Ignoring the Subtext

As long as I live, I will never understand what compels people to become door-to-door salespeople. I guess some people just have a knack for it; it’s just something that they are good at.

Personally, I have never been a good fit in the customer service industry. I fit more into the corporate world where, for the most part, I constantly work with the same people. My forays into the world of retail sales and customer service have been, well, less than spectacular.

One of my managers in my earlier days described me as, ‘Narcissistic, openly defiant, an egotist with an attitude, a person who believes that he is above the rules.’

I just have a problem dealing with people who are stupid, lazy, and inconsiderate. My attitude stemmed from people in a store who passed what they looked for seven times, were too lazy to turn their heads to look for an item, and were too inconsiderate to thank me when I showed them where the item was.

So for the most part, I decided that the way that my managers wanted me to do things was irrelevant, I tended to spend more time helping people that were thoughtful and actually needed help, and in turn, virtually ignoring the ones who couldn’t find the nose on their own face. I am the type of person that is only willing to help people if they are willing to do their best to help themselves.

I still don’t understand why my managers thought I had an attitude.

I took a stab at door-to-door sales, briefly in college. It only took a couple of days before I realized that I fit into the demographic of people who definitely don’t have a knack for it. Most people are volatile as it is, add the fact that you are knocking on their door at home, interrupting their dinners, asking money to sell them something that they don’t want and will never use, and people will be ruder than you can possibly imagine. On my three days on the job, I heard obscenities that I thought people were making up, and for the most part, I curse like a drunken sailor.

“If you want to be good at this job Jake, you have to be persistent, ignore the subtext, and don’t take no for an answer.” My sales manager had been doing the job for a couple of years, apparently, he had no idea who I was.

The difficulty of the job was compounded for me by the fact that I had no salesmanship skills whatsoever. A dyslexic, drunken orangutan is a better salesman than I am. I couldn’t sell a free life preserver to a man drowning in an ocean.

I never understood what my sales manager meant by ‘ignore the subtext’; maybe it was because there was no subtext involved with any of the people behind the doors that I knocked on. There were only threats to my life, racial epithets, and the occasional ‘no’.

I never understood what he meant until last night, when a door-to-door magazine saleschick knocked on my door, and not once understood the subtext behind my attempts to be nice to her.

The first mistake that she made was knocking on my door at seven o’clock on a Thursday. There are only two television shows that I watch religiously, Scrubs and Smallville, last night was a brand new episode of Smallville. She was lucky that I didn’t throw her down the stairs when the commercial ended.

The only reason I answered the door during one of my weekly sacred rituals was because I thought my brother was on the other side of the door with a calculator that I loaned him three and a half years ago. I opened the door to find a short, thin, blond girl in her early 20s, shivering from the cold weather.

For the purposes of simplicity, our conversation will be in quotes, with my subtext defined inside of parentheses. For example “Blah blah, blah blah blah (subtext)”

“Have you seen a young kid with green hair, kinda smells bad, running around this complex?”

“Uh, no…(Who the hell are you?)” I was under the assumption that she was looking for her little brother or a friend.

“Are you the man of the house?”

“Yes… (Hell yeah, I’m the man!)”

“Hi, my name is ‘her name here’, I am doing a contest for school in which I try to collect points by going door-to-door and selling magazine subscriptions to popular magazines. I am currently in first place. The grand prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to, guess where?”

She spat out her pre-scripted monologue in about half a second. She handed me a laminated brochure, complete with the rules for her little contest and a picture of Mexico with the word ‘Cancun’ emblazoned below it.

“Cancun? (Really, how friggin’ stupid do you think I am?)”

“Yep! Have you ever been to Cancun?”

“Of course! (No, never)”

“Cool! The trip is for two, you can go with me and show me all the sights!”

At this point, she is starting to feed on one of my weaknesses. It is a weakness of all men. You can call us simple-minded creatures, but we can’t help ourselves. All guys, without exception, will buy something from or for a woman who flirts with him. It is an undeniable fact of nature. I personally remember walking out of a store in Las Vegas this summer with a new pair of sunglasses that I didn’t need, 200 dollars poorer, cause the saleschick that worked there said that I looked hot with them on.

