I was quite proud of the column I had written for this week. The headline was to have been “How to get rid of a telemarketer.”

The column consisted of a series of comments you might make to get a telemarketer off the line quickly, after he has interrupted your dinner with “Hello, Mr. Schmidt. My name is Roscoe. How are you this evening?” All my rejoinders were funny (or so I thought) and some were delightfully snarky. I had a great time writing the column and felt very clever upon completing it. 

Then I showed the column to my son visiting from Chicago. “Dad, I think you missed one important thing in that column,” he said. “Telemarketers are people, too; and they are probably treated rudely for eight hours a day. Maybe they have families to support and maybe it’s the only job some of them can get. When you wrote that column, were you thinking about who was on the other end of the line?”

I didn’t feel so keen after that.

My son’s remark reminded me of something I’d said when leading a workshop in Wichita last year on “Discerning the will of God in your life.” One way of discerning God’s will, I had suggested, is to pay attention to your passions and yearnings. “God’s call isn’t something external to yourself, but comes from within. If you love to do something, God planted that love within you. Follow your heart.”

I said that because following my heart had worked for me. I had been given many advantages, including loving, supportive parents and a good education. And I was white, tall and male. People like me have choices. I could choose to follow my heart.

But what of telemarketers? I’m guessing that few telemarketers have a passion or yearning to be insulted on the telephone by strangers. Given a choice, they’d probably not risk our wrath by interrupting us at dinnertime. But perhaps their only other choice is unemployment. Most people work a job because they have to. They do not choose it because they love doing it.

And some people have no job. To someone who can’t find work, who has lost her home to foreclosure, who can’t afford to live in a neighborhood with a decent school for her children, or who is constrained by incarceration or disability, it must sound insensitive or presumptuous to hear a privileged person like me say, “Follow your heart.” Or “God has a plan for your life.” Or “Trust Jesus and everything will work out for the best.” For some people it doesn’t work out for the best.

Employment in a dreary, dead-end job is only slightly better than no employment at all. Both can fail to deliver a sense of worth to the worker.

William Temple commented that the greatest tragedy for the unemployed is the sense that they “have fallen out of the common life.”

Denied the opportunity to serve his community through gratifying work, a person “is turned in upon himself and becomes, according to his temperament, a contented loafer or an embittered self-seeker,” Temple said.

The worst thing, according to Temple, isn’t bodily hunger, but “social futility.” I would call it the sense of being unneeded, human refuse, a disposable person.

Some jobs do not endow the worker with a sense of personal worth, and there are ways to make money that destroy souls. But I’m not talking about those jobs. Most jobs, even the most menial and unpleasant ones, make the world a better place and can be done with pride and to the glory of God. That makes the worker part of, in Temple’s words, “the common life.”

But back to the telemarketers. Apart from the lack of face-to-face contact with the customer, they are not unlike other salespersons. If the product they’re selling is a quality product and is offered at a fair price or the charity they represent does good work, then the telemarketer is rendering a service and is indeed part of “the common life.”

I’ll try to think of that the next time a telemarketer interrupts my dinner. At the very least, I can be polite.

Richard H. Schmidt is a retired Episcopal priest, editor and author who lives in Fairhope. He can be reached at courier@gulfcoastnewspapers.com.