And while we’re on the subject of snail herding in the Aleutians, I am reminded of some very dodgy jobs I almost, but didn’t actually, do.
I was at a very vulnerable stage in life, from the employment point of view. Eighteen or so, no longer at school but not yet in the work force, and I had done a few short-term jobs for a very big temp agency, which was okay, and brought in a weekly crust, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I used to go through the jobs section of the Evening Standard every day, and I saw an ad for a job that seemed to promise the earth. Good hours, wonderful product and huge pay cheques (when you read this, do remember to factor in the naiveté of an eighteen year old!). So I called the number and made an appointment to see someone the following afternoon at an address in Grosvenor Square. It didn’t strike me as strange that they didn’t tell me what the job was and deftly blew off all my questions about it with non-committal answers.
For trans-pond types, and other non-Londoners, Grosvenor Square is a very posh address. The US Embassy is there, taking up one entire side of the square, and the Canadian High Commission is on another corner. So, I figured I wasn’t dealing with a crap company. The outside of the building I fetched up at was very impressive, and inside I walked up a grand curving staircase on the start of my ascent to the fifth floor. The fifth floor turned out to be the attic, with a lot of plywood partitioned spaces, and one actual room, containing a second hand dining table and a number of mismatching chairs. I was shown in and waited for a few minutes before being joined by a guy called Tony. He had a broad salesman’s smile, a ponytail and was wearing a pair of those striped Uncle Sam trousers that had been fashionable for a very short time. He greeted me effusively, offered me coffee and began to tell me about the job.
He told me in his way, answering all my questions with “I’ll get to that in a moment.” and it wasn’t till later that I realized he was giving me a sales pitch. He told me that the company -- he didn’t tell me the name and to this day I don’t know what it was -- was in the business of approaching families on a one to one basis and getting them to allow the company to place learning systems in their homes. There was no charge of this, he told me, but of course if the family agreed to accept a learning system completely free of charge, they should also agree to maintain the system and keep it up to date. “That’s only reasonable, isn’t it?” he asked. “Yes.” I replied like a patsy (salespeople among you will have recognized that technique immediately). What I would have to do would be to persuade the families to accept learning systems and get them to sign a maintenance contract, and depending on the length of the contract (two, three or five years) I would receive commission.
This is where he made his regulation funny: “Now I’d like to discuss a subject very dear to my heart, and probably to yours too: money!” (chuckle, chuckle). He told me all about how the commission structure worked, and the amounts of dosh I could expect to receive depending on how many signed contracts I could turn in to head office every week. He wrote each successive figure on a pad of paper, one under the other, and each one in larger figures than the one above it. The record for the highest commission earned in one week was just under two thousand pounds (and here he wrote £2000 on the pad in huge figures, followed by several !!!! and underlined it) but of course that record was there to be broken (more chuckles).
The way they operated was to take their field staff out to carefully designated parts of London (“We take you, at our expense – a free commute for you!”) at times when we would be most likely to find potential subscribers at home, and we could then plan out own routes for calling at customers’ homes, until we were collected and given a free ride back to head office. “The sky’s the limit, Nicholas” he told me, and said they would be starting a training course for new staff the following Monday morning and was pleased to offer me a place in it. I was delighted at having been selected. As he showed me out, we passed a number of framed photographs on the wall, which were of smiling people being handed cheques by some bloke in a suit. They were sales staff who had broken sales records over the past two years. As an afterthought, he told me that they operated on a self-employed, commission only basis. Then he shook my hands and I was on my way down the staircase.