“Do you mind if I come in for a second to show you this?”

“Ok… (You have until the end of the commercial)”

She walked in just past the door, far enough to lay her pamphlets and other sales material out on the kitchen counter. I left the door open just in case I had to physically throw her out of my apartment if she pulled a knife on me, or something to that affect.

“If you don’t mind, could you leaf through this booklet and pick out four magazines that you would be willing to subscribe to?”

“Ok… (I ain’t buying a damn thing, lady!)” In retrospect, I was being far too nice, especially considering the commercial break was almost over.

I proceeded to thumb through the booklet she handed me, looking at the brief number of magazines therein, all with a number of points listed in their description.

“Oh, by the way, you can’t choose ‘Details’, we’re out if it.”

Now, this sent up a huge red flag for me. If someone knows how a company could ‘run-out’ of a magazine subscription, please inform me. I still played along with the game, wasting more of my time. I picked out four magazines that were on the list, and she wrote them down, assuming that I had already made a decision.

“Now this is what I can do for you…” She showed me her sales slip and explained the price scale on the four subscriptions that I chose. Not wanting to wait for her to finish her speech, I did some quick math in my head and soon realized that the total dollar amount was just shy of 250 dollars.

“I’m sorry, but you really caught me at a bad time, I have a lot of things going on in my life right now, and I can’t really afford the money… (Lady, if I wanted to spend that kind of money on magazines, I could do it at the newsstand!)”

“Well, if you write me a check, you can post-date it for up to nine days from now and it won’t be processed for another two weeks!”

“Things aren’t going to be much better for me in two weeks… (In two weeks, I still won’t want to spend 250 dollars on magazines!)”

“Well, here’s what you can do then, just to help me out with my contest, you can post-date the check, then call this number in about a week, and tell the operator that you want to cancel your order. That way, I will still get half of the points for the order!”
This little contest of hers was getting on my nerves. As it turns out, the scoring system was more complicated than the scoring system of professional auto racing.

“I’m just a little cynical about things like this… (Let me get this straight, you want me to give you a check for more than 200 dollars for knocking at my door, and assume that you aren’t going to cash the thing, based on good faith?)”

“Well, see, that’s why we don’t take credit card numbers anymore. Some of the kids in the contest were stealing them and trying to do bad things with them.”

“Really? (Now, how exactly is that supposed to make me feel better about giving you a check?)”

Let me let you in on a little fact that everyone should be aware of, checking accounts are far easier to defraud than credit or debit cards. When completing transactions online, a security code of some kind is usually required to use plastic. Most cards also have a dollar limit that is used to prevent fraudulent charges.

A growing trend online is the ‘electronic check’. It allows use of a checking account by using the routing number and account number, easily found on a check. It will allow you to spend up to the dollar amount in your checking account, and has very little security involved.

“I really don’t feel safe about giving a complete stranger a check, sorry… (You’re done here, go home!)”

“Well, can you at least let me borrow a lighter?”

“What? (What!?)”

“I just wanna smoke a cigarette before I go home.”

“Let me see if I can find one… (Wait outside!)”

I shut the door and proceeded to rifle through my apartment, looking for a lighter that I knew didn’t exist, knowing that if I found one and sent her on her way, I would be sitting on my couch again, experiencing sweet television bliss.

About ten minutes later, she knocked on the door again.

“Let me just borrow your stove for a second…”

“No, I don’t want my place smelling like cigarettes… (What the hell is your problem?!)”

“Oh, come on, it will only take a sec!”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you, have a good evening… (Go home!)”

I closed the door and sat down again, now thoroughly in a mood. I turned and looked at the clock.

7:30

I missed half of the show, Lex was bleeding, and I had no idea what happened. My evening at home was effectively ruined.

If someone knocks on your door, and you are busy, for God’s sake, don’t beat around the bush, just do what my dad does. Tell them what you need to tell them without any subtext.

“I don’t want any.”