Fish are Born to Fly

I grew up around salesmen; excuse me, “account executives,” or “customer relationship managers” as they are now called.

My dad was a salesman.

It took me a long time to figure that out, because every time I asked him what he did, he would give me a different ambiguous answer. At one point, he told me he was a fireman. I knew this wasn't true, but it did explain his preference for black and white dogs.

My dad was not a person who dealt in metaphors, but his choice of fireman, was, as it turns out, a pretty accurate one. Like firemen, sales people face risk every day. They know winning and losing like few others and, try as they might, they live and die by forces that are beyond their control.

My dad's professional life spanned a period in history when selling transformed the world and was, in turn, transformed by it. Sales created opportunities, fueled business, created jobs and moved people up the socio-economic ladder. Salesmen are also the ventriloquist puppets spouting the magic words dreamt up by the dark lords in advertising.

When times are good, it's because salesmen are there to stoke the fires of good fortune and, when they're not, it's because some salesman took all your money in exchange for a bag of smoke.

That's a lot of pressure.

My dad would bring his friends home after work and they would drink and unwind. Our home was a kind of half-way house, a decompression chamber where they could purge the bad gasses from their blood before they made the final push to the surface.

It's ironic that nitrogen should be a common problem for both deep sea divers and salesmen. In one instance it's a by-product of their work environment and, in the other, a poison in the air they breathe.

My dad's friends were loud and funny guys. These were guys who liked nothing more than to make fun of one another, but who knew they were like the floats in a toilet tank: the first to reach top when the water was going up and with only a slender lifeline to keep them from going down the drain when it was flowing the other way.

The ephemeral nature of their work made each success and every failure keenly felt.

There were days when we children would be paraded out into the street to see somebody's new car, or motor-scooter, or when all the wives would get some elaborate kitchen appliance; and there were others when money was scarce and ends did not meet.

My dad came from a time when you did not talk about money. That he chose to sell investments must have made a difficult job even harder.

I don't have a clear picture of this, but, based on my own responses to money, I believe my dad was very generous with his friends and loaned money as much to help as to change the conversation to anything else.

I only recently learned that my brother and I share the same abhorrence of the splitting the bill negotiation. We will pick up the whole thing just so we can talk about something else.

What helped my father in his work was his curiosity. He seemed genuinely interested in people.

I had the good fortune to travel with him several times and he always made it a point to sit at the bar because, as he said, that was where the action was. One of his favorite stories was of the time he met the man who claimed to be the biggest pornographer in London.

My dad had accounts because he made friends. He made friends because he was always ready to help.

As I got older, I began to understand that my dad's willingness to help was not always reciprocated, that the people he loaned money to didn't always pay it back, that “friends” didn't always watch out for one another.

As I got older, I understood that my dad was not a saint, he was a salesman.

I've heard it said that every generation is a reaction to the one that came before. Liberal parents begat conservative children; religious parents have atheist kids.

What does that mean for kids of salesmen?

This is a question I have been wrestling with for my whole life.

The question becomes particularly relevant as I again find myself at something of a career crossroads.

I have been posting my resume to countless job search and staffing websites, hoping to win the lottery and come up with the magical combination of words and phrases that will help me get through to a round where people and machines make the final decisions.

But if I do, if I can get in the room with another person, can I sell myself as being the right person to solve their problem?

I am not a salesman.

If I were, I would still have a job.

Despite what you may have read, being a salesman, like being a good waiter, is an art and not a “safety” job to take while waiting for your “real” career to start.

Selling is also not a con.

Persuading an Eskimo to buy an ice maker is not the same as selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower for scrap. It's about identifying a need for which the ice maker is the only viable solution.

Looking for work, on the other hand, is a confidence game. Persuading an employer to invest today on the promise of future value requires a degree of confidence that is often hard to come by, especially if the job search was not planned.

To be looking for work is to be confronted with all the bad choices you made while you were working.

Once you go online to look for work, it seems the only email you ever get is from people all-too-ready to tell you what you should have done to prepare yourself for a position you never expected to find yourself in.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I was too busy working to become involved in trade associations, or programming committees, or lunchtime service clubs.

I am not positioning myself for sainthood, but I often worked through my lunch in order to meet deadlines and going to hear the weekly speaker over an anonymous chicken dish did not seem a good use of my spare time. Nobody made it clear to me that, while work may be done between eight and five, business got done and careers were made at lunch and after hours.

You would think I would know better, especially given my background as bartender to my dad's friends, but all I saw was the medicinal alcoholism and not the good business sense and career moves being made.

Now don't get me wrong, I am also not making a late-in-the-game play for a Shriner's fez, a Mason's apron, or a salesman's liver, I am just too-late recognizing the truth that we are all salesmen, or more accurately, we all need to be salesmen.

