The names of the company I worked for and the people I worked with have been changed

This is how it played out, more or less.

For about three and a half weeks, I sold cable, internet and home-phone door to door. I had just gotten back from abroad, ready to counterbalance the irresponsibility I had during the past five months of country hopping, stout drinking and debauchery having with some calculated, nose-to-the-grind (stone?) work. My mind and body have gone without serious function for too long.

As an accounting major, I was looking for something that worked me mentally more than physically, as most of my prior jobs were blue-collared, red-necked affairs; the kinds of things you did in the hot sun and threw bodies at until the job was done. But not this summer. No, sir.

Thing was, I didn’t come back with a job lined up. Most people my age, on my path in college, still wait a year to intern somewhere, but I desperately wanted to get a jump start on the whole thing. I scoured the internet for a long while, realized most positions got filled up back in February, felt dejected, kept looking, then finally found one—“Marketing & Communications Internship”—that struck my fancy and had an opening.

Hmm. Not exactly actuarial, but analytical nonetheless, right? I’d get to develop marketing strategies from the ground up, do demographic and product research—seemed like a legitimate thing!

So, I went ahead and applied, and shortly thereafter got called in for an interview in Cheektowaga, all the way across the state. No matter. Rent’s cheap out there and I’d have a new city to stomp around in. I loaded up my car and headed West, through the Catskills, the marshlands and brackish woods, a four-and-a-half hour trip that I managed to shave an hour off of by going ninety the whole way. At one point I saw a state trooper trailing behind me, and my heart leapt and froze on the beat, but the state trooper just passed right by me, lights off, going about 45 mph over the speed limit himself.

I went to the address I was given and pulled in front of a two-story apartment building, one side occupied by Liberty Tax, and the other housing the skeletal remains of an abandoned Chinese restaurant. I gave the company a call and the secretary on the other end said, “Yeah, come on up! No, no, we don’t have a sign. Yes, you’re at the right place. Yes, Columbia Management Group.”

Huh.

I went on up to the second floor and saw the woman I was just speaking to—Katy, barely in her thirties, sitting behind the desk in the waiting room. She gave me a warm smile and put a call in to Sam, the manager, to come fetch me. I heard a cacophony of voices coming from another room. Katy saw how I was peering out the door toward the noise and said, “They’re practicing their lines.”

About half an hour passed. There was a flatscreen TV in the waiting room that was tuned to Lebron James saying, “damn cameras,” over and over again. A bunch of dopey looking guys my age or older drifted in and out of the room. One of them stopped and told Katy, “I hope I get this job,” then, as an objection to his hopes, he dropped his suitcase and all his papers, almost like the universe forced it upon him as a sign of impending misfortune. Soon after, a tree trunk of a man walked in, wearing a navy-blue suit, white shirt and red tie that evoked flag colors. Before I even registered his occupation of the room, he said, “Hey, buddy, follow me,” and walked out.

I looked at Katy, and all she said was, “Sam.”

I followed Sam down the hall and into his office, where behind his desk was a large map of the 48 continental states with thumb tacks pushed in all over, but especially concentrated in the mid-Atlantic states. A statue of Atlas stood behind his computer monitor. Two leather chairs flanked his desk, and I went and sat in one of them. There was something vaguely analogous about this office, but I couldn’t pin it down.

Sam asked me several questions about my education, my work history, and my experience working with people. Sure I do. Marketing? Yeah, IMC systems, brand wheels, direct and indirect marketing, but at this point he wasn’t really paying attention and was just looking at something on his computer screen. I cut my sentence short. Then he asked me what the coolest thing I can do is.

No thought: “I can do a flying side kick across twenty feet.”

Is that even possible? Could I ever at any point in my life do that? Tae Kwon Do you once did, but skilled you are no longer.

