A Nasty Example of Personal Selling

Today in marketing, we were covering a chapter on "personal selling" and the professor asked if anyone had ever worked as a telemarketer, which I and two other people had. The first guy said he only did it for two weeks. I said, "Well, I did it for three days but on the third day, I couldn't take it anymore and walked out in the middle of my shift." The other guy had also quit during his third day on the job (and made an eloquent gun-to-head gesture to put across how he felt about it).

I did not mention that right after I left, several other people - I believe the majority of those who started the job the same day I did - walked out also. We all commiserated with each other on the absolute suckitude of the job and how we were desperate in varying degrees, but not quite that desperate, for money. (I was in college and living with my parents, so the least desperate of the group, but even the single moms and such had other options they felt were preferable.) As I recall, I followed up this abortive telemarketing gig with renewed employment at Sonic Drive-In, where my sales requirements were limited to pushing the 44 oz. cherry limeade or onion rings or whatever to people who deep down really did want it and who did not, in any event, call me names when they did not.

So the professor asked me what I didn't like about it and it was surprisingly difficult to answer the question. Not that I do not remember the horrible feeling of doing something intolerable, but it was hard to break that feeling down into what were the particular aspects of the job that I disliked. So I said something like, "I hated trying to convince people who had no interest in the product that they should buy it and talking to old people who were so lonely that they asked me a hundred questions about road-side service even though they did not drive and generally feeling like I was supposed to be manipulating people into doing something they didn't want to do, and I just hated the whole dynamic. It was gruesome." Basically, I felt alternatively like an asshole or an exploiter, neither of which is a role I enjoy.

Another thing I did not say, because I didn't think of it until later, was that one reason that I hated it was that I was so bad at it. Perhaps if I had been more capable of getting that person who said that she was already up to her ears in credit card debt to accept the credit card I was pushing, it would not have felt so awful or so slimy. But maybe one has to be sort of slimy to excel in this kind of sales work. I actually think that a good bit of the sales work being done is valuable and honorable, but telemarketing is a pretty seedy enterprise. I can only imagine that the high performers in the company were not burdened with much in the way of social conscience or sensitivity to being rejected.

Which reminds me... when Robert was out of town a few weeks ago and I was more bored than usual, and Tam had been talking about Facebook and finding some of our old college friends there, I decided to google some random people I knew in high school. There was one particular guy JD (with whom I went to the prom my junior year, for those of you who know these players), who I have always been curious about but had never been able to find anything online. (Everyone who has interacted with JD knows that he is a cocky son-of-a-bitch with zero sensitivity to rejection, a Machiavellian personality, and a potentially adaptable moral compass.) I had heard through other people that he was in law enforcement in some capacity, and thought that might explain why he wanted to keep a low profile. So with low expectations, I looked him up and got a bunch of hits for a criminal lawyer in the right geographical area. For a laugh, I clicked on one of the links. Holy shit, I thought, that picture could be him if he had gained a lot of weight. College details - correct. Law enforcement background - correct. I finally found mention of a journal article he co-published with his best friend from high school which cinched the deal. So if I get stopped for a DUI over Christmas and need a sleazy lawyer to get me off, I know who to call, I guess.