More and more people every day are looking for ways of working from home. Working from home has never been so popular and the choice of types of employment seems endless. You might decide to start your own home based business and work long hours to achieve a dream of supporting your family from the profits of the business. Perhaps you simply want a job you can do at home, maybe just for a few hours a week to bring in a little extra money.

Up until a few years ago, work from home opportunities were rare and poorly paid. This type of work from home slavery still exists but technology has caused a dramatic increase in the number of genuine work from home opportunities available, both for the home based business entrepreneur and for the stay at home mom who wants a job she can fit in around the kids' schedule.

If you have a professional qualification such as being a Lawyer or Accountant you can quite easily set up a home based office. If you have a practical qualification such as being a hairdresser, beautician or nail technician you can build up your own mobile business. If you have no particular qualifications but possess a talent for something such as carpentry or sewing or welding, you can make things at home and sell them at craft fairs and art exhibitions. If you have no particular qualifications or talents but possess some imagination and drive, you can carve out your own niche by identifying a need in your community and providing a service to fill it.

If you have no qualifications, no talent, no skills, no imagination, you could become a telemarketer. The only attributes a telemarketer needs are:

1. A phone

2. A friendly manner (optional in some circumstances)

3. The ability to memorise and recite a script

4. The ability to tell lies in a convincing way

5. A conscience on psychopath level

6. An inner radar enabling you to identify the least convenient time to phone people

7. the ability to talk for a long time without pause

8. Tenacity

9. A thick skin.

Recruitment advertising might mislead you by stating that a clear speaking voice is a requirement but I can tell you from experience that this is not so. Provided you can make your scripted speech without being sidetracked by questions from your prospective customer and have no qualms about the size or number of the lies necessary to close a deal, you will easily find employment in the field of telemarketing.

If you think this sounds mean, just think for a moment about telemarketers. You know, the people that make unsolicited phone calls to you when you are in the middle of bathing the baby or having dinner or when you are up a ladder trying to hang wallpaper. You dive for the phone trying not to drop a slippery baby or trying to swallow your food without choking or trying to control the gummy wallpaper that wants to stick to you, the ladder and everything else around you. You manage to pick up the phone without suffering a serious accident and find yourself listening to a complete stranger who wants to sell you something you don't need and don't want.

While the baby howls, your dinner gets cold or the wallpaper dries in creases, this person talks at you relentlessly and seemingly without the need to take a breath. Only when the dripping soap suds or congealing food or the fact that your hand is glued to the phone finally drive you to interrupt, will there be a pause. This pause, however, is nothing more than a brief mini-second's respite before the script is resumed. You won't get the chance to say enough to turn the soliloquy into a conversation. You see, telemarketers are trained to capitalise on the fact that most people are polite. Most people in this situation don't like to interrupt and won't hang up the phone until the caller has finished speaking and goodbyes have been said.

The only ways to end a call from a telemarketer are to agree to purchase whatever he is offering you or to hang up the phone while he is still reciting his script. If you are too polite to hang up, you might as well just agree to purchase right away. There is absolutely no point trying to reason with a telemarketer if you say you don't want to buy his elephant because you can't stand grey, he will ask you to tell him your favourite colours and then he will swear a solemn oath that the elephant he is offering you is yellow with pink polka dots. A tempting offer! By giving him that tiny bit of information about your personal taste, you have given the telemarketer his hook: he is offering you something in a colour-scheme you said you like, how can you reasonably refuse?

Even though the baby might be blue with cold or the dinner completely solid or the wallpaper glued to your shirt, don't accept the offer. A yellow with pink polka dots elephant might sound like a real novelty and acceptance might seem like a way to end this miserable phone call. The thing here is that, when you receive it, that elephant will be of the grey variety. I don't like to say this but telemarketers lie and, the more incredible the lie is, the more they will protest that the offer they are making you is genuine and too good to be true. Well, they get it half right: it will undoubtedly be too good to be true.

Copyright 2005 Elaine Currie

Elaine Currie runs a work from home directory at her Plug-in Profit Site at: You could too.