|
|
|
hardsell captive
Tuesday, June 17 2003
I went to Bread Alone in Woodstock for a second appointment with a sales lady from a company that sells listings in one of the several brands of Yellow Pages. At my first meeting, she'd tried to interest me in a display ad, having actually clipped out my display ad from the local paper so she could show me how it would look. I'd had to fight my way upstream in the torrent of her sales pitch to find what a simple half-inch listing would cost.
When I walked into Bread Alone this afternoon, I was greeted by a slick young man wearing a tie and one of those vaguely-glossy saturated-blue button-up shirts I remember so well from my days in the dotcom world. Unexpectedly, the sales lady had brought a colleague. My worst fears were confirmed when they proceeded to tag-team with their sales pitch, showing me statistics about the fates of businesses that do not take out display ads in the yellow pages. I explained that I had limited resources and no one to field the flood of phone calls that would come if I had a huge advertisement, but it did no good. After some tens of minutes I began to feel trapped, like there was no way out of my captivity. Indeed, there was no way out, at least none that was polite. I suppose I could have said I had an urgent appointment I needed to get to and cut the sales pitch short, but for some reason the thought never occurred to me. All I wanted to do was sign the paperwork for the modest advertising I was seeking, but to get to that point I had to suffer through their double-barreled propaganda shitstorm. There are few occasions in life where a salespitch is this in your face and unavoidable. Under most circumstances, you get to hit delete, change the channel, or hang up the goddamn phone.
When it's this face to face and personal, all sorts of factors come into play which might be insignificant via television or email. The most important of these is sexual. Now I fully understand why it was always the hottest-looking chicks on the CollegeClub.com salesforce who landed the big contracts. On some primal level, there's something inside every straight man that reduces him to a vulnerable adolescent every time he talks to an attractive young woman. When she is trying to sell him something, he doesn't want to let her down because there's a little voice inside him whispering, "If you do that, you can just forget about fucking her." Mind you, the sales lady at today's meeting was fifty something and not especially attractive. Perhaps at our first meeting she'd thought I was gay and this is why she recruited the assistance of the handsome blue shirted salesman today.
I did some flyering on Main Street in Woodstock after the meeting. It was a beautiful day for being out and about. On the narrow triangular Woodstock village green, a solitary protestor, a middle-aged man who had the deep shiny suntan of a homeless person, held up a cardboard sign reading "Boycott Bread Alone - Stop the Yuppification of Woodstock." You have to be pretty hard-pressed for boycott targets if you're boycotting Bread Alone, a franchise comprised of two or three stores. I guess this protestor was, as they say in some circles, hard core.
[REDACTED]
For dinner, Gretchen and I were treated to one of our typical Hurley Mountain Inn meals by one of our mutual clients. When we arrived he was talking to one of his local friends in the area, a woman named Bev. The two, we soon learned, "go way back." Bev turned out to be one of those people with a proclivity for talking endlessly about "Viennese friends" and various celebrities and politicians she has known. Somehow, though, this did nothing to take away from her entertainment value. Her whole personality - sometimes flirtatious, other times emphatic - was the sort most would describe as "a trip." Anyway, she took one of my business cards before she left and said she'd be talking to me later about building her a website.
Our client is something of a professional kayak enthusiast, and when he saw that one of the cars in the Hurley Mountain Inn parking lot had a highly-esoteric kayak on its roof, he was inflamed with curiosity. Who among the Hurley Mountain Inn clients would have such crafts? They couldn't possibly belong to any of the scores of middle aged men in pastel-blue golf shirts. Nor did it seem likely they belong to the dozen or so dudes sitting at a table near the men's room. (These guys had shaved heads and thickets of tribal tattoos. They looked like they might belong to a Nu Metal chamber orchestra.)
After dinner, Gretchen and I went took Sally on another walk along the east bank of Esopus Creek. The plants in the large cornfields between the creek and US 209 were already over six inches high. At the farthest point in our walk, we encountered a medium-sized Snapping Turtle lounging beside a puddle in the path. His shell was about ten inches across and his tail was maybe eight inches long. Sally didn't know what to make of this large living rock and started barking at it. I figured it was best to just turn around and leave; a turtle of that size has the power to rip off a dog's nose.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?030617 feedback
previous | next |
