I have a story to tell, and I didn’t think it fit well in any other thread that I could find, so here you go: a story about two groups vying for the title of “most despicable people in the world”: salesmen… and my family.
Here’s the deal: a few weeks back, my wife and I decided to go to the Home & Garden Show at the Expo Center down the street. We’d always heard good things about it and were looking to improve our landscaping, so we figured it would be an effective way to kill a Friday night. We also knew that practically every booth would have some raffle or sweepstakes to draw people to their sales pitch, and we resolved to sign up for each and every one of them. We figured that the odds of us winning at least one of them would be… probably about 25% or so.
To prepare for this, I created a throwaway email address to catch the endless waves of spam. In retrospect I should have also created a Google Voice number specifically for the task, but oh well.
The show itself was a little disappointing. We learned a few things but most of the vendors were services rather than products, and being a handyman and someone who takes a great deal of pleasure in building stuff myself, I wasn’t really interested in paying anyone to come out and do the work.
Nevertheless, we signed up for pretty much every chance to win a $10K landscaping job or $15K bathroom remodel or whatever. The wave of spam came as expected as well as a bevy of calls to our landline which we almost never answer and I kind of wonder why we still have anyway… but I would peruse or listen to each one to see if we had actually won something. Nada.
A lot of weeks go by and then, the other day, we got a message on the answering machine from some firm or another that I didn’t recognize telling us that we had won the grand prize! I needed to call them and set up when I could come pick it up.
Well, that was exciting! I called the guy and my wife and daughter eagerly waited to hear about what we had won. The fellow on the other end of the phone called me “buddy” a lot and gushed about how wonderful the prize was: four round-trip tickets to pretty much anywhere in the world! All we had to do was drop by and pick them up. Picking up the prize in person meant that it could be counted as a “gift” rather than “winnings”, so I wouldn’t have to count it against my taxes.
That sounded fishy, but I didn’t hang up.
All right, to make a long story slightly shorter: It wasn’t us winning the sweepstakes, it was a timeshare pitch. We had to go in and sit through a “120 minute” presentation and at the end of it we’d be given the tickets.
Ugh. I had never allowed myself to get roped into one of these things before because I know that I am not a spectacularly strong-willed person. I am (or so I still kind of believe) an easy mark for pyramid schemes or sob-stories told by door-to-door salesmen allegedly raising money for college selling magazines. The fact that I’ve never actually joined such a scheme is only because I’ve studiously avoided attending any sales “seminar”, regardless of how tempting the prize is. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’m an iron-willed bastard who has lasted this long through rigid discipline and grit… but that doesn’t sound right.
Moreover, I have some friends and family who have gone to these kind of high-pressure sales things and come out thousands of dollars poorer and in possession of a timeshare that they’ve come to regret.
So I huddled up with my skeptical wife and my ruthlessly cynical younger daughter to decide whether the juice was worth the squeeze in this case. After some deliberation we decided that we would go… but the Youngest would also attend, ready to clout her weak-willed Daddy across the ear if he looked like he was wavering.
The presentation was last night (Friday) and it was at a local “resort” in the middle of Alexandria. Because this is a public board I’ll avoid sharing the company’s name but they are a VERY large conglomerate, who in all fairness have great properties: when the Eldest Daughter used to have to go down to Orlando for the end-of-year volleyball tournaments, we would stay in one of their massive properties because the rooms were enormous for the price and had some great amenities nearby.
But overall, I was disappointed by their pitch. It was disjointed and – here’s where I start to demonstrate why I’m so terrible – seemed to be pitched at a lower social and economic rung from where I believe myself to reside. Their spiel was fine, filled with decent factoids about how little Americans go on vacation and why their monthly-payment plan was a better way to spend the money that (they allege) you’d spend anyway, but did a terrible job of showing how you’d actually use their services.
I had geared myself up to be hugely tempted and had prepared myself with a mess of mental defenses against their pitch and… at the end of it, there was absolutely no desire in me to buy. None whatsoever. Ironically, this pissed me off: far from challenging my willpower and giving me a chance to demonstrate my resolve, this was just going to be an exercise in tedium instead.
One more piece of set-up: this was now three weeks after my wife’s most recent surgery related to her cancer. You can read the gory details in the Having Cancer thread if you’re interested. She’s cancer-free, but there have been a number of complications in the last few years that have resulted in lots of surgeries. The most recent surgery went better than we had hoped but she had suffered through a small infection and an allergic reaction to some of the medical adhesive that they had used in the procedure. Last night she had a heinous headache and had taken one of the prescription Ibuprofen pills they had given her. The headaches are (so far) the only reaction she’s had from losing her ovaries, but the point is she wasn’t feeling too well and it showed.
All right. That was a long preamble. Here’s where the “terrible people” stuff starts.
The hour-long presentation ended and we got handed off to a young (31) man named “Steve” who was a local, having grown up in DC. He was pleasant enough and did his job reasonably well, though again, he kind of failed to tell us what the hell we were supposed to be buying.
But in the meantime, I decided to play what my wife calls “The Cancer Card”. When the poor guy made the mistake of asking about what vacations we had taken recently, I was ready. We had not had a real vacation in almost four years, I revealed… because of THE CANCER.
Now this actually has the advantage of being true. For each of the last three years we’ve had to pay the whole of our $6K deductible all at once to pay for my wife’s cancer treatment or hospitalization, and because it “resets” in the summer, the auto-deduction from my paycheck never has enough time to refill the pre-tax HSA. Each of the past few years I’ve had to put a few thousand on a credit card to pay for the medical bills, and with my wife having to take long-term disability here and there, paying them off has been harder than it should… leading to a reduced vacation fund. Not to mention the fact that a hospitalized or recovering family member means taking a vacation is problematic.
