Door to door sales goal sheet

Description:  Single white sheet with grid for making and tracking goals.  It is a mass produced sheet that is not particular to any business.  In my handwriting under weekly goals I had “have all materials for each day and Get pitch down completely. Under Tuesday is written:  "1. Smile going up to the house.  2. Get pitch down (don’t hesitate) 3. Do better on Intro. " In the bottom is the Juice with each letter written down in columns in my hand Join Us in Creating Energy.  There are some other words I can not quite read.

Story: This is the only evidence I have that for two days I was a door to door sales person--well a trainee.  It was in that "hey, I’m not going to be a classroom teacher, but I need money phase" of my post college life and I was applying all sorts of places and just looking for work.  This was after the three weeks I spent doing temp work assigned to a research company doing telephone surveys.  I answered an ad offering advancement and looking for a team leader.  I had almost zero idea what I was getting into.  I showed up with a few other recruits to an office park in Brookfield called Bishop Woods (You can see the sign along I94)  tucked back in the trees. I had a meeting with a man who said something about not worrying about doing sales. They were there looking for management.  But he was very vague.  Anyway I took the job and the next morn showed up for the "team meeting."  It was in a large open room with no furniture.  I’d say over 100 folks were in the room and with that we endured about an hour of what seemed to be a product brief, a motivational speech and what I was reminded most vividly a high school pep rally cheering kind of gathering.  I felt uncomfortable and that is putting it mildly, but we needed for me to work.  After the team meeting I was pared with a guy and spent a day driving around Port Washington stopping at houses and knocking on doors trying to sell a sheet of prepaid golf outings.  It was not the only product the company did.  They also would sell bundles of oil changes and other service things.  I picked up a few things about sales.  The importance of having the customer hold the product while you talked about it.  Give them a sense of having it and then feeling like they are loosing something if they don’t pay for it.    They guy who I road with that day was not much older than me.  I learned too much about his life, he had a girlfriend and a son and didn’t think he was ready for marriage.  We met up with other sales persons and their trainees for lunch.  It was a long day.  Lots of car time.  At the end of it we went back to Bishop Woods and all the sales folks were back in the big room yelling and loudly celebrating their successes and trading stories.  I felt very out of place.  

I came back the next day.  Was pared with another guy.  He was more reserved and professional.  We headed south knocking on doors in affluent mc mansion neighborhood around Delevan or some such.  It was another long day and by the end of it I knew I was not cut out for this kind of work, nor was my 84 Chevy Cavalier cut out for that much driving each day.  Lesson learned. On one hand I felt like a quitter on the other I knew I needed a job where I would not spend eight plus hours and more than a tank of gas and come home at the end of the day with nothing to show for it.  

I took what lessons I could from the experience and went and signed on with another temp agency the next day.  They had free training on Microsoft products so I sat in a room for a few hours and worked though some tutorials on managing electronic files, word processing and using spreadsheets.  With that I was able to get work updating the inventory lists of Sears repair vans.  Eventually I got a full time job at an expired pharmaceutical return company, but that is a whole other story.  

Drawing of the front of my 4th grade classroom

 

Description:  white letter paper drawing in pencil of the front of my 4th grade classroom

Story: The details are a bit fuzzy on this one.  I think there was a thing where stuff from the school could be submitted to the county fair.  I don’t know if I got a ribbon or certificate, but I recall it won some sort of prize.   I obviously had not learned anything about perspective and only knew a tiny bit about drawing three dimensional shapes.  Mostly I sat at my desk with the paper and tried to draw what I saw in front of me.  I left out some details and drew it all free hand without using any kind of straight edge.  I really wanted to fill the page and in that it was a pretty good effort, though even when I drew it I was bothered by the fact that you can’t see where the floor ends and the wall begins.  I had a lot of issues with the teacher's chair.  Part of the reason the floor is so dark under the desk is that I was covering up my light pencil attempts to get the wheels right.  I was never happy with it.  They hardly look like they match the back of the chair that I also had issues with.  I do rather like the effect of having the PA system box with sound lines coming out of it.  I also played a bit with texture on the bulletin board.

You can tell it got pinned up a few times with the holes in the upper corners and there is some soot damage at the top again.

Pamphlet about Tourette Syndrome

 

Description: 

Light blue tri-fold-out pamphlet with questions and answers about Tourette Syndrome from 1991.  

Story:

My earliest memory of a motor tic was in my high school English class.  My head seemed to move on it’s own and I went from looking at my textbook to looking at the clock on the wall.  It was weird.  Did I really want to look at the clock?  I’d move my head slowly back to my book and be thinking about it, trying to decipher if I had chosen to look at the clock or if it just happened on it’s own.  Then I’d do it again, but I was thinking about it, so that was my conscious choice...wasn’t it?  Tourette is weird that way.  It is like it is it’s own impish thing, knows when it’s being talked about, so as I write this I’m having symptoms that I have not experienced in some time.  Anyway it was a very infrequent thing, and I didn’t give it much regard.  Then I started my sophomore year in college.  I was taking some intensive courses.  I was writing long letters to Mr. Gaba who was in basic training and there I sat on my college bed trying to read Candide by Voltaire and my head kept turning to the side and I kept losing my place.  It came to be an ongoing issue with reading.  It didn’t hurt, it was just annoying and more persistent than my sudden odd high school clock watching.  My roommate who was a nursing student noticed it.  I looked up a few things in some medical books in the library, figured out what I was doing was called a tic. 

