Hear the fabulous exploits of one complete reject
The Psychic Readers Network is only the most recent and successful of the telephone psychic systems. You've seen the ads: Ms. Cleo, awash in Jamacan slang, tells her TV callers that the man with the wart is the father of their baby. She explains why the police report will not contain their sister's name, or that mother's cancer will go into remission.
It's definitely bullshit. There is no Ms. Cleo, and no one, no matter how often they can tell you what number you're thinking of, can determine who the father of your baby is over the phone.
But there's a lot more to the Psychic Reader's Network than you might suspect. Ever see those signs at the gas station that claim you can make $1200 a month working at home? It's possible that they're from the Psychic Reader's network. In truth, the PRN will pay you around $12 an hour to sit at home and give tarot card readings over the phone.
Here's how it works. You sign up with one of their brokers and receive an extension number. Then, when you've got a few free hours, you call in and sign onto the network. Once you've logged in and hung up, your phone starts ringing. The wee hours of the night are the most popular, and our close personal psychic friend, Ed, typically works the hours of midnight to four AM
In a typical night, Ed can go through about twenty to thirty calls. The payment is centered around average call length. If Ed turns over fourteen three minute calls, and only two or three twenty minute calls, he's not getting $12 an hour. To keep the rate of pay high, he needs to keep his average around 16 minutes a call. Naturally, Ed's not a fan of Ms. Cleo's three minutes free plan. Sometimes, he gets repeated calls from clock watchers who hang up on the dot every three minutes. These guys ruin Ed's average.
But Ed is not just some poor schnook in bum-fuck Arkansas counting phone minutes and reading a script. If there really is such a thing as a medium, Ed is definitely it. To hear Ed tell it, his gift came to him around the time his older brother died. Ed wasn't even a teenager, and the death of his brother was a strong blow to his already shaky family life. Ever since then, though, Ed has been in tune with what the faithful would call spiritual dealings.
At first, Ed considered the idea of being a phone psychic to be preposterous. Why would any self respecting mystic actually consider doing something that is the equivalent of being a psychic harlot. Indeed, the brokers who manage groups of these phone psychics are often referred to as tarot pimps.
But what it all came down to was helping people. Ed's always been a local area dispensary of advice, typically of the more mundane kind, and occasionally of the occult sort. So, he decided that, even if he was only telling people the blatantly obvious at $4.99 a minute, he was still doing good in some way or another.
Thus, Ed signed on with the fictional Ms. Cleo and began his career as a phone psychic. And you wouldn't believe some of his stories.
Typically, Ed says, there are three types of calls: the emotionally damaged, the skeptics, and the idiots. The first group is generally populated by folks who are wondering if they'll get back together with their estranged significant others. The skeptics are easy to spot because they usually begin the conversation by insisting that Ed's the psychic and therefore should know their name already. Finally, there are the idiots. They always become the best stories.
Idiots call up and ask silly questions. Where are my keys? I dropped three tabs of acid, what do I do? How many fingers am I holding up. While we'd like to think that most of these sorts of callers are drunk, a frightening number of them are completely sober. Ed worries that this job is going to turn him into a racist, as the following exchange illustrates how hard it is not to discern the skin color of most callers.
Ed: Hello, welcome to the Psychic Readers Network, my name is Ed, can I have your name please?
Caller: Sharifintiniqua.
Ed: And your last name?
Caller: White.
Ed: Ok Sharifintiniqua, what can I help you with tonight?
Caller: Well, my parents is intoxicated, and I have to watch my brothers and sisters because they ain't around to take of them all.
Ed: Have you considered trying to get them some help? Maybe get them to join a rehab clinic? I can give you the number for your local AA chapter if you'd like.
Caller: Well, they be gettin' help when they get out.
Ed: Out? Of jail?
Caller: Yeah, they intoxicated.
Ed: Incarcerated?
Caller: Yeah, that what I mean, Incinerated.