But it impressed him nonetheless. Phew. That door’s opened, walked through and shut. He asked me a few more questions in a regionally rapid sort of way with a deeply ingrained snarky inflection. He told me he’s from South Jersey and left it there, implicating that any preconceived notions I had about New Jersey were true and accurate. Then he explained the job to me; I would market primarily ____ to “clients” face-to-face, while doing some office work as well, including major specific projects and some accounting work.

“That sounds great to me.”

“Awesome. Welcome to the team.”

I headed back to Albany and returned a week later, having leased out a room in a retired woman’s house in Amherst, the inside of which looked like one of those abandoned Delray homes with the floors ripped out, plaster everywhere, and paint coming off the walls in visible flakes. Oh well, I guess I’m getting what I pay for ($625/month), plus the $400 deposit, so whatever works. She was a sweet Italian woman, though. She said, “I want to learn things from you,” as she was taking my money (cash). There were two people living on the second floor, she explained, but I never found a staircase leading up, so it was almost like there were ghosts walking around and turning the lights on and off above my head every night.

I started my job the next day, so I moved my things in and went to sleep early. The next morning, I exited my room into the hallway and saw a shadowy figure darting from the bathroom, across my eye line, into the kitchen. A roundish shape, almost troll- or goblin-like. I looked into the kitchen, and in the corner, shielding herself with her blouse, was the woman, naked, pleading, “Don’t look at me!” I just turned around and went back to my room. What a way to set the tone for the rest of our acquaintance.

I went about the house that morning as if she wasn’t even there and headed off to work. My drive in was backgrounded completely by pylons, burned out Bethlehem Steel factories, barren streets that existed in a vacuum and 50-year-old strip malls with nail salons and Greek restaurants. It truly was the rust belt, that grey area between the Northeast and Midwest. It had that integral quality that spurs the imagination. Spiritually, I guess, the rust belt is the new desert. Both are dead. Both are empty. Both suggest movement and pulses and tectonic plates of a million years ago.

Its heart has stopped beating, and thus the whole universe and the potential for nonexistence opened up. “Fall of the Roman Empire,” I thought. Dead earth. The deadness of the landscape makes them transcendent. Ghosts reside in the canyons as they do the old craftsman homes I passed on the way to work. Each house is a desert within itself. Gutted, support beams, wooden skeletons, stained mattresses, shattered glass, and urban prairies all around. A city being reclaimed. A place where humanity is losing influence over its environment.

But I digress.

This work morning played out how pretty much every other morning did. First, I started out by learning and practicing the basic intro and short story (“Hey, how ya doin’? I’ll be quick for you: my name’s Aidan, and I’m just out here with ___…”), writing it on the whiteboard and shouting it to a partner, along with the twenty-five other voices shouting over everyone else, while one of the same seven songs that played from an Amazon Echo every morning blasted. Mouths moving, reflected hand gestures, heads on suits nodding up and down; everyone acted like bobbleheads on a dashboard. Everyone looked too young for the suits they wore. It took only a few minutes for the words I was saying to lose all meaning; just a series of vowels and constants now. My suspicions were growing.

Next, we all circled up and listened to the top sellers of the prior day explain what was “working for them”: often it was Adam, who kept emphasizing the importance of “pushing the needle forward”—essentially going for the close, “no” be damned—and the value of simply walking faster from house to house. Other times, it was Dominick, a former marine (“The army’s alright, the navy are douchebags, and the air force are just a bunch of pussies”); Brittany, the eldest of all of us and who was gunning for a promotion so she could open up her own office in Staten Island; Bam, who chocked it up to “turning on his southern charm,” shining us the whitest teeth you’ve ever seen; or Patrick, who said he’s “living the dream” every day (puh-lease) and always quoted “the great philosopher” Nas: “I know I can/Be what I wanna be/If I work hard at it/I’ll be where I wanna be.” Such were the typical high rollers of the office.

I realized that first day: Oh my God, this is just door-to-door sales.

