Cold Calling
Whilst unemployed, I worked for a shit-hole of a phone poll company in Leverkusen. The "Training" I was given was laughable. I just had to sit in a room for half a day whilst some idiot wittered on. I actually did listen to it, and can report the following :

It's an utter waste of time having your phone number put on a list by BT so that you won't be called up by someone trying to sell you stuff or ask your opinion for some fairly useless survey. This is because telephone companies allocate phone numbers in blocks of 1000. It's fairly easy to randomly pull out phone numbers from these blocks, which is essentially what the call centre software does.

From experience I can tell you this :

As these "opinion polls" are shift (remove the f) work, if you're given a poll for people in the 18-30 age bracket for the day shift, it's fairly obvious that anyone who answers the phone is going to be a crusty old pensioner who doesn't know what the hell you're on about. If you don't complete a significant number of successful calls, however, you're out on your arse, and they will cut your money at the slightest excuse, so you usually end up making fake data just to keep the job.

Some of the senior staff were friendly, but the immediate supervisors were power-mad fascist bastards, particularly one of them who had a face like a pizza and a haircut like a dead skunk stapled to his head.

I lasted about a month, but had the pleasure of telling them where they could stick it when I got another, infinitely better-paying proper job.

Length. A month, but it seemed like a year.
( Stevedix http://www.stevedix.de/blog, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:12, Reply)