Book #2: Chapter 7 - Tuesday the Salesman

My name is Tuesday, and I am a sales representative.

I sell encyclopedias. More accurately: I attempt to sell encyclopedias, but I'm never successful anymore. I've been working here for five years, and things have just gone farther and farther downhill. When I first started, things looked bad. But management promised that they had a strategy for turning the business around. It turns out that strategy was to pretend that nothing was changing. The fingers-in-ears business strategy. That one's a classic, since it always works.

Our main customers these days are big libraries, luddites, and morons. The libraries keep us in business, because they feel obligated (or maybe they are obligated, I don't know how a goddamned library's funding works) to keep buying our books. The luddites and morons just help me pay the bills with my commission. At least they used to. Now, they tell me their grandson or neighbor kid is going to "download the internet for them" instead.

As you might have guessed, we can't compete with the internet any longer. We update our information once a year. The internet can update every five seconds. And internet sites are - mostly - free. And I've seen some journals that do update that often. But the journals? They're mainly about boyfriends and cutting one's self, or how much someone's job sucks and how they want a new one. I'm aware of the irony of my saying this here. However, our encyclopedias are about more general topics than these things. At least, so far.

And yes, I saw these sites during work hours. I haven't seen any, ahem, competition of ours. At least at work. That's like drinking a Pepsi in the Coke lunch room. Minus the public caning. And the horrible hamburgers. (My half sister used to work at a bottling plant, and I ate in their cafeteria once. Yuck. Or should I say, attempted to eat there once, and went to a TGI Fridays after I left. The drinks were nice and fresh though.)

I use my time during the day browsing news sites and hoping something happens that I can feign interest in. Not to anyone else, just to myself. I need something to make myself believe that I'm accomplishing something during the day. To be honest, I don't know how I still have a job.

In the evenings, I browse job sites; looking for something I could apply for. A new career. Something to really jump start my dreary, dead on arrival life. But I just don't have the kind of experience companies are looking for. Apparently cold selling books over the phone isn't an in-demand skill right now. I can't imagine why not.

Funnily enough, Wikipedia doesn't have a careers section.

I checked. From home.

One day, I actually talked to a guy named "Meat". At least that's what the database said his name was. That was one of the days I pretended to work. I think the CEO was in the office for once. Or something. I don't really remember. I got really fucked up that night.

Anyway, this Meat guy - the guy on the phone said he was that guy, but he said his name was "Hickory". We got cut off just as I was trying to figure out what he was talking about when my coworkers were playing "wrestle each other instead of cold calling people because no one has purchased a set of encyclopedias since the early 90s" and knocked the handset out of my hand. I called him back - not because I thought he would buy, but because his names were the most interesting thing I had seen in our office for a couple of months.

The most interesting thing before that was when a bird got loose in the building and they sent us home, with pay. It took them three days to get it out so I had a mini vacation and watched a bunch of kids' movies. I think the most interesting thing that happened before the bird was somebody brought some day old donuts in. Something like that. It might have even been me. It was too long ago for me to remember.

Later, Troy, the non-knocking the phone out of my hand but still wrestling coworker, broke his arm by getting mosh-pit-rammed into a desk on the other side of mine. It moved the desk a few feet, and took the cable routing channel between us out with it. I was stuck the rest of the week with no phone or internet service. I used the time to read the "E" book. It was really boring. Especially the obviously biased article on encyclopedias. I wanted to read about Entourage, but we don't carry pop culture articles. Too dynamic and frivolous.

Troy was fine. He used his broken arm to sell five full sets over the next few weeks to dumb, sympathetic grandmas.

Motherfucker.

Labels: A Book for Oprah's Book Club