them. But the straight male directors - forget it. I grew really tired of their dysfunctional favoritism and their exploitation of actresses. It all just became a tiresome, soul draining game, completely disconnected from my original intention of sharing creativity and emotional energy with audience members. There were always these horrible "gatekeepers" sitting between you and the audience, demanding your soul in exchange for a $200 a week acting job. I don't think so!

My psychic counselling work was really taking off, and there seemed to be huge momentum around it. I found myself working at various psychic festivals, saw clients in my home, did readings parties, and also taught workshops in psychic development. At one point, I thought it would be good to try doing readings for a hotline, since I could set my own hours and work from home. I had found one company's employment ad in a holistic magazine somewhere, and I saw they were looking for psychics. So I thought I'd check it out.

Joining a Psychic Hotline as a Reader

As part of my "entry" requirement I had to do a long reading on the phone for one of the managers of the company. I was excited about showing someone what I could do, and I was determined to do my best. But all I remember now about the hour-long reading is this depressing blur of data in which I did my best to sort out the frightening cast of characters in this woman's life. Mostly, she kept asking me about immediate family members who were either heading to jail or coming out of jail and pressed me for info about various ex-boyfriends/fathers of her many children/dangerous felons (gentlemen who fit into all three categories.) "Which ones are going to show up on my doorstep in the future?" she asked me, with the air of someone who was considering going into the Witness Protection Program. Eeeeeeek!

Whatever I told her must have pleased her, or at least it was good enough to qualify me as a reader. From that point on, I was given a call-in code. Readers signed on to work at times when the company was running national TV ads, because that was when the calls for readings would come in. So I could either work really early in the morning (not possible, given my propensity to get up at 10 am) or late at night. (That one appealed to me in those days. I had the type of metabolism which meant that life got started around 11 pm each night.)

During the time that a reader was signed in to receive calls, the reader was not guaranteed any work. But they had to be ready in case calls did come through. For each 60 minutes that you were giving readings, you were paid $7. So, while the company's ads stated that they paid $7 an hour, they really just paid $7 for each accumulated sixty minutes that you were on the phone with someone. And as the average reading only lasted twenty minutes or so, I quickly found that I was only earning a couple of bucks here and there.

Management pressured you to get people to give you their mailing address at the start of the call, and you HAD to do this if you wanted to work for this company. You told people that they would receive a free newsletter about psychic stuff if they gave you their information. I don't know if a newsletter really did go out, because I never saw one, but it's more likely that the company was just collecting addresses for resale to various marketing companies.

You were told that calls were monitored and that if you didn't collect the caller's address at the beginning of the call, you'd be fired. The fact that you might try to provide a quality psychic reading for the caller somewhere along the way seemed secondary.

You were encouraged to keep people on the phone for as long as possible, since they were paying some $2.99 a minute for the call. I was REALLY bad keeping people on the phone. I was always so aware of the expense of the call that I hurried through my readings, scanning to the information that I felt was most pertinent for the person and then gently guiding them to end the session.

The people who called were inevitably sweet, lonely, and very mixed up. Many were surprised at the quality of the reading, because they had called the hotline before and had bad readings in the past. I felt like I was aiding and abetting their addiction to psychics and felt terrible about people who were getting dependent on readers.

What I Learned from Working for the Hotline

I learned a lot about how NOT to exploit either yourself (as a psychic) or a client while I worked on the hotline. I also learned about energy management. It's impossible to stay in a light trance state and be ready to give readings on a moment's notice for long periods of time. It's simply too draining on your nervous system. So, even if I only gave a few readings a night, I found that I was exhausted from sitting around, waiting for the phone to ring. It's not a good thing for your psychic instrument, and it's not a healthy way to work.

That's why so many people who work at these hotlines are housewives with rudimentary tarot or astrology skills who are busy attending to kids, cooking dinner and so forth while remaining "on call" with the hotline. They're usually not sitting upstairs in their home office, meditating and invoking the angels to bring forth the best and most appropriate information that a client might need to hear. I was doing that, and that's still how I approach all of my metaphysical work today. But waiting for calls to be filtered through a 1-900 hotline isn't a good channel of energy. At least, it wasn't for me.

I only worked for the hotline part-time for a few weeks. They did pay me, so they weren't a fly-by-night organization (at least, they weren't back then.) Over the years, I've known other psychics who have had both good and bad experiences working for other hotlines, so it IS possible to get a real reading with a real psychic on a 1-900 line. But now you can see how the conditions of working for one are not ideal. And some hotlines require readers to sit in a bull pen or office during their shift, which will not generally be a place conducive to meditation and higher energy sensitivity. Who wants to give readings in a cubicle?

I Never Got to Meet Billy Dee

After I stopped working for the hotline, I thought the world of 1-900 numbers had left me behind for good. I maintained my own busy psychic counselling practice, kept an office and also worked on the phone with people. I was making more and more media appearances, doing a lot of morning show radio for stations across North America, and I even did some TV appearances.

Somewhere along the way in about 1997 I was asked to appear in a TV ad promoting a new psychic hotline, one which at the time was being represented by Billy Dee Williams. While I would have loved to have met Lando Calrissian (He was so hot in The Empire Strikes Back!) I wasn’t too thrilled at the thought of having my likeness associated with yet another potentially bogus hotline. So I turned the offer down.

The Moral of the Story

So what's the moral of this story? Well, it all goes back to understanding that you have the highest chance of finding a genuine, helpful psychic if you avoid any sort of "mass produced" situation, whether it be an Internet company promising individual readings (but really delivering an automated astrology report for $10) or a 1-900 phone hotline.

I've written about this before, but if you want to find a good psychic, the best way to find one is, in this order:

Anyway, here is the link to this entertaining Slate.com article about the woman who worked for a hotline. Enjoy!

http://slate.msn.com/id/2083907