Then Sam came up and gave his daily motivational speech, speaking in that quick rat-a-tat cymbal way that he did. Often, he used words like “goals” and “motivation,” which just sounded like buzzwords the way he used them, devoid of substance. A lot of the time he used football metaphors that went right over my head. There was a charisma that he possessed that kept most everyone engaged, and maybe even some of his words were resonating with people, like Thomas, who could never seem to stop nodding his head.

But for me, I’ve heard this kind of talk before; I call it “vague speak”—saying something that sounds inspirational and meaningful but is just open enough to pertain to pretty much anything, rather than anything specific. Corporate jargon that casts the widest net for meaning. It’s what companies use to hide fraudulent activities. Color me unmoved.

After that, we broke up into our car rides—four or five of us who would cram into somebody’s early 2000s Toyota or Honda, one-to-two hubcaps appropriately missing—and go over our goals (there it is again) for the day. We called our car ride “Dynasty,” and for the first week and a half, it consisted of me, Adam, Patrick, Amir (between semesters at Buff State) and on-and-off Kyle, a transsexual with whom I kept mixing up what pronoun he wanted me to use.

Finally, we got called back for one more office meet, with Sam speaking again, usually reiterating the kinds of deals and promotions we could use, often comparing them to using bullets in a gun. “Apply urgency,” he said. “Go for the kill,” he said. “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take,” and that sort of thing. He’d also write out so many acronyms that it’d make your head spin. But he always ended it with, “Alright, I need all the leaders in my office, and everyone else—get promoted,” then lead all the leaders (everyone but me and three others) into his office for a quiet discussion while the rest of us changed into field clothes: khakis, polo, and tablet in a satchel. Us newcomers had to wait for all the leaders to change into their respective clothes before we could head out.

Amir was gracious enough to drive us to the field in his RAV4 most days, but before that everyone went over to the local gas station to get some grub. Here, I was able to learn a little more about everyone in the office. A good many of them weren’t college graduates, reasoning that it’s a waste of time and money (which is reasonable), or that school just “isn’t for them” (which…alright); everyone wanted to be their own business owner, but when I asked, “what in?” many of them just shrugged and said, “something in finance, or something.”

A lot of the guys reminisced about their all-star status back in high school when they were quarterbacks and linebackers, something I obviously couldn’t relate to. My sense was that this job was the in-between stage for some bigger and better thing for most of them. I couldn’t blame them—they were all aiming for something more in life, but what that was they were still trying to figure out.

When 1:30ish rolled around, we headed off to the field. On the way, every day, we played the celebrity game, where one person said the first and last name of a celebrity/historical figure/etc., and the next person (clockwise) said a person whose first name starts with the first letter of the last person’s last name (Phil Collins—Chris Hemsworth—and so on). This was probably the most effective way I was able to see into the characters of my co-workers. Adam dropped pro-wrestlers on a dime, Patrick utilized baseball players and east coast rappers, Amir shouted out famous billionaires and CEOs, and I typically defaulted to classic rock artists and dead white writers.

Adam typically won (“Ooh, tragic, Patrick, you lost again), but no matter how predictable the outcome might have been, these games served as a good way to kill time.

Here’s where our actual job began: At around two, we were all dropped off in our respective neighborhoods, where we followed a lead sheet we’d been given, which could contain anywhere from 40 to 120 houses, and hit each one three times for the next seven hours. During most of my training period, I was paired up with Adam, who would show me the ropes and how to effectively close a sale.

We went from house to house, each time Adam bellowing his signature “He-llo, he-LLO,” before he rang the doorbell, which didn’t take long to become grating. Normally, half the houses we went to didn’t have anyone to occupy them; either they were not home, or they knew what our deal was and didn’t want to answer the door.

Concerning the homeowners that did answer, about 75% of them would open the door just for the satisfaction of saying “no” to our faces and shutting it on us. Another 15% would hear us out through our introductions, bland faced, all the while suspicious, but then shake their heads and roll their eyes when we asked them, “But I’m assuming you’re using (insert cable provider), right?” because then they knew we were trying to sell them something. It’s at this point they usually closed the door on us, sometimes with a “Stop coming to my house” shouted at us as a cherry on top.

