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.
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