Tuesday night I got a phone call. It was my younger brother's birthday (I can't call him my little brother anymore because he's now bigger than me) and we were just about to start singing "Happy Birthday" to him when the phone rang. I wasn't going to answer it but I didn't want to sing so I picked up. On the other end was a man who sounded very accomplished and he told me he had my resume. He said I didn't send it to him but someone forwarded it to him and then he proceeded to begin his trickery.
You see, I've been sending resumes to Alberta at a feverish pace applying for jobs that are quite out of my league but I figure it can't do any harm. So when I got this call I was genuinely excited. He told me that if I got this job I had a choice: I could go to Alberta and start out making sixty-grand a year, OR I could stay in Deer Lake and make sixty-grand a year?! This really caught me off gaurd so I didn't even bother to ask any questions. He said he was hiring for a position with Combined Insurance and told me to be in Corner Brook the next day for an interview.
I get to the interview and the first thing I notice is that this man has gold tooth. I only know a few people in real life with gold teeth. Actually, I can only think of one. It was the grandfather of one of my best friends and this man was one of the most interesting and successful people in my hometown. And now that I think of it the gold tooth may have had lots to do with it. This man actually saw god at one point and I actually believe it, although I'm not sure if I believe in god.
So anyways, the gold-tooth interviewer tells me about the company, the training in Dartmouth, and so on. It all sounds like a really good opportunity until he asks me if I have a criminal record. He said "Richard, if you have anything on your record that might come up we can just talk about it now and get it out of the way." This threw me off a bit. You guys hire criminals? Interesting.
By this point I had passed an aptitude test (with flying colours I might add)and had been told about the two week training in Dartmouth. The plane ticket, hotel and food is all supposedly paid during the time that they are trying to convert you into a "salesperons."
After his shiny speech he tells me that he wants me to go out with a representative the next day to see what they do. He also tells me that only seven people applied for the job and three of them were females. "Between me and you Richard,we usually don't ever hire women" so this means I have a 75% chance of getting this job. Then he tells me about a person from Pasadena (a neighboring town) who made eighty-grand last year and is now a "District Manager." And this "manager" is younger than me. Then he tells me that there is another person from Deer Lake who I know that is applying for the job. This fellow Deer Lakian was out with a representative as we spoke, according to goldtooth.
I didn't ask many questions although by now everything was sounding too good to be true. I left the interview and went home. That evening I got a call from a friend to go out "for a drive" and who happens to be in the car but the other person from Deer Lake who applied for the job (things like this happen all the time in a small town such as mine). He told me that he never went out with the representative that day because they were a bunch of liars. Unlike myself, he asked a lot of questions to the golden man and got the answers he wanted to hear. His main question was "Is this a door-to-door sales job" and the golden man replied "No, although you may have to visit some homes but these people already have accounts with us." He left the meeting in the same spirits as myself thinking that the job seemed a little sketchy.
That night he got a call from his representative and he asked him "Is this a door-to-door sales job?" The representative, who is maybe a semi-honest man, told him it was.
So I learned a few valuable lessons through this whole experience such as the fact that Combined Insurance is a company based on lies and that one must move to Alberta to become rich. It just cannot be done here even if you work for a company owned by Aon which has 27 billions dollars in assets.
I also learned that just because a man has a tooth that is made of gold, we cannot assume he has a heart that is made of gold (although we can probably assume he has a watch and a few other items that are indeed made of gold).
But the most important thing I learned through this event is that you should always sing happy birthday to a sibling and if the phone rings just ignore it. You will be better off in the end.
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