Back in the early 1990s, when people still had to pay by the minute for long-distance phone calls, I worked for a company that sold calling plans. I’d sit in a warehouse in Colorado with hundreds of other telemarketers and cold-call customers of our rival company, trying to persuade them to switch. As soon as I’d end one call — or, more often, when the other person would end it — another name would pop up on my computer screen, and the phone would start ringing again.
One day the computer dialed someone named Aaron. I could see his address on my monitor: Worcester, Massachusetts. The data didn’t include his age, but he sounded young. I was nineteen and harbored a dream of going to college in Boston, a place that felt far away and exotic. Though my job was to sell Aaron a phone service, what I did was ask what Massachusetts was like — the weather, the people, the culture. He was amused, and we talked easily.
