Temp Hiatus/Working for a Scam
Dunno how long it’ll take me to get back to my normal schedule of writing and posting; there’s a lot on my plate at the moment, from sobriety to moving (thank god for good realtors) to extra work to court, so there’re a few hurdles in front of me at the moment.
Since I’m already in court for something else, I’m going to be vague on the regal company that I recently left for greener pastures. (On second thought: no, I’m not, this is Royal Publishing). Those greener pastures, unfortunately, ended up being at first a janitorial job that seemed awesome, then a bottle of absinthe, one of 99 Bananas, and a 1.75L of Blackheart rum to kick off a relapse and sleep through the first few days, so now I’ve got a different backup plan for employment. Real shame, though, the woman who offered me that job was a very kindhearted, compassionate woman and I feel bad I let her down by relapsing for two or three weeks.
Anyway, the first job was in ads. Only job I’ve basically walked off. Still waiting for my stuff to be returned in the mail, but apparently that’s not happening because it’s 2+ weeks.
There are a lot of reasons I left. Let me start at the start.
We were given the chance to dress casually most of the week if we had money taken out of our paycheck for it. The company, allegedly, was very good about giving money to charity. They told us about how charities get this money, come in, do a whole song and dance, and then we give them a jumbo check. Shitty way to do it, they’re a charity, not a dog-and-pony show, you should give quietly and be proud. But it didn’t take me long to suspect that the money from casual day is probably the only money going to charity.
I was reminded a bit of working at Sears: we had these fundraisers where we’d give money to the troops—in the form of Sears gift cards. People were perfectly happy to fork over money for that. But a lot of gift cards go unused. So the money people thought was going to charity was basically turned into instant-profit for the company and then passed out, which the full understanding that statistically, a lot of it would go unused. It was a really shitty maneuver where people gave their money to “the troops,” Sears turned it into a profit margin, and then had the audacity to run a PR campaign on it on top! Shit, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to find a way to write it off as charitable giving, too. This is the kind of shit companies do.
(My opinions on hyper-patriotism, the lionization of the troops, and the dangers will come another time).
So let me return to ads: that money withheld from employee paychecks is what is going to charity. It’s just them not paying their employees their full wages, then taking the money their employees hand back, giving it to charity, and turning it into a PR stunt. Similar subterfuge playbook to Sears.
See, if the company really cared about charity, we’d be hearing about record donations and the number of people we helped. We wouldn’t be hearing about how there are trips to different vacation destinations if you feel X amount of ads!
We wouldn’t be hearing, written down verbatim as the office was told it, “If you’re not glutting yourself on money like a pig, there’s something wrong with you…”
I’ve been told before I don’t have a filter. Clearly I must have a filter of some sort or I would have said this out loud like I wanted to instead of writing it on the front page of Maslow’s book.
(She went on to complain about people who use the bathroom and how she has “never been in a bathroom ten minutes in my life.” I found this to be a much bigger sign there was something wrong with her. Maybe it’s because I’m a bath guy, but I spend at least ten minutes a day in the bathroom with soap and shampoo. On the other hand, if you’re trying to force something out for ten minutes: you’re risking hemmies).
Anyway, the problem is when you speak to the customers.
Many of them are lovely, charming people. And, say, you look at their purchase history and you can see a trend: they bought once, then they started getting hectored with more and more calls and more and more pressure to purchase. Until they just quit altogether. And if you manage to call and they pick up, a lot of times, the story goes something like this: “I kept buying all those ads in [removed] and finally I went to the school and told them how much I’d given—they had no idea who I was, or who [name removed] is. So I give directly to the school now.”
(And those numbers—we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent, which these people think they are giving to schools. They are being fooled as a business. And the school’s getting fucked, too, I was on student government. We struggled to make something like $5-7k for Prom funds. These are the events these business owners think they are giving to in exchange for positive community exposure for their business, NOT some assholes in their thirties and forties in an office lying to them about how they are calling “in regards to” not “on behalf of” the school but otherwise misleading them to believing that we’re raising funds for the school through heavy implication)..
That money that goes missing in the middle that we make them think is going to the school? Trips to vacation destinations! Glut yourself like a pig!
And then, of course, there are the nastier stories: the funeral director who passed away a decade ago and the new owner saying, “No, he would buy, I won’t. You still even ask for him!”
The guy who unloaded, rightfully so, on me about how “this man has been dead for five years. I keep telling you not to call me. You keep calling. Every few weeks. You know why it pisses me off so much? That’s my dad! Every time you call, it brings it all back up.”
“Don’t overthink it,” your managers will say. But then they’ll also be there to instruct you to lie to the customer.