And so on. There's usually one or two of these calls every night. Ed says that the most dificult part of his job is not laughing outright at these types of calls.
The skeptics are a bit tougher to deal with. Ed tries to head them off at the pass by asking them to open their minds. If they're unwilling to sit and listen to his tarot readings, he asks them to simply hang up. Most do. The rest, however, he can usually win over. In fact, Ed's found that his most reliable repeat callers are often skeptics at first. One lady that started out as a skeptic was so enchanted by Ed's tarot reading and understanding of her situation that she began calling him at least twice a week, often leaving the phone off the hook to help keep Ed's average up.
But even if you're a skeptic of the most stalwart sort, there's no denying that Ed's advice and common sense is well worth the $4.99 an hour: it's the poor man's dial-a-therapist. Even the callers who want to know who the father is can typically glean some useful knowledge from Ed's scant minutes of advice. if nothing else, Ed can at least suggest a good brand of condom.
One caller said she had narrowed the father candidates down to 29 separate possibilities. Ed gave her the phone number of her local Planned Parenthood.
Another caller dialed in from a battered woman's shelter on a calling card. Ed spoke to her for over an hour, and in the end, convinced her not to go back to her husband and to seek help from her local authorities to press charges.
When asked if he feels bad about money of people who are obviously not in charge of most of their mental faculties, Ed categorically denies guilt. "When I got off the phone (with the battered woman) I was physically and emotionally drained. I give these people my all when they need it. I'm earning this money."
While Ed is definitely a credit to the Psychic Reader's Network, there are also those that do take advantage of people. In Ed's group of 750 readers, there are no fewer than seven who pretend to be Ms. Cleo. Two of them are men. Others, constantly inundated with requests for Ms. Cleo's advice, simply ask callers to wait on hold while they go get her. Naturally, they leave the phone on hold for extended periods of time and collect the rewards in their pay checks. The PRN is doing all it can to crack down on these folks (the seven Ms. Cleo's however, are perfectly alright with the PRN).
But Ed always plays it straight. He even ignores one of the PRN's main rules: do not give callers bad information. If Ed pulls up the 6 of pentacles, or feels that the family member you're asking about is dead, he will level with you and tell you the truth.
And he does feel that death pang every so often. Ed is no stranger to the paranormal. He's often had to leave houses that have overly active spiritual energy. Recently, he received a call about a haunted house. The caller asked if he could see anything about the house or understood why it was so spooky. Ed began receiving images in that quiet way that only mediums can. He successfully identified the basement as the source of the house's problems. Out of the blue, he received visions of a tombstone and a dirt floor. The house, said the caller, had a Michigan basement (dirt floor) and was right next door to a cemetery. Suddenly, Ed was unable to control himself, and blurted out "Fuck! Someone was raped in that basement." The caller was silent for a few moments. Ed was worried that his outburst had offended her and felt as though he'd just lost a customer. But after a few more seconds, the caller intimated that a psychic who had been to the house a year earlier had said the same thing. Ed instructed the caller to get a pen and paper, and then gave her explicit instructions for a ritualistic cleansing of the basement.
"She Asked if she should get a priest to come and help with the cleansing. I said no. In order to deal with the spiritual world you have to believe in what you're doing. While the Catholic church does maintain a sect of exorcists and cleansers," says Ed "Your average priest probably isn't going to truly believe that the house is haunted. Sprinkling holy water isn't going to remove a ghost. It's just going to make a wet ghost."
But not all of Ed's calls are so dark and dreary. Often he hears from drunken protagonists who want to know which dinner course had made them sick, or why their arm hurts so much. There's not a whole lot Ed can do for these people. He enjoys being a counsel and an ear to listen, but he has absolutely no way to determine why a caller is afflicted with diarrhea.
So if you've got a question for the universe, or simply need some advice, don't bother going to the $25 tarot card reader down the street. Give Ed a call. He's on Sunday through Thursday, midnight to four EST.
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