2003-09-25 - 1:56 a.m.
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Dirty Little Devils
"If you want to test a man's character, give him power." - Abraham Lincoln
It has become apparent to me in the last month or so that there is precious little out there in terms of extremely good and wholesome jobs. There are, however, a ton of jobs out there. Don't let anyone fool you and say to you that there are no jobs to be had anywhere and that times are tough and that there is little out there period. That is absolute malarky. There are a ton of jobs out there, ready for the taking, ready to be filled and ready for people to fill them. Some of these jobs include High-Level Executives, Managers, Advisors and the like, as well as Janitor, Handyman, Security Guard and Jizz Mopper. With the former, a huge amount of experience as well as training and certification is necessary to perform the functions of the job, as it is highly unlikely a company in need of a High-Level Executive is going to hire someone who was last week applying for the job of Janitor, unless that Janitor happens to have a MBA or a Doctorate of Business or his father owns the company. These jobs are always out there, as the Highest Management never ever ever changes except in cases of death and scandal, which is really death but in business terms. The Highest Management needs the pit of lackeys that are within their reach. They do not want to, say, interact with their grunts, the people mopping floors and cleaning windows and filing papers and making them all the money they stuff their mattresses with. So, they grow their arms longer by putting on these Upper Management attachments - kind of like the Go-Go-Gadget Arms of Business that can reach from the top of the perch and throw out the garbage at the bottom for them, which is the grunts. These arms, your Executives and Lower Executives and so on down to Regional Supervisors and Locational Directors or Managers, pick up the dirty laundry of the company, the parts (humans) that are quite frankly fucking up the well oiled dollar printing machine of business. IF the Highest Management see that their dollar printer companies are not printing enough money, they send their wrath down the long line of business, so that each level is progressively harder on the level below it until someone either gets fired or quits. Since there is never enough money, this happens constantly until there is absolutely no money and the party is over. To be able to whip a pile of meat doing work for you into a frenzy, you need to have been taken from that pile of meat and made into a tasty hamburger of Executive material (through schooling and experience and so on). Then you get put in a higher level until you scratch your way up and cling to the bottom of the shoes of the highest level and attempt to climb up their legs in the hopes you can take them out and be them before you die or are taken out by any number of factors, including backstabbing by the sea of people around you doing the same thing you are or you die before they do. A lot of this process is simply skipped for no other reason than you popped out of the right woman and her husband was one of those highest up or at least high enough to avoid much of the hamburger process.
The latter of the two job types, the Janitors and Jizz Moppers and such, are a very interesting bunch because there are a miriad of reasons for their insisting on doing that job. Some simply don't want high responsibility jobs and prefer to just hammer out a simple living that will keep them alive and that's about it. Some actually find solace in the profession, because it allows them certain freedoms that higher jobs do not, such as being able to smoke pot and not have to take a piss test as well as not worrying about someone trying to stab them in the back to take over their Janitor job. Some people are very lazy and this was all that was left for them after they found that they couldn't cut it any other way and they stopped caring and just bowed their heads down and now they slave away incessantly, never looking skywards at what's above them and never bothering to wonder why they're doing what they are doing. Whatever the reason, however, there is one constant and it is that these jobs are terrible and if there was no pay involved, your floors would be filthy, your shit would sit in an empty toilet bowl, your mail would not be delivered and nothing would be stocked on any shelf you see in any store. There is little upward mobility involved in these jobs. Some might be able to do the "mailboy to VP" business masturbation story that everyone who dreams big and starts small has but few ever take those Cinderella steps and get to sit in a swivel chair behind a huge desk and ask people to clean out their desks. You might get to be a Manager by the time your kids are fighting for the same job you took on years ago, maybe move up to Supervisor and maybe even get to be a somewhat respected part of the company, showing your loyalty and dexterity to the biz and given a nice pension at the end of it all so that you can eke out a life until you don't live anymore. It is funny to mention that most pensions don't even come close to a yearly income of Highest Management - in fact, the amount of money some people spend in their entire lives may never come to even half of what other people make in a month. But, it's enough to make people scramble for retirement funds and the like, which is about all you can hope for when you have a job that peaks just below the lowest important job there is.