Lemme give you an example of that. Your customer says they will only purchase if they can see a printed proof in advance. Your trainer, Dan, tells you that we don’t do that, but make the sale. You say, “She said only if we can provide this. I won’t lie to her to get the sale.” He tells you again, you ask him exactly what to say. He tells you Pedro, the manager, will come and help you. Pedro comes over. You have an almost word-for-word identical exchange. When you ask him exactly what to say, “Dan’s going to come help you now.” Rinse and repeat. Now it’s Pedro again. Now, time three, Dan comes back, and he gets to listen to you apologize to the customer and tell her we cannot provide that.
Then he asks you why you blew the sale.
(This is also why hint hint, we were firmly instructed to state we were calling “in regards to,” and not “on behalf of.” It is legalese to trick the customer into believing you represent the school without you explicitly stating this and lying to them. This is why managers tell you to lie: it becomes “my word vs. theirs, they’re on the recorded line, not me, and we fired them when they became a problem,” while you were just following their “coaching” as he’s standing in your cubicle telling you what to do.
At Sears, this was the top credit card sign up guy in the store—until an adult kid realized their senior mom had been told to provide her Social Security Number for Shop Your Way Rewards and, wait a second, this isn’t Shop Your Way, your employee just took advantage of my aging mother to try and sign her up for a credit card. He got fired real quick, but the stories of how great he was at getting people to sign up for cards remained—just without his name attached).
Now, I’ve complained about my family and their business a lot. But I do gotta give credit where credit is due: we did not double-bill people. If a lawn was burned out, we would not mow-and-charge anyway. If we were asked to do a job, we would at least do the job and generally we expected ourselves to exceed the customer’s expectations, If we promised something, we delivered and if we were late or faulty, we would internally adjust the price down so customers didn’t have to worry about it. If someone didn’t pay, we’d give them at least a month of free service and ignore it, I don’t think we ever used collections even. One time, my dad dug up a woman’s daughter because some roofers took advantage of her mom and were bragging about it. He made sure they didn’t get to double-charge the senior woman. By, like, six, I was trained to answer, “Hello, may I help you?” and “May I ask who is calling?” instead of “who is this?”
Things like, “Call three times a day,” and, “If they wanted off our list, they’d find a way to contact the national Do-Not-Call List,” do not a good customer experience make. It drives away customers, one by one, and it drives the business into a bad place as people begin to catch on to the reality of what is happening. They’re being milked, drained, and moved on from. Any suggestions on how to tailor to the customers needs and wants, however, is “overthinking” and goes right to the circular file. Same with the notes left on your computer that allegedly are being checked by management (they aren’t—at least, not the important stuff).
Do you really think that hearing the same spiel over and over and over again is making people more likely to buy or more pissed off?
Last Friday and Saturday, I counted over a dozen calls from the same scam company trying to sell me some bullshit stock over the phone, sounded like. Kept interrupting my music while I was trying, and failing, to put in a new battery (look, I’m an idiot, yes, I ended up having to bring it to a shop).
Arguably the worst part? Took me like half an hour to be like, “Huh. There seems to be part of the positive terminal missing… and batteries don’t come with anything attached… shit!” Who else could be this brick-humping stupid?
No, you’re not going to be more likely to buy. Neither were the people we were pestering day after day. There’s a reason some of them told us with relief that they’d been bought out by a corporate entity and gleefully gave the number to an automated system that would take forever to navigate. I can’t blame them, I’d be pretty happy to do this to an annoying salesman, too.
Plus, consider my case: if this is such a good investment, why am I being called this many times and begged to sign up? A truly good investment would already have been bought up, not being repeatedly pitched to me on the phone. By the time you hear about a company to invest in, chances are it’s too late and you’re buying in on hype, waiting for the crash to come without realizing it. Or, like the guys calling me, you just bought the investment equivalent of a time share.
Returning to the job I left: I also try to like the people around me. I thought the guys on either side of me seemed pretty cool, to be honest. Until they started swapping stories about ducking child support, abusing their exes, and threatening them into silence if they went to court again about the unpaid child support. Big tough “men,” I just think they’re fuckin’ deadbeat losers and it’d be funny if wage garnishment caught up to them faster.
After leaving, I took a look through the company’s BBB complaints and, unsurprisingly, the customer complaints mirror pretty much exactly what I warned about. But whether it was computer notes or ones I wrote on pieces of paper and gave to people in charge, it just got crumpled and tossed and “stop overthinking.”
Anyway, I suppose ethics is what I’d point to for why I left that place; someone else might disagree, that’s cool too. I got a handshake deal that we weren’t doing stuff like—well, exactly what we were doing. Couldn’t do it, even if I could use the cash.