Field of Steve

Thanks to a post on Jim Thomsen’s blog, I was inspired to create a list of cities (which you can see by clicking the “continued” button below) I stayed in because of a job I had for two years not long after college.

American Business Seminars sold books and tapes for hundreds of dollars, mostly to people who were desperate to find their way out of their 9-to-5 lives. The company would send about 20,000 “free” tickets in the mail and if 200 or more showed up it was considered pretty successful in terms of attendance.

Each presentation would last an hour to 90 minutes. The major portion was used to describe how the program; such as making money on real estate notes, bonds or 900 numbers, worked. Then the hook would come. If you ordered these things on the phone, it would cost $495. But because they were there at the seminar, they could get it for $295. Oh wait, how about I give you $100 toward the program. That meant coming to the back table where the speaker would hand us each $100 to go toward any person’s purchase of the program.

It was schlocky as heck. I wanted to believe it was legitimate and probably should have quit long before I did.

It’s a period in my life that is the definition of a mixed blessing. I loved the travel, but wished I’d had another way to make that happen. I was no salesman. I hated being around the sales environment and genuinely felt bad for some of the people who bought from us. A couple of people I felt so bad for that I dissuaded them from buying some of our stuff. One woman told me she had so much to spend and asked for a recommendation. What I recommended required her to return something else. Another woman would cry as she bought every book and tape we had. At the end of the seminar I tried to talk her out of some of the programs she had, but she was resolute that day. I’m sure she spent more than $2,000 that day, most of it borrowed from other people. It wasn’t one of my prouder moments and was one that haunted me for years afterward.

(more…)

The King County Journal, as of late January, is no more. We all saw this coming. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote:

Don Kendall, general manager of Black’s newly created King County Publications Ltd. division, made the announcement in the newsroom in Kent, reading from a prepared statement. Forty full-time employees will be laid off.

Eleven Journal staff members will not be laid off. Ten will move to weekly sister publications, and one is moving to the marketing staff, Kendall said. Journal Newspapers employ about 300 people.

We heard that the jobs at other semi-weekly papers Journal employees were encouraged to take pay $12 an hour.

Tips on how to treat your carpet and flooring customers, based on our recent experience with the company we hired.

1. Delay returning phone calls
2. Promise to send company employees to install the carpet, then send contract laborers instead.
3. Tell your customer there is 90-days-no-interest financing, even if that’s not true. Let them find out when the bill arrives.
4. Tell your customers it will take no more than two days to install your carpet and laminate, then make sure it takes five.
5. Promise to have someone call you to confirm the installation date, but don’t actually have anyone call. Leave your customers wondering.
6. Tell your customers that you’re going to stay in the house all night if necessary to tear out the old carpet yourself, something you don’t normally do, then leave five minutes after they leave.
7. When the homeowner points out problems with the installation, send the same incompetent contract employee back to fix the problem.
8. When the homeowner further points out the same problems and some new ones, agree that the work was unacceptable, promise to schedule someone to come out, even suggesting you ordered new supplies, but hope your customers will eventually give up.
9. Keep on hand a list of excuses for why different people don’t keep their commitments. Never use the same excuse twice. Start with a sick child. Family time is hard to argue with. In a pinch, tell them a kid had to go to the hospital.
10. Once you’ve come back a few times and demonstrated a false sense of concern over the shoddy workmanship, that’s the time to stop returning phone calls all together.
11. If the homeowner is a reporter, here’s a helpful conversation:
YOU: Your husband isn’t going to write a negative story about this experience, is he?
SPOUSE: No, he doesn’t do that kind of thing.
YOU: Yeah, I don’t really like reporters.
12. Collect commission.

Field of Steve

I rode my bike from Boston to San Francisco, where I stopped long enough to catch a Giants game. I wanted to see if the stadium was all that. It was.

I rode down to L.A. where a couple of guys I knew from when I was a kid accosted me while I was showering at a gas station. They were both naked and one was trying to get his business done, if you know what I’m saying. Then a couple other guys walk in, one’s a big muscular Type-A jerk and the other one is smaller and more anonymous. They decide to join in the assault. What they end up doing, however, is distract the guys who are trying to deflower me. I elbow one in the chest and before long I’m outside the shower near the gas pumps dressed in nothing more than shorts and a towel. The two guys I knew drove off in a small truck and the other guys walked away.

Next I got my cell phone and called the police. The dispatcher wanted to be reassured that I got into survival mode. In other words she was wanting to find out if I fought my out or just let them have their way. I’m not sure why it mattered, but I soon grew impatient with the questioning and told her I’d call her from my house, where I could sit in a big comfortable chair instead of standing around in the parking lot in shorts and a towel.

Of course, I still hadn’t paid for the $2.37 in gas I’d received, for what, I don’t remember, because I thought I was on my bike. I go inside into the convenience store part of the station and wait in a line of about 12 people to pay for the gas. When I get to the front of the line the cashier leaves and the big guy that tried to join in on the gang rape is now the cashier. I’m hoping he doesn’t recognize me and I’m really glad he’s there, because when I go home to call the police I can tell them where he is. But I try to pay for the $2.37 in gas I bought and he can’t find anywhere that the station has sold that much in gas. So with a line of about a dozen more people behind me he sends someone out to verify that they sold that much. I ask him if he’s kidding and he continues his belligerence (all the while not recognizing that shortly before he tried to “have” me) and tells me that indeed he is not kidding. “So you’re going to make all these people wait while you try to verify $2.37 in gas?” He tells me in his best Bubba that it’s the way it works there. I tell him I will never buy from this gas station again and he says that will be doing the station a favor.

At this point I am so disgusted with him that I turn around and begin walking out and it’s around then that I wake up from the dream, because if there’s anything that makes me madder than being raped, it’s poor customer service.

www.bainbridgeislander.com