It was a job I took on in early 2002, right at the beginning of the industry, and I think the company I worked for were one of the first to make it a Thing. It was very different to the way it appears to work now. We had an office, in south London, and the 'texts' we sent were done on some modified version of (I think) Messenger. Because the service functioned 24/7, the office had to be staffed 24/7, so I had to build a team of staff who could work however-many six hour shifts a week. As the, er, #bossbabe, it usually fell to me to cover when someone was ill, or hungover, or had some other personal emergency, which sometimes meant working an 18-hour shift, having a 6-hour break and then going back in because something else had gone wrong.
In case you're completely unfamiliar with the concept, commercial sexting invites, by adverts in porn mags, people (mainly men) to text and 'flirt' with others. Except that the 'others', in the companies I have worked for, consist of paid staff pretending to be anything up to 150 fake people...
Yeah, the ethics were a little troubling, even at the beginning, but after a month or so, I was so bombed from the lack of sleep that I pretty much stopped caring. I like to think I had a bit of an aptitude for the work, though. Parts of it appealed to my fiction-writing side, for one thing. I often had to 'build personas' when the company had a new ad out, which meant listing a fictitious Hot Babe's hair colour, eye colour, age, tit size, and inventing stuff like what day job she had, where she lived, her favourite music or hobbies... and I had to keep this stuff interesting, plausible, and not so esoteric that my co-workers would struggle to sustain an ongoing conversation with a customer.
The co-workers, being a bit of a mixture of flakes, chancers, hard workers and howling wackjobs, often needed a certain amount of spoon-feeding when it came to keeping stories consistent and not doing something that left the next op with an incomprehensible mess and a cross punter ranting that he was being lied to. Even the weather mattered. If it was sunny in south London but pissing down in Perthshire, and you were roleplaying Margaret from 'the Scottish Highlands' you had to make sure you didn't get caught out.
I have to say that the second time I took on a sexting job, around 2010, this stuff was a lot easier to stay on top of: not only could you check the weather online wherever you were supposed to be, but the supervisors had even provided a list of websites where you could look up 'local' pubs and restaurants...
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