I have learned all this through the process of throwing myself at the mercy of the working world and shouting out loud that I am here to be fodder for their machines, another gear to their corporations, another pound of meat for the pile. And I have found that there is no need for me.
Except for the devils.
A while ago, I went on a job interview with Adforce America and it was disasterous, showing me the dirty side of sales. A Dark Side of the Dollar, if you will. I went on and on at length about that day in a post, so I don't feel the need to do that again. IF you want to hear all about it, you can go look for it. It is probably only 6 or 7 back. Just this week, after being in the dark for a whole month as I both toiled away on my own work and then squandered the rest of my time on my personal pursuits
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which include seeing Erin a bunch and going out to shows and hanging out with friends. All of these things are important to a person. You need love in your life and if you have a relationship, you need to devote time to your loved one. You need entertainment and friendships, because without them, all you're doing is nothing. There is no light to shine on the darkness that is life if there is no such thing as friendship and entertainment in your life. But, none of these things assists you in coming any closer to finding a job, unless your job is going to shows and making out with your girlfriend.
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...I had gotten a break in my radio silence. I had received a call from a company called HMH Solutions who was interested in having me come in and check out who they were and see what they do. I was psyched. The day I went into the city to go to this interview, I had gotten a call from a company called First Investments and they wanted me to come in the next day. This day, also known as yesterday, was the same day I had come to the conclusion that there is much evil in the business world and that I want no part of it, but it wants total part of me.
HMH Solutions, which shares the name of another place called HMH Solutions - a digital storage business, is a sales office. When I went searching online for information regarding this place, I found that there was a website for an HMH Solutions and that they dealt in digital storage and other IT things for businesses and the like. I said to myself "hey, this can't be bad. I think there's some good to this."
That was not the HMH Solutions I was coming into.
This HMH Solutions is a fractured piece of a huge umbrella company which was started by two college dropouts who sold pots and pans. I kid you not. The girl who was my "mentor" for the day, who showed me around the workings of the company much like Zorick did at Adforce, was named Desire(pronounced "DEZ - ER -EEE" and spelt Desire but you knew that because this is writing and not speaking) and she told me all about it. I believe the company was Cydecor. It doesn't really matter all that much. The point is, the structure of the company is as follows:
STEP ONE: THE BOTTOM AKA THE KILLING FLOOR
- THE BEGINNING: TRAINEE: This is where it all starts and where I would have had to go to. You get trained like a monkey - taught to speak your little dialogue to the stores like some jingle, mentally cross your fingers and hope to God the customer actually cares about what they're using for their phone. It must be extremely boring and at this point in time, I believe you don't do jack shit as far as sales go. You probably get SOME field time, some basic sales that give you a small commission pay. Yes. This job is solely commission. So, while you're in an office somewhere in NYC, being told about the Join Us In Celebrating Excellence (The J.U.I.C.E. as it where) you're making all of diddly shit for money. When you get brought out in the field, you probably get to make a few sales here and there in your trainer's territory. They wouldn't give a shitload of new trainees their own territory and waste all that valuable space on someone who has no idea what they're doing and is most likely going to quit in a few weeks. Not only that, but I guarantee the trainer gets a piece of whatever you do. So, theoretically, let's say 6 people join in. The trainer sends all 6 of them out to do the work. The first three do a fantastic job, pulling in awesome numbers and they move higher. The 4th does ok for a while, but a month later, quits. The 5th person only lasts 2 weeks and quits. The 6th person lasts a week and quits. The first three make a small fraction of that money made on the sales of telephone lines to AT&T through their commission. Maybe enough to even have made a decent paycheck. The 4th is slowly leeched dry, doing bad at first and not getting better and probably spending more money each day than they are making. The 5th is not doing any good and is in long enough to spend a ridiculous amount of money and get little to pay for it. The 6th is doing maybe a few sales and sees the bad shit they are in and they bail. Despite the length of stay of each of these people, they all have made money for the company, but not for themselves. AT&T pays one flat rate for a year of this service and it is paid off within a few months due to the increase in service from the collective sales obtained from these 6 people, despite the amounts they have made personally. If the numbers go way up, the service becomes more expensive and the company makes even more money next year, maybe multiple thousands to millions more. To make it even better, the day after 4,5 or 6 leave, there is another person there to take their place and continue making money, which means the spot never dies off but the employees do. Another group of people who used this tactic was the British Infantry. When one died, another took their place and the machine kept moving on, leaving dead bodies behind it and in front of it.