Now we’re down to 10%. For 7.5% of them, we’d get to the point where we create a package for them on our tablets, give them the price, create value in that package, in ourselves, (a salesman’s a salesman), and finally go for the throat by figuring out an installation date for them. But these were the sneaky ones; they bailed out at the last minute, having their own nonspecific reservations like, “I gotta sit on it,” or, “I have to talk to my wife/husband,” or just, “I don’t know.” We’d try to answer any questions they might have about contracts, features, or what even a router is, but their complacency was set in stone. There was no budging them; they were immovable objects. At that point, we had to get out of there and move on to the next house, with only twenty minutes of wasted presentation to show for it.

That last 2.5% were the ones you close, the ones who you’ve persuaded, or the ones who had their minds made up before you even knocked on their door. They were the sweet nectar of the field. You might only find one or two, or likely none, of these people on a given day. They were a rare, evasive species. There’s a euphoric feeling you get when you find one of them and hit that CONFIRM ORDER button. You even felt like your job was worth something when you made a sale.

But how you got them was often dirty business.

See, I believe there’s an appropriate line in door-to-door sales that can ensure that, if you don’t cross it, everyone can walk away happy. But there were tactics that were encouraged that were used to exploit people’s impulsiveness by giving them hardly any time to think about their decisions and frame questions so they require a “yes” answer, so the potential buyer is manipulated and strung along all the way to the end of the closing. Apply urgency where there isn’t any. Say, “I’ve been talking to your neighbors,” when in reality they’ve all closed the door on you. Create value where none might exist. Say that you’re the account manager of the area, even though you totally aren’t. The line I thought was there was too far off from the line that the company maintained.

These might seem like white, immaterial lies, but when repeated so many times, they begin to spin your moral compass out of whack. My feelings about these would fluctuate throughout the day, and during times when I would grow comfortable saying them, I would also see the people I talk to not as homeowners who deserve respect and personal space, but as slabs of meat with wallets just waiting to be opened. Targets that I was aiming down my sights at. Jesus. These moments were like waves that always receded back into the surf, and every time the tide pulled back, I would feel dirty to the core and my tongue would feel like it was coated in gravel.

The thing that really got to me was utilizing what the office called the AIR principle—Agree, Ignore, Resume. If the homeowner had a concern or complaint, or just flat out said, “no” to you, you said something like, “Oh, yeah, I totally understand,” then just continued with the pitch.

This baffled me. I believe there’s a fair way to play the game: I can go up to their house, state my case and what I’m doing here, and if the homeowner says they’re not interested, then I leave. It’s not intrusive, there are no low-blows about it. But every time we continued with the pitch after they expressed disinterest, their mouths would shrink, and their expressions would shift from patience or sincere geniality to a deep chested disdain they’ve been harboring all day, now directed squarely at you. Simply put, they got pissed.

And understandably so. If someone acknowledged the fact that no-means-no, then threw that to the wind, I’d want to slam the door so hard on them it falls off its hinges. But such was protocol. I often asked Adam if doing that sort of thing was, putting it lightly, “kind of disrespectful,” but he would usually just roll his shoulders and say, “Just gotta take the shot,” then lead me on to the next house.

There was one instance that really shook me when Adam used the AIR principle on this one woman: She stopped him dead in his tracks and said, “Well, if you understand, then think about it,” and slammed the door. I was shaking because she had a point. But we just moved to the next house. His entire body seemed to reset with each house. He had the same exact inflection with each of his pitches. He seemed like a wax figurine come to life; something I had to take a few steps away from every time he started talking.

But during that time, I tried to reconcile the situation I was in; this is my job, and if this is what I have to do, then I’ll do it. Adam and I went on a three-to-one system; after every three presentations, I would conduct my own presentation to a homeowner. I tried to mix up my pitch to sound natural and fluid, but this often resulted in me stumbling over words and the door being shut on me. I had no problem with the idea of speaking to total strangers, but it was the fact that there was a fine line between politeness and intrusiveness I didn’t want to cross.