Finally I went to see the campus doctor.  There is this Loony Toon cartoon of Tweety taking a Jekyll and Hyde formula. Every time Sylvester looked at Tweety he looked normal, but then Sylvester turns his back and Tweety becomes a monster.  My visit to the campus doctor reminded me of that cartoon.  Every time the guy looked at me I was perfectly still.  He’d look down to make a few notes and my head would tic.  He checked out what he could about balance and interviewed me and suggested that I see a neurologist.  I didn’t have a car and know what to do, so I called home, and Mom set things up for me to visit a doctor during spring break in North Dakota. 

I was tested for various things. Tourettes is a diagnosis of elimination.  If no other cause can be found, it must be.  Well it wasn’t Tourettes, I was told it was transient tic syndrome.  If symptoms went on past a year it would be chronic tic syndrome.  In reading up on it as best I could in the days of pre-internet, the only difference between chronic tic syndrome and Tourettes is that Tourettes has both physical and verbal tics.  I had no verbal tics.  So life went on.  I had no interest in trying to treat my condition with medication.  My tics, while at the time annoying and bothersome, were not debilitative, and knowing some girlfriends with epilepsy and how the medications messed up so many other things and had to be counteracted with other meds, I reasoned that any medication that would help the tics would cause me other problems.  Things stayed pretty much as is.  Got married, graduated, eventually ended up working at Todd Wehr Library at the Medical College of Wisconsin where I did a second shift that ended at midnight five days a week.  In was on a drive home that I started to have verbal tics.  A really loud ear piercing "HA!” I could feel it coming, and couldn’t stop it.  Well that cleared it up.  I have Tourette syndrome. '

What I have learned over the years is the number one thing I can do to reduce my tics is to make sure I get enough sleep at night.  I’ve had a few times when I was prescribed medications for other things and found my tics got much worse.  If it was a direct cause of the medication or simply that the meds messed up my sleep cycle I can’t say, but in both cases I simply stopped taking the meds and things got better.  Now things are pretty stable.  The only time I really have any issues is when I’m under a lot of stress (another reason why I’m a librarian and not a high school history teacher) or when I am visiting someone who has tics.  If we are together and one person tics and the other sees it...well, like I said, I’ve been ticking like a clock as I write this.  It’s an odd compulsive condition.  It is somehow related to obsessive compulsive disorder and I have some of those tendencies too, though much less than before.  I drove my roommate in college crazy with not being able to go to sleep unless all doors and drawers were perfectly closed and latched.  This I got over after getting married, and living in old houses where almost no internal doors latch, and in the case of the bedroom door it needing to be unlatched so the cat can get in and out during the night. 

Anyway, I don’t remember the doctor's name, thought I think he was a graduate of the Medical College of Wisconsin where I ended up working for a bit.  He gave me that pamphlet and it was in his office when he wasn’t looking at me, and was making notes, that my mother first noticed what I had been complaining about, because prior to that she had never seen me tic and had set up all the appointments not quite understanding what was going on.   My mother upon learning that my condition was somehow hereditary felt terrible and perhaps guilty that I should suffer with such an odd condition.  I assured her that unlike with the genetic time bombs of heart disease, diabetes, & cancer, Tourettes didn’t hurt and would never kill me.  I’m glad it didn't become a real issue until college, when I was much more self confident, and did not have to deal with it around people who would tease me about it.  

Years later, I went to a doctor in Fort Wayne and a nurse was taking my medical history. I mentioned it, and she stopped and looked at me and seemed choked up.  Turns out her teen daughter had Tourettes and she was very concerned about her.  I explained that my symptoms were relatively mild and I was never medicated for them.   The woman said, “But here you are, a married woman with a college degree, and you’re OK.”  I didn't quite know what to make of that exchange.  I never thought of myself as a positive role model, but this woman found some comfort in my ordinary life. 

String Art on Paper--Bunny

Description:  8.5x11 sheet of colored paper with white reinforcement sheet on the back.  Using string thread is stitched through the paper to create images using a precise method that gives the impression of an image made with a spiral graph.

Story: In 5th grade Miss Hanson had us doing various string art projects.  We were give a grid sheet with numbered and lettered holes and directions with where to put the needle each time to make the right pattern. There were the usual frustrations, knotting thread, getting a few ahead and realizing you were in the wrong hole and having to pull it out to fix it.  I deeply enjoyed this project.  

Sixth graders at St Thomas Public school made more elaborate projects of string art that involved nails and black cloth and three dimensional effects.  They were made to give to our parents at Christmas.  Mr. Stuberg, the 6th grade teacher, didn’t change it up, but he did have a selection of patterns you could choose from (train, snail, ship etc,).  Families with a lot of kids ended up with several forms.  It was not unusual for younger siblings to say “Well, Mom said I need make this one."  The joy of small town life.  There were never too many surprises.  The 5th grade projects were seasonal. We all did the same project at the same time.  I think we did three of them all together,  One was just circles, There was a heart for Valentine's days that we were to give to our parents. The bunny was by far the most complicated one we made as an Easter project.  The fire was not kind to this work and some of the strings on the back broke so it no longer has the tight neat look I produced. 

I wrote about all these archived objects in November of 2020. At that time I was asked to decorate a hand turkey for a display at work. I did it free form so there isn't the geometric precision of the fifth grade work, but I was inspired by the memory of the fun I had with those grade school projects.