So the answer to poor Steve’s necessary question of “what types of vacations do you take?” was a triple blow to his pitch: cancer-survivor; loss of funds; (presumed) inability to actually get away. I wasn’t proud of “weaponizing” my wife’s illness in a negotiation, but I did it anyway. Because I’m a terrible person.
But Steve had his own ace up his sleeve: A Cancer Card of his own. He excitedly called over his manager (Christian) who had recently recovered from stage-3 testicular cancer. Son of a bitch! This guy had his own story to tell – how he had battled back from three sets of chemo treatments and was out of work for nearly six months. He used his story to emphasize how much the looming promise of a great vacation helped him in his recovery. He pulled out his cellphone and showed us pictures of a skinny, bald version of him in his hospital bed being embraced by his adorable moppet of a daughter.
This pissed me off even further. How dare this fucker weaponize his cancer in a negotiation! What type of a despicable human being does that?
We sat through a tour of the “resort” that we were standing in… which wasn’t too impressive to tell the truth. I would have been much more impressed if we had been touring the Orlando place we had stayed in previously. But I kept on playing the Cancer Card. Every few minutes during the tour, I’d look at my wife with an adoring but terribly concerned expression in my eyes and ask if she needed to sit down, or if she was OK to continue. Hey, she was feeling bad – this was honest concern, dammit! The fact that we had taken the dog on a mile-long walk just a couple hours before is irrelevant… maybe she had gone downhill since!
I played that up later on when we went over to a huge touch-screen display that we could use to examine all the hundreds of potential resorts that the company offered. I insisted that my wife sit down in a chair while the Youngest and I poked at the screen. My wife was doing a great job of looking like someone suffering from an illness… mostly because she had a bad headache. At one point in the tech-show I frowned down at her and asked (in a voice just barely loud enough for those around us to hear): “When did you take your last pill? Has it been long enough to take another?” Gamely, she shook her head and looked like she would burst into tears. Sweet! My wife is also a terrible person!
The show-and-tell ended and the true negotiations began. Annoyingly the “great deal” they put in front of us was a transparently terrible deal. You put some stupid amount of money down (through their credit card that they offered with a lousy interest rate) and then paid another monthly fee forever. A quick math calculation revealed that the amount of money that you would pay in twelve months was far above the value of the seven-day, six-night vacation to wherever they were offering. Basically you’d pay $500 per night for a $200 room… and that’s assuming you could manage to pay your way to get there in the first place and would have the time necessary to do it. Out-of-season was better, but that really just moved the numbers around a bit – if you could take two weeks off out-of-season you could make the money work, but just barely; and of course you’d be taking your vacation out-of-season.
Again, this pissed me off. They were supposed to be TEMPTING me, not insulting my math skills!
Could you afford this wonderful deal, the cancer-surviving Christian asked? I looked over at my wife, with an expression that I hoped looked utterly stricken. She looked back miserably. On the other side of the table, the Youngest narrowed her eyes.
With a sigh, I shook my head. Dammit, I could NOT afford it, I said. Between our mountainous medical bills, we just last month had to get a new car because our venerable mini-van had broken down (“A new, used car,” my wife added ruefully). And to make matters worse, I said with what I hoped was bitter humor in my voice, I am a government contractor like many of the folks in this region… and my current contract is with: The EPA!
Now to be clear, none of this was utterly false, just mostly false. In the vernacular, most of it was “alternative facts”. We had just bought a new, used car. But it’s a practically-new 2016 with like 7,000 miles on it, and the mini-van hadn’t broken down; we got a very decent trade-in on it. And I am a government contractor. But although I’ve done work for the EPA in the past my current contract is with an agency that is in practically no danger of losing funding.
I was really proud of the EPA thing. I actually had just come up with it on the fly. The Youngest played her part perfectly: She blurted out a startled squawk and demanded to know why I hadn’t said anything and wanted to know if I had told the Eldest, who was away at college. Don’t worry honey, I said in a mollifying tone, I haven’t lost my contract yet, and I’m actively looking for another one; we’ll be fine.
But I was temporally stymied: none of the salespersons around me understood what I was impying. None of them had the foggiest idea why working for the EPA right now was risky. Seeing that, I had to walk them down the Trumpian path and explain to them that the vast majority of the EPA’s funding was going away and that contracts would be the first to go. Eventually they got it, but it just annoyed me that I had to work so hard on a lie.
But it was enough. They half-heartedly tried to “talk with their manager” to get more perks added to the terrible deal, but they already knew we couldn’t buy… not a cancer-suffering family that was about to lose their main (only?) source of income.
Their last attempt was with a senior guy who was supposed to fill out a “survey” of how the pitch went, but who was actually there to make the pitch one more time. Thankfully, this guy apparently watched the news occasionally, so he got my EPA thing at once and just gave up. We collected our plane tickets and made our way back down to the car, escorted by another salesguy. I gingerly held my wife’s hand to lend her frail body whatever support I could. You know, because of The Cancer and all.
When we pulled out of the parking garage, my wife and I high-fived and celebrated the fact that we were such accomplished liars. Three cheers for using a disease that kills millions every year to our own advantage!
The one fly in the ointment: The Youngest, in the back seat, leaned forward with tears in her eyes. “Daddy, why didn’t you tell us you are about to lose your job?!”
