Job days

In any big city there are companies that prey on the new, young people that arrive every day with no skills. They advertise jobs that seem too good to be true and they are. I searched through the classifieds in the newspaper and there I found companies advertising to hire people to sell savings plans with the potential for great commissions. I bit. 

There was a training period when you learned the spiel with a notebook that involved a lot of memorization. As I had done a lot of Bible memorization growing up, my memory muscle was strong. The others were impressed at how quickly I picked it up. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily translate into good sales.

Once we finished our training, it was time to hit the sales calls. That consisted of going door to door in council flats during the evenings. Council flats are high-rise apartment buildings built for people with low incomes or on the dole – not necessarily the best place to try to get people to start a savings plan.

It was a game of numbers. The more doors you knocked on, the more would let you in, the more would listen to your pitch, the more would bite – theoretically. My numbers were very, very small. The flats I visited were quite humble. Yet for me, living all alone in one room at the top of a row house, I envied the sense of home and belonging that some of them seemed to evince. It kept me plowing on so that, one day, I might aspire even to this. 

It was hard to get up in the mornings, knowing what I had to face each day. But a Bible passage in Proverbs 6:10 and 11 helped me stay motivated

“A little slumber, a little sleep, a little folding of the hands to rest and poverty will come on you like an armed bandit and scarcity like an armed man.” (NIV)

I would recite that to myself over and over and it would help me get up and going.

We would all meet together in the office in central London before we went out in our groups each day. It was a time of rah-rah speeches and enticing incentives for moving up in the company to keep us motivated. But after a short time I could see that I was not going to make any money. I began to look elsewhere.

Did I learn my lesson? I had yet more life experience to undergo. I signed up for another savings-plan-selling company offering still better incentives. This company’s methods were different. They did street canvassing to get people interested enough to give out their phone numbers. Then the sales people would call them, set up appointments and go to their house to do the pitch. I was one of the sales people.

The office was located just outside central London and it was constantly filled with smoke. Many of the other sales people smoked which was suffocating to me. I was constantly trying to just breath through my mouth so I wouldn’t smell it.

There was a lag time getting paid for the plans you sold at the previous company. They had to make sure the people kept up the payments before you got paid. I kept good records of the ones I had sold. That was easy because there weren’t many. When it was time, I called to see where my money was. I went through each of the people I had sold to. Of course, this person had not kept up the payments and that person had cancelled and so on and so forth. In the end, it didn’t even pay for my transportation costs.

At the new company, it was going a little better but I still wasn’t making near enough to live on. My money was draining fast. Big cities are very costly. My rent was very moderate but transportation costs were expensive. I was getting chewed up by the big city but I didn’t have anywhere to go if I got spit out.

In the Bible, the book of Job was one it seemed I could never get into when I was growing up. I couldn’t understand it at all. It is about a man who had everything and lost it all and though it, learned about God in a much greater way. During my early days in London, Job became my favorite book of the Bible. Although my circumstances were not near as desperate as Job’s, I felt empathy with his despair.