I always hesitated after the homeowner’s first no, not wanting to see that hospitable smile tighten into something more disastrous, but I could feel Adam’s eyes piercing the back of my head as he watched me from a few paces away, so I would say, “I totally understand,” then…find myself continuing, against my better judgment. The lips would disappear into that tight hole where the mouth used to be, and yep, the door would shut.

“Just gotta take the shot,” he’d say again.

I spent that first week and a half with Adam traversing the overwhelmingly Caucasian, Levittown-type suburbs of Aurora. There were countless Buffalo Bill flags and sunny welcome matts that did not match the personality of the homeowner. There, most people were uptight and hellbent on maintaining the present quo of their insular afterwork lives. They were cold and ever judgmental. Can’t blame ‘em, though. There was quite a bit of money swimming around these neighborhoods, and I’m sure a lot of nerves were shot to earn it, so the last thing anybody there wanted to do was talk to some conniving salesman trying to sell them cable.

It got me thinking, though, walking those streets, if I ever want to earn that kind of money and buy a house like theirs. Living that way seemed to kill the momentum in so many of those people. Security at the expense of freedom, a silent pleading of, “Please, don’t touch anything!” because they don’t want your fingerprints smudging their property. Shit, there’s another balance to be had that seemed to have tipped too far to one side. In a peculiar sort of way, I felt sorry for them.

Throughout the day, my body would grow stiffer from the constant movement and my walk cycle would morph from the easy and controlled flow I usually have to the stilted arms-out, tough guy walk Tom Hardy has in most of his movies. It wouldn’t be because I had this reinvigorated sense of confidence that I walked that way, it was just the delirium and exhaustion had set in, had caused my muscles to tighten up and force me to walk like a scarecrow.

We’d all get picked up around eight (closer to nine, in reality) and taken back to the office, where we debriefed individually with Sam. Nothing of great value was ever said during one of these meanings. Whatever I said, I said for the sake of saying it, and not because any of it actually needed to be said. Always something that conveyed the same message: “I know what I need to improve, and I’ll improve upon it.” This always satisfied Sam, who never paid much attention to what I said anyway, so he’d give me a fist bump and send me on my way. I usually got home around 10:00 or 10:30, walking into the house to see the land lady asleep on her unmade mattress in front of the TV, tuned to the Price is Right or Crimewatch. Always the same electric blue from the screen. I often went straight to bed without brushing my teeth.

The nature of the job was sucking everything out of me.

One night, when I parked the car in front of the house I was staying in, the car alarm suddenly started going off and the hazard lights flashed on and off. I fumbled around to try and turn everything off, but it kept on ripping open the night silence for a full 30 seconds. When my car finally shut itself off, I was not shocked or embarrassed: no, I had one thought—“I hope that woke the bitch up. I hope that woke everyone up.”

By the end of the week, I had gotten noticeably better at my presentations, and my skin had grown significantly thicker. I was close to impervious to the word “no.” But there still remained my reservations about the go-for-the-kill mentality we were supposed to have, and the tactics used to enforce it. I still had my line, and I still refused to cross it. But Adam said I was definitely improving, and that he was actually really proud of me.

The following week, Adam left our car ride and I was paired up with Patrick. For four days, we worked the streets of East Buffalo—high concentrations of minorities, potholes, liquor stores and collapsed buildings. While Adam kept his pitch moderately professional and even-keeled, Patrick was completely off the leash, just shouting “yerp!” while walking down the street or donning Italian accents in front of poor Hispanic or African American families. But if he was able to slide into the pitch after initially breaking down the social barriers, get the homeowners sitting in a chair or leaning against a railing, Patrick would adopt that (how do I put this?) double-negative AAVE voice to close the gap, he being African American himself. It was so strange to see him just turn that on and off.

