So if you've talked to me in the last week, you know I just got a job with Vector, demonstrating and selling knives for Cutco. It's not what I was planning to do this summer, but it's what happened. It's hard to say how I feel about it: on one hand, I have a lot of thoughts along the lines of "I'm too good to be selling these", but on the other hand it's not like I'm getting any other job offers. Mostly I've just been thinking about it as a regrettable but necessary summer experience.
Today was a giant divisional meeting in Washington. I was pretty negative about going up there, especially when I found out it was not "a little north of Vancouver" as advertised, but in fact in
Centralia, Washington. Quite an investment in terms of time and gas money just to get to a hotel convention center full of lectures with titles like "Excellence: Because You Can".
So yeah, I was pretty unhappy, and I spent the first two hours scheming how to go home early. In the meantime I sat through the sales lectures and listened to people get extremely jazzed up about cutlery. And I started to be a little happier. Maybe it was just brainwashing from all the positive-thinking speeches, or maybe not. To my own surprise, I ended up finding myself at an opportunity to leave early and stayed to hear just one more lecture before ducking away.
While I was sitting there, I took the time to think about the rest of my summer. Barring any other fantastic opportunities, this is it. This is my income, and my future resume. I might as well make the most of it. I realized that I could continue to deride the job as a demeaning experience--but I'd be doing so as a mechanism to distance myself from it, to give me an excuse for not doing well.
And dammit, I'm tired of doing that. There have been so many times in my life when I've given up halfway through something because I couldn't finish it and didn't want to expend the effort to try. I need to get off my high horse and just follow my commitments all the way through. Okay, so great, I've decided to put an effort into my job. Maybe not to the level of dedication that other sales reps are taking it, but at least to some level that I can feel satisfied with.
And that's kinda my new problem now. The number one thing I need to do to actually do really well here, the one that gets reemphasized in our training all the time, is the part that I have the most visceral reaction against: soliciting my friends and family for money. Whenever I try to pitch to someone I know, I feel like I've betrayed their trust. Every time, I have to balance the potentials of immediate financial gain against those of long-term relationship damage. That's not something I'm comfortable with at all.
So that's the dilemma I'm facing right now. A renewed feeling of motivation in my job, coupled with a realization that I'm going to have to change who I am to put that motivation into action. And suddenly things are back to looking negative again.
Also, totally unrelated, I really like the philosophy behind
this brand of captchas. Basically, the words used for the captchas are scans of old books that OCR software has trouble recognizing, so every time you solve a captcha you add a word to a digital version of that book. Neat.
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