- THE MIDDLE: TRAINER: You've made it all the way to trainer and you've mastered the art of walking into shops and making people buy your stupid shit. Now you have to show other people how to do this. The Manager would do this, but he's paid too much to care so it's your job. Desire was a trainer, although there was another word for this step that I have no idea what it was and I don't care. These programs are basically all the same and have fun pet names with each position that are all basically the same anyway no matter where you go and no matter what you sell. Here, you're no longer an absolute idiot, just a regular idiot. You now get a taste of what it's like to run things. Now you get to take a bunch of trainees out into the field and show them the way through. You do less now because you have people doing it for you, but you still have to go and sell things. You're also taught the office side of things: how to run an office, how to maintain a staff, how to set everything up and so on. Let's say 1, 2 and 3 from the previous example are here now. You make a little more on commission now because you do more sales than you did as a trainee because you probably either get a cut of their shit (which motivates you to make your team top notch) or you don�t have to take stupid training courses and are now out in the shit and making money for yourself (but more importantly, the company). 1 does well and moves on, but 2 and 3 can't cut it and haven't sold very well and they end up leaving. Their SALES don't leave. Everything they have sold at this point (which is quite a lot) stays there, despite personally having made not a hell of a lot of money. That 1 person moves ahead to the next spot and gets to have fun as they run things a little more than they did, but still enjoy someone telling them what to do.
- THE TOP: ASSISTANT MANAGER: This is the last step before you went off to buy your own office. You've MADE it! Well, almost. You've got to do some more Managing training and you have to do more stupid shit, but at this point they pay you $50K a year. This is the only place I think I've seen this, but I could be wrong. This could be status quo for this shit. Anyway, you're basically asked to learn how to be a manager at this point. You have to, as a rule of this company, make $10k that you put aside for "Oh Shit, My Business Is Doing Bad/In Case You Need It" money in the prospects that you get to make the final leap and get to start your own company as a Manager. You do this in the hopes that you get to recreate everything that has happened to you so far for a bunch of people in a new place. Out of all of the number 1's that make it this far, not every one of them go on to succeed and, as it was before, the company (much like the House in a casino) always wins. At this point, even though they paid you $50,000, you made them much more than that and they don't care anyway. There's plenty of people to replace you anyway.