This put me at a bit of a disadvantage. I’ll be frank about this; I had never felt so tangibly white in my life. I found myself stepping on eggshells with my words, having no idea what was appropriate and what wasn’t, nor whether that kind of caution was warranted in the first place. A few people took one look at Patrick, and then at me and asked, “Who’s he?” with the more than obvious implication that I should just scamper away and hide in the gutter. These few instances, however, were outliers to how the rest of the population treated us.

But there was one misconception people had about both me and Patrick—about half of everyone thought we were Jehovah Witnesses, there to proselytize.

There were a lot of people already sitting on their porch steps or hanging out of windows, talking to their neighbors when we would walk up. They’d take one look at us and say, “No, nuh-uh, hun, if it’s Bibles you boys are sellin’, we don’t want any,” but Patrick would slide right past that and say, “Don’t worry, that’s just our side hustle,” and move right along. Yet the majority—or at least a noticeable minority—were religious, even though they didn’t want to hear any of that sort of thing from us. When we moved into our presentations, they would start talking about churches and blasphemy in Jesus’ name. “Mr. Walker, down the street,” one woman said, “that’s a good Christian right there. Oooh, lawd!”

There was one instance where I was up to bat, standing ten feet away from a door I had already wrung and Patrick standing another ten feet away from me, to see what I was made of. A towering woman, vaguely ovalish and about six feet tall, pushed the door open and stood with one leg on the porch. For whatever reason, I believed her to be a heavy built 17- or 18-year-old, by the lack of any accentuated lines suggesting shape of her figure, so I did what we were told to do when we thought we were talking to a child: ask if this is their home or if they are in charge of the bill. Henceforth, I did just that:

“Hello. Is this your house or your parents’ house?”

Okay, so I have never seen a human’s eyes bug out quite the way hers did. Her mouth gaped a little bit—not to a cartoonish extent, but enough to denote raw shock. She leaned out of her door farther, to see if such a fool could really exist. Her cheeks fired up. She was stuck on the outbreath like I had just punched her in the gut.

When she found her voice, she said, stone cold, “Um, does it matter?”

I had realized what I had done. I was suddenly alone in an ocean full of sharks with no shore in sight. My throat was clogged. The airwaves in my head just weren’t coming in clearly.

“Uh…uh…”

That’s when Patrick swooped in and threw me a life raft. “Don’t beat him too seriously,” he said. “It’s his first day training.” He carried on the pitch with the woman, who quickly warmed up to him, but only because she was comparing him to me, a pretty low bar to hurdle. I destroyed the more-than-a-week I’ve been working this job and was back to my “first day.” I couldn’t tighten any of my muscles. I felt stale. I was so embarrassed and shattered in every possible sense.

We didn’t get the sale. After we left and were a few houses down, Patrick bent over, fell to his knees, and started howling. It overtook him. I stood above him, watching him almost in the fetal position on the dug up concrete road, laughing at my blunder. He couldn’t get a full sentence out: “You-…You-…Holy shit!” and would continue laughing. Kids on bicycles were stopped on the sidewalk looking at us.

“What time is it?” I asked, meant only as a rhetorical question. “Is the day over yet?”

No response. Too much howling.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” I asked flatly.

“That’s the…Holy shit!…”

“Oh yeah? How old do you think she was?”

“Dude, she was, like, forty-eight.”

It took him a few minutes to recover, capping it with, “Aidan, I love you, man,” before we continued on. If Patrick wasn’t laughing or reminding me about my little mishap with that woman, he would mutter old jive vernacular that he kept hoping people would say: “Jive turkey…Jazz cigarettes…Yo, hep cat…Can you dig it…”

It was easy to tell there was a lot of pain in those neighborhoods—pain from poverty, pain from shootings and burglaries, pain from being left in the dust. But from that pain sprouted a sense of community that I hadn’t quite seen before.