Arthur Miller's “Death of a Salesman” is a post-war allegory for America as salesman, as Willy Loman. Depending on when you ask me, you will get a different answer on how closely I identify with the role of the play's lead character, Willy Loman. Today, in the middle of another work day, as I sit in a coffee house filling out another career profile for a job that doesn't interest me, I can identify very closely.

I have never been a persuasive advocate for my “product.” I just do the work to the best of my ability. I never talked much about the work I did because anybody I might tell was either working with me, or completely disinterested.

So, I don't have the pitch and the promotional materials, to help make a good impression with the client. And every resume I write and cover letter I draft, feels like the embroidery on one of those pillows that you get at a roadside tourist attraction: attractive enough to draw your attention from across the store, but quickly unravels once you get too close.

Put me in a room with a decision-maker and I will sell myself short every time. Take me out of my work environment and ask me why I should be hired over anyone else and I will actually ask myself the question, “Well, who else are you looking at?”

By this absence of self-promotion skills, I can recognize the valuable lessons that salesmen can teach you. I am perfectly comfortable telling others that there is a life lesson in the A-B-C monlogue from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another play about salesmen: “A-always, B-be, C-closing.”  Life is largely a transactional process:  you give to get: sometimes it's immediate and sometimes not, but always asking for the sale, for what you want is never bad advice.

Asking for the next job, even when you have one, would seem, especially from my current perspective, very good advice.

I've told people to do this, but I can't seem to do it myself, which makes it all the more troublesome that the only contacts I have had in response to my resume postings have been from companies looking for salesmen.

How can I sell insurance when I failed to insure myself against risks like losing a job? How can I seize the opportunity of “unlimited upside earning potential” when I have repeatedly failed to take advantage of the opportunity to learn from earlier mistakes?

In the end, instead of soaring with the eagles, I guess I am more of a birdwatcher: I can recognize the difference between a Cardinal and a Scarlet Tanager, but I will never be either one.

You Can't Handle the Truth

It was ninth grade history class....  Pretty certain about that....  Yeah.

It was DesRochers’ classroom, for sure; no question about that....

Anyway....

DesRochers’ classroom:  I think we were talking about the Middle Ages.  Could have been something else, but there is something about serfs, feudal lords and high school that seem to go together.

I don't remember anything about the circumstances other than that I closed my eyes for what I thought was an instant and, when I re-opened them, everyone in the class was staring at me.

In and of itself, that was not that unusual, I was the only person who came to class in a cardigan and a tie, but this was different.

They were telling me I had fallen asleep.

Impossible.  I had a very clear idea of what sort of student fell asleep in class and I worked very hard not to be counted in their number.

No way.

The more I insisted that I had not been asleep, the more insistent they became.  It was one of those yes-you-were-no-I-wasn't Mexican stand-offs that only ever end in embarrassment.

But how could I have fallen asleep?

There was no before and after, no day to follow the night.  One minute I was in the class and the next moment I was in the same class.

When I closed my eyes, we were talking about the Feudal System and, when I opened them, we were still talking about the Feudal System.

Nothing was different.

But what if everything was different?

What if everything and everyone in my world had been taken away and replaced with an exact duplicate.

Only these “duplicates” all knew things that I did not.

All through high school, I had this sense that everyone knew stuff that I did not.

I remember sitting in English class.  We were reading “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” and everyone else “knew” that she was a prostitute, except me.

Or maybe it happened before that.

I changed schools for eighth grade and I remember sitting in boy's health class with the gym teacher.  What a gym teacher..., what a nightmare.  I remember he started one class by saying there are two hundred muscles in the human body.  Some smart guy piped up saying, “two hundred and one,” and the class burst out laughing.

I was focused on the rudeness of correcting the teacher and completely missed the point of the comment.  I tell myself that now, but, at the time, I most likely had no idea what my “classmate” meant.

Or maybe it was even earlier, back in elementary school, when they took the girls away to show them a special movie.

We knew it was “special” because permission slips were needed.  In those days, when our parents just assumed that teachers knew what they were doing, permission slips were the exception rather than the norm.

We needed permission to go on a field trip, but a movie?  We saw movies in class all the time, what was so special about this one?

I don't remember now whether they left the class, or they took us boys away, but it seems to me, that things were different after that.  I was like, after that, the girls had specialized knowledge that was not available to the boys.

It was like they had the secret of fire and we were just a bunch of apes freezing in the dark.

School went from being a place where you got teased because a girl liked you to a place where you got teased because you liked a girl.

It was a little while later that we boys got our own permission slips and I got scared.

I didn't want to know what I didn't know.

I don't really have a good illustration for this, but perhaps you will remember when there were kids in your class who wanted to tell you the “truth” about Santa Claus?  Or, maybe they even came out and said that he didn't exist?  Do you remember that space where you didn't want to know that?  For whatever reason you chose not knowing over knowing?