I left the building feeling very chuffed about my new career, but by the time I got home I had mentally replayed what he had told me, and had deciphered his code. All that talk of free rides to the sales area and placing learning systems etc. What it boiled down to was that they would stick everyone in a van, drive them to one or other part of London and dump them out so that they could spend their evenings going door to door trying to sell encyclopedias. That’s what the learning systems were: first volume free, provided you agreed to “maintain the system” i.e. buy a new volume every month for several years. And of course, if it was commission only, they didn’t have to pay us a penny if we didn’t sell anything. A very few people can make a lot of money at door-to-door cold calling. For everyone else it is utterly soul destroying. I went back to the Evening Standard and never showed up for the sales training. Knowing what I now know about the sales world, I doubt that he was really expecting me to
Some time later, after I had lived in Canada for some years and was back in England looking for work, I thought about sales again. I answered an ad for a sales position selling a home improvement product. This time the address was in Oxford Street, and again it was the top floor of an otherwise posh building. There were several applicants sitting in rows, some looking very young, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and me, worldly wise at twenty-three. A company exec made a grand entrance and gave us talk about the company and the positions that they were going to offer to a select few. Instead of the pad, as used by my old encyclopedia flogging chum Tony, he used a flip chart and magic markers, but the technique was the same. Commission figures in a column, each one in larger numbers than the one above it. Profligate use of underlinings and exclamation marks. “That’s a lot of money for one day’s work, isn’t it?” “Yes.” we all replied. Well, I didn’t but most did. I put my hand up. “What exactly will we be selling?” He seemed annoyed at such an irrelevant question.
Eventually they had to broach that subject though, and he told us about this wonderful, new, totally amazing, just-developed product for roof insulation that could save homeowners enormous sums in heating costs. We would sell on a one-to-one basis (cold calling, door to door) and demonstrate how the product could save them money, how they could take advantage of the company’s installment plan (get them to sign their lives away) and point out the economic advantage of not having to pay expensive fees to builders to apply it to their roofs (because they would have to do it themselves). Then he showed us an example of the product. Some of us, including me, could see it for what it was, but several of the younger ones oohed and aahed at it. It was a five gallon plastic drum, with all sorts of brightly coloured writing on the sides and the lid, containing the wonder product.
The exec finished his talk and a couple of his minions in the room began to clap, and most people in the room joined in, and then he said they would be interviewing us individually, leaving us all sitting there waiting to be called in for a chat. I didn’t stay. What these people were being interviewed for was for the opportunity to go door to door selling unsuspecting victims a couple of buckets of tar on a very expensive installment plan. That’s all it was. Not illegal, but just plain wrong.
Since then I did have a number of sales jobs, and for a while even my own company, and made a lot of good money, but they were always business to business sales. I never had to stoop to the demi-monde of door to door huckstering.
Consider this. A body has a cancer, and after the doctors have excised it, they lop off some limbs and rip out a few other organs that were completely uninfected and unaffected. Or, if carcinogenic hypotheses make you uneasy, think about your house – a small fire in one of the rooms. Along come the fire-fighters who douse the flames but they also smash the rest of the building to pieces and use their hoses to soak all that therein is, making the place uninhabitable. Do you thank the doctors and the fire-fighters or, in spite of the good thing they at first did for you, do you begin to resent and then hate them?
In her comment to my last posting, lovely Wylie instructed me to write about drivel for a change but at the risk of disappointing her, I wish to write about something very serious, namely the parlous state of the U.S. Justice system – or at least part of it. I refer, of course, to the imminent incarceration of poor Paris Hilton.
So goodbye to Tony Blair. The man who became Prime Minister in May 1997 after defeating by a landslide the most incompetent government Britain has had since the war, and whom some saw as a bright hope for the future -- assuming he represented the kind of future you wanted -- has announced that he will be stepping down at the end of next month. And few will be sorry to see him go. Whatever else he may have achieved, and there are some who would say that that is a not inconsiderable body of work, he will be forever tainted by and reviled for his biggest mistake, which was to get Britain involved in the disastrous and completely unnecessary war in Iraq. 
A rather nice family moved in next door to us a couple of months ago. The way people are, we haven’t really had much to do with them, but they seem very pleasant. They have a couple of little dogs and two small daughters of, I’m guessing, ten and six. We often see them walking their dogs or riding their bikes around the complex, and they always seem very interested, for some reason, in watching me watering and tending the avocados I have growing in pots out front.
So, 
