The Thousand Yard Stare

Yesterday I got pitched by a pro. This guy was truly good. Sometimes i think that having lived a little does eventually teach you something.

To start, I was having a great morning. Seriously, a GREAT morning, where even though I was late to work nobody cared, I was getting all my stuff done and pretty much knocking it out of the park. Around 1:30, I felt like I’d accomplished enough and could take a break.*

Heading over to the Starbucks local to my office, I ordered and went to sit down in one of the cushy chairs. It was angled slightly toward the guy in the corner, but that didn’t really matter to me, it didn’t look like anyone was sitting there.**

“Is anyone sitting here?”, I politely asked.

“There is now”, the man said with a large smile on his face.

He started the conversation innocently enough.

“How is your day going?”

We bantered a bit. I was in a great mood, so I kept batting back inane comments and quips to make him chuckle. I didn’t have anything immediately pressing back at work so it was just a means of hanging out for a minute.  We discussed how this Starbucks was close to the airport, and how people there tended to be travelers. It neatly segued into

“So, what do you do, if I may ask?”

I discussed it briefly, omitting where I actually worked and instead named the contracting company that actually pays me. i’d already overheard someone not three feet from me on my right that was discussing some information that had to do with my company, so I wanted to be a little careful.

There was a slight pause. Since I’m conversationally challenged some times, I did decide to go down that path. “So, what do you do?”. Now, my hesitancy doesn’t really have anything to do with being shy, or understanding how conversation works. It really has more to do with me not really caring what other people do for a living. I don’t put much stock in people that I meet randomly, because you can never tell who they really are. I doubt that I will meet a guy at Starbucks and it turns into someone I consider a life-long friend. Cynical? Yeah. Sorry.

This guy was soooo good, he didn’t immediately talk about what he did. He eased into it so gradually that I didn’t see it coming. He talked about: Racism in hiring practices (which was immediately astonishing, but reflecting back, not likely), scraping the bottom of the barrel in applying for jobs, being over qualified, being in the military, dis-illusionment with media and society in general, supporting his family, owning his own home, the american dream.

About 10 minutes in, honestly, I was ready to bolt. I realized that this guy was going to talk forever. ***
But at work right now, I’m relatively indispensable so I knew that if I was gone a little longer than normal, nobody was going to really worry about it. That’s how good the day was going.

So inbetween my, “Wow, that’s crazy” and nods of agreement, and shakes of the head against “the man”, he finally, FINALLY gets to the original answer. And he didn’t answer it directly. He had peppered his initial stores with “self employeed”, “my own boss” and “owning my own company”. As I fell deeper into his rabbit hole, he got a little closer to what he actually does.

When he finally got around to it, he started at the periphery and worked his way inward. Like an onion. I can’t even type this up as eloquently as he brought it around, but it started with things like “My wife is retiring at the end of this year”, “I’ll be retiring soon”. As he got closer to the core, the details start coming in. “Thanks to the deregulation, and who doesn’t use electricity?”, and “When people hear that they could be paying single digits for a kilowatt hour, and most are paying double digits, they immediately are interested, even if they’re not interested in contacting people, they still want to save money”. Note at this point, he has not told me ANYTHING directly about what he does. Finally, the key line emerges, “so I get paid not only when they sign up, but when the sign other people up and then every time they pay their bill.”

From there it went into a VERY roundabout discussion about how he has friends that I don’t have and that I have friends that he doesn’t have. My spider sense has been building up.

When the key line above hits my ear hole, i put all the pieces together, and realize that he’s involved in one of the pyramid schemes for electricity.

Back in the 90’s, one of my very dear friends that I’ve known since I was five, approach me with something similar. Back in the 90’s, however, we weren’t as connected as we are now. Smart phones hadn’t been invented, the internet was truly in it’s infancy. The horror of dialing long distance (and getting billed outrageously for it) was still a very real thing. So calling cards became the rage. Then, calling card pyramid schemes became the rage.

His family had fallen into that trap. I went to their family meeting essentially under the influence and asked a few bizarre, potentially inappropriate questions. After the meeting, I knew I wasn’t interested, but he was one of my oldest friends, so I gave him the $100 and wrote it off. I knew I was never going to do anything with it, and I knew that he wasn’t either.

There’s a lot on the internet about pyramid schemes, so I don’t need to lay it out.

Back to the guy at Starbucks.

He’s laid a ton of groundwork. Once I’ve figured out what was happening, I said a few things about how deregulation was good for the electricity industry. I wasn’t buying it. He’d put out hook after hook, after hook and I wasn’t biting. I don’t think he ever got the feeling that he was about to reel me in, and honestly I don’t think he was too concerned. His angle seemed to be the pitch. He enjoyed it. Signing people up would be a bonus. So eventually (it had been about an hour), I said, ” Well, I’m glad you got that stability you were looking for.” He complimented my shoes **** and I departed.

During one of his long stories, a barista walked in and said hello to him by name. By this time I knew what he was up to, so I jokingly asked if the guy had sold the barista electricity. He said, “No, I just come here all the time.” I thought to myself, “This guy just sits in Starbucks all day and pitches. What a job.” The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how much was truth, and then how much was the pitch.

Either way, he was good at it.

There are two lessons I feel like I need to impart here:

1) Energy deregulation is a good thing for lowering prices for consumers. Go to powertochoose.org if you live in Texas and want to see if you can lower your kw/hr amount. I did it, there’s nothing to be scared of, I even like how they now rate complaints against the provider. Really, it’s still the two or three main electrical providers providing the electricity, the companies are just subcontracting the electrical rate and administration of your account.

2) Always remember that if it sounds like it’s too good to be true, it normally is. Pitches where anyone makes money off of your involvement should be avoided at any cost. It’s hard to see this when you’re younger, but eventually you’ll learn the hard way. Hopefully it doesn’t sting too much.

 

 

 

 

 

* Accomplishing things also included buying an amplifier off of ebay that I didn’t really need. But it is pretty.

** Was the chair angled on purpose? I tend to think it was, this guy was THAT good.

*** Which is another reason why I don’t start conversations with strangers.

**** Ragged out checkerboard vans. Really?