Every neighbor on every block knew each other. People smiled and chatted away the day without any ulterior motive. The level of thrift and altruism I saw in this part of Buffalo was incredible. Unlike in Aurora, there was virtually no money invested in these neighborhoods, so people simply toughened up and made do with what they had. And nobody honestly gave a shit about what we were selling; they just wanted to talk, learn a little bit about us and maybe teach us a little bit about themselves.

There was one family who was hosting a graduation BBQ in their backyard, and even though they were actually extremely pissed off at ___ and wanted nothing to do with them, they invited us back for burgers, hot dogs, and to generally shoot the shit. We filled our stomachs and wanted to stay all evening, but the sad reality was we needed to move onto the next house. They understood—everyone understood—the nature of the down-and-out job that we had because everyone there has had that job at one point or another. Or sadder yet, still had that job. “We know the game,” the father of that house said, “and we know you gotta play it.”

There were some other interesting moments had in East Buffalo. A high number of houses in this area turned out to be vacant, but we always had to walk right up to them before we knew for sure. We were walking up to one of them, and out from a Burger King across the street ran this gangly white guy screaming, “Don’t go to that house, boy! That’s the devil’s house! I seen ‘im! I seen ‘im!” He stood on the sidewalk, watching us for a moment, then scurried back inside and kept looking at us through the window, with his flattened hand providing shade across his brow. That house turned out to contain an electronic band in the middle of the producing something—nice guys, but they weren’t interested.

On another occasion, we were in the projects and were invited into this one gym teacher’s house. While we were creating the package for him, he was talking to us about smoking weed and the different scents he uses around the house, even showing us his collection. “It’s for my anxiety,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. You in a place like this, you gotta keep sane somehow.” Through conversation, I learned this guy was partial to Wu-Tang Clan, which put me in a good mood. He bought a package and told us to have a good day, but to “stay out of this place if you got the choice to.”

On that same day, not twenty minutes later, a black minivan rounded a corner and stopped right beside us. The driver was already leaning out of the window, and he shouted right at us, “Hey, you the cable guys!?”

“I mean, we sell it,” Patrick said.

“Oh, thank God ya’ll here.” He then told us to swing by 59 Williams Street (or whatever it was) in ten minutes, then peeled off. Patrick and I traded looks, both of us pondering the fortuity of things just landing in your lap. It was nearing the end of our day, so we set out for that address immediately—turned on to Williams Street, there’s 49, 53…61? Where’s 59? I asked Patrick, “Did you hear 159?” and he said, “No, did you?” We were both idling in thought. Did he even say Williams Street? Yes, he did, because there’s no other street around here that has a name sounding like “Williams.” We scoured the projects for half an hour for this house that didn’t even exist, expensing all the time we had left of that day before we were picked up.

So to recap: I’m about a week and a half into my job. Every speech I hear in the office are repeats. The songs playing on the Echo have the same effect on my ears as acupuncture needles. My contribution to the city appears to be nonexistent. I feel all-in-all like a sham.

Then Sam brought me into his office and asked me if I’m “ready,” like I was about to jump out of an airplane.

“I think I am.”

“You know you are.” He slid me a new ID badge and leaned back in his chair. “You’re on your own now. Lone wolf. What are you thinking?”

“I think,”—I’m sensing imminent disaster—“it should be fun.” Then, against myself, “I’m excited.”

“Good. You’ll be making full commission now. It’s summer, everybody’s impulsive. Remember: it’s a good time to be a salesman.”

I nodded and walked out. There was poison in my blood. I tried to make it all make sense. I felt out of touch, out of line, out of sync. It wasn’t right what I was doing there. But I figured that maybe, on my own, I could play the game the right way and still make some closes. None of this dirty business they’ve got going around here. I’ll be a straight shooter, I thought, totally transparent and lacking any bullshit. This gave me a sliver of something just barely resembling hope. But still, walking out of the building, while my mind tried to harmonize my vision of the coming weeks, my heartbeat to a distinct rhythm: “Dir-ty…Dir-ty…Dir-ty…”

Continue reading The Cable Guy: The Grind of Door-to-Door Sales (Part II)