STEP TWO: THE MIDDLE GUYS
This is the Bread and Butter of the whole place: the managers. After you have sold enough shit and you have saved the Oh Shit money, you get to open up your very own company. Brad, the manager for HMH Solutions as well as the owner since he put up his Oh Shit money to run this place, is 23. That means he is a year older than I am and is making over $100,000 a year because he owns HMH Solutions. They share the office space with another company, Online Marketing or something like that. The fact that I didn't have anything to look at to get these names shows the quality of them. I had asked for some documentation to base this all on and at the end of the day, I got nothing so these names are coming from my memory of the day, which is clouded at best, but despite the names being muddled, the experience is still true. Managers are the pollen carriers, if you will. These are the people who made enough money for the company as lowly salesmen and get to open another spot for the Umbrella Company and hire more sheep for the slaughter to make the company more money. You can own as many offices as you want and each are guaranteed to make you at least $100K a year and maybe more. There is a guy in the company who is going to retire by 35 and he has about 9 or so companies. Basically, you open these companies and you push ONE product per company. This particular office was AT&T Business plans. They want to LEGITIMATLY (and there is no sarcasm there: this is all legitimatly run, with AT&T hiring HMH to do this) offer you better rates on your phone bill. There is nothing wrong with this. However, it is hard to sell enough of your service to the entire city and be prosperous enough to get to this level and then to have an entire office dedicated to doing this brings your success level down to very little. I know that they set up territories, so that one person wasn't going into the same building as another or even trying to steal sales, but as each oasis of people not connected to AT&T dries up, you're left with a desert and then there's nothing. To get to this level, you had to have done a lot of sales and also taught others to get sales and I'm sure there's a quota, but I was told "No no no, there's no quota" and then I was also told that someone wasn't doing enough sales. I said to myself "Enough for what?" but that was never answered, so I believe that this just adds up to an unspoken quota. So, to put it short, it is either completely impossible or fucking easy to get to this position, based on whether or not you mind bothering every single thing you see so that you can put some money into your pocket. There is nothing overly wrong with this, until you look at the fact that it's soliciting and almost every store in the city has a sign against it. You can argue "But I was only bringing them the news of rates that were lower than theirs. I didn't want to sell them anything, just give them information" like Desire did, and that's a great argument. But I didn't buy it and I'm not selling it.
STEP THREE: THE TOP FLOOR
- Travelling Supervisors: These people have opened enough companies, which are simply breeding grounds for sales and have shot out of the belly of the huge corporate umbrella like pollen, that they can go around to all these small upstarts and tell them what they're doing wrong because the supervisors know more than they ever will. They are the lowest of the top chain and are higher than the lower half.
- The Absolute Top: This was so way up there, even Desire had no idea how to get there. I asked her as the demonstration she was programmed to give me went on if there was a chance to ever get to here from the bottom and she didn't even know. She had only been working at HMH for a month. I suspect it consists of the initial guys who dropped out of college to sell pots and pans door-to-door, became rich enough to start dealing with real companies so that they can sell THEIR stuff door to door and a few years later, they own an international business. I also think there might be a handful of other people who have sold enough things door to door and have then gone on to open enough upstart companies for these guys that they could play with the big boys.
This is the way it went and the First National was the same way, with some major changes. First off, you had to be trained specially for the job because it was a life insurance sales gig. You basically sold financial plans instead of phone plans, but it was much the same. The big thing about this special training for state certification was the fact that you had to go to school for it, which means only one thing: YOU HAVE TO SPEND MONEY TO DO IT. Now, I know there are stupid people in the world. But how many would listen to a financial company who thinks paying money to get a job to make money is a good idea? The reason for you getting a job was the fact that you have NO money as it is. Is anyone else finding the irony here? I would have had to pay almost $600 to go to classes to get trained to sell things. And the kicker? Not only are you paying to go there, but you make no money while you do this. YOU MAKE NO MONEY WHATSOEVER! You can't sell something like life insurance until you're certified to do so, so you KNOW that while you're getting certified, you can't make any money until you finish anyway. AND on top of that, they didn't even have a medical plan, one of the things I am in desperate need of.
So, to bring this full circle, there are a myriad of jobs out there. Some are shitty and some are awesome but they need the power of a bunch of shitty jobs to get you there. Then there's the survival of the fittest sales jobs and those are either shitty or awesome if you mind doing sales or if you don't mind doing sales. But even if you don't mind doing sales, it's a very shifty business in itself and that doesn�t say anything about the practices of the people involved in this system of kill or be killed.
Now you know why salesmen are slimy - they have to be able to slip through the meat grinder without being chewed up.
BMC
What did you just say? - What's he gonna say next?
