Confessions of a dodgy phone psychic.

Ever feel like psychics just sit there, laughing on the inside, while making up a stinking pile of crapola and then charging a fortune for it?

Well, one former phone psychic confessed about the realities of the job – and if her story is anything to go by, you probably WON’T be destined to meet that “tall, dark stranger” any time soon…

Angela Lovell wrote on Vice.com about her brief stint at one of the world’s most famous phone-psychic companies.

And if you are a believer now, you probably won’t be after reading what she has to say about her time as a “half-ass psychic”.

Reading tarot is a combination of looking at the cards, their placement, and using intuition. I don’t know why it’s worked well enough for people to pay me, but I imagine it’s because the human race loves fiction.

And:

I was collecting $1.99 a minute to tell them what I saw in the cards, which was, by and large, bullshit.

Ouch.

Lovell describes how her “interview” before getting the job involved doing a reading for an older woman over the phone – as part of her trial, the writer was required to tell her “about the life she was currently living and where it would take her”.

I flipped over the Disc and Cup cards, and told the woman over the phone that a Capricorn man was sucking her dry. This was the strongest detail I’d provided and it absolutely dazzled her. At that point she broke her character as interviewer and revealed that a Capricorn man had, indeed, drifted in and out of her life over the last 30 years.

For her second “interview”, she read tarot cards for a man and interpreted that a blonde woman was about to screw him over. This is how she handled the situation:

After years of reading strangers for quick cash, I knew better than to tell someone that a person he cared about was going to take advantage of him… My intuition/magical powers told me this woman was about to leave him high and dry, but common sense told me that news might offend him and blow my chances of landing this job. Fortune-telling has no solid ethics, so I told him what I believed he wanted to hear. And I got the job.

According to Angela, her “insights” were based purely on chance and guesswork – she described how her favourite regular, “an eccentric opera singer in her mid 60s” – would call often to ask which of her valauble paintings she should sell to pay her bills:

I dangled a rose quartz pendulum over a circle surrounded by the answers “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” I listed the titles of her artwork to “my spirit guide,” a term I loathed but the callers loved. The crystal swung back and forth and I would report the answers to her as minute after minute robbed her of valuables.

Around about now, I’m seriously regretting that time I shelled out $100 to ask a psychic if I would end up engaged to my boyfriend and landing a new job (both happened – no thanks to the psychic though).

Hmmmm – turns out that psychics aren’t all legit.

Who would’ve thought?

Do you believe in psychics?

While we’re on the topic, here’s one of the finest psychic-related moments in cinematic history:

You can read the full Vice article here. 

A few years ago, Mamamia writer Rosie Waterland sat down with a psychic. Here’s how it went down.