Even though something like that is impossible to un-know, even though the de-stabilizing amputation of certainty begins to eat at you like gangrene, you cling to the idea of Santa like the figures of Need and Want huddle at the feet of the Ghost of Christmas Present.

My world was confusing enough already.  I had no room for any more secret knowledge.  If it was something that “they” hadn't wanted me to know, then I was fine continuing my ignorance.

I was the only one to take that position.

And so, while my peers were headed off to the basement screening room, I went to the library and looked at some educational materials about the Canadians at Ypres in World War One.

These were allegedly “health” films.  They were supposed to help us understand the changes that would come to us with the onset of puberty.  My body had been letting me down for a decade; I could only assume that any changes were not going to be upgrades.

This was a fork in the road for me where opportunity and responsibility parted ways and I took the road less traveled.

A little later on, there was another round of films and I could no longer avoid going.

We were marched off to the damp brick-lined basement that looked like the sewers of Vienna as depicted in “The Third Man.”

There I was in a closed, darkened room with my snickering male classmates learning about what was normal and healthy in between scenes of rockets launching into space.

Opportunity versus responsibility.  Where my classmates were excited to see a rocket launch, a blow-up, I was thinking that if nobody made any sudden moves then nobody would get in trouble.

 

Perhaps that was it.  Perhaps that was my moment where I was offered a choice in life and I got it wrong.

Most everybody I have ever met seems to have learned to value opportunity over responsibility.  All of the people I am most drawn to see only possibility where I can only see barriers and obligation.

I would like to be one of those who see possibility in every situation, but I can't seem to make that change.

I remember one night in graduate school where I had gone back to the room of a woman who, by all rights, should have had nothing to do with me.  She wasn't only above my grade level; she was an entirely different school.

She was beautiful and she was spending time with me....

Inconceivable.

I had parked my car in front of the theatre, which was okay at night, but subject to a hefty fine and towing during the day.

I figured this was not going to be a problem because when women asked me to their rooms all they wanted to do was talk—usually about their problematic boyfriends.  An hour or so and I would be on my way home.

But this was a different situation entirely.  She had apparently not received the memo on how such evenings were supposed to go.

There was touching.

There was kissing.

Some other stuff too.

But the more stuff went on, the more I kept thinking about my car being ticketed, or worse....

Yes..., yes I did.

I left.

I chose my Pinto over this beautiful woman, because I'm an idiot.

Because it was the responsible thing to do.

This is not a story I am proud of; that is the story of someone who has a bug in his programming; someone lacking critical operational instructions.

It's decades later and I should be comfortable with the choices I have made, but I most definitely am not.

I know I want more opportunities and fewer responsibilities.  I am drawn to professions that are founded on it.  I have wanted to be a writer since before high school and yet my dominant, responsible, self also knows that success in that business depends on the ability to see and seize opportunities and, whereas, I can be counted on to close the refrigerator door, I can't ever seem to be able to convince other people of that.

Perhaps the problem is that I equate responsibility with order and opportunity with chaos.

My recollection is that all through elementary school I was pretty good in math.  Not stellar, but I got my work done.  When we got to algebra in high school, I was pretty good at that too.  It was orderly and made sense to me.

And then, in ninth grade, we were introduced to functions.

Ninth grade was not a good year for me.

Functions left me stymied. With its multiple paths to the same answer, I was awash in chaos and uncertainty.  It was the anti-algebra, the drunk cousin of geometry.

In algebra there was the cruising lane and the passing lane and, unless you were passing, you knew exactly where you stood.  But with functions the rules no longer applied:  park in the left lane, pass on the right, drive faster on the berm.  It was whatever you could get away with.

This great unsettling has continued and, if anything, gotten worse.

I keep looking for lines to color inside and, just as fast as I can find them, somebody seems to be following me around with an eraser.

At some level, I can appreciate why conservatives are always angry.  They too seek the comfort of absolutes in an increasingly unfamiliar world.  They cling tenaciously to ideas that our quicksilver society has either abandoned, or outgrown, as a way of putting a fence around their common ground.

The more they will advocate for whoever has the biggest piggy bank, the more they seem to cling to definitions, rules and regulations.

And, before anyone stops reading because I'm slagging on the right, all of the same things can, and should be, said about those on the left.  The only difference is that their approach seems more inclusive.  Like the difference between trying to join the chess club and joining student government:  only one of those groups is going to teach you how to play chess.

The older I get, the angrier I get about this gap in my knowledgebase and I'm not talking about the health films.

I grew up thinking there were norms, rules, truths and all I have seen is people working hard to make sure those rules don't apply to them.

Every time somebody cuts in front of me from a right-turn-only lane, I can feel every one of those two hundred muscles clench.  Every time I make a wrong turn and take the time to go all the way around the block, or go to the next exit before turning back, I feel like a chump, like I have been conned, like I was accused of sleeping in class.

As far as I know, we continue to teach kids the difference between right and wrong while living in a culture that celebrates those who choose to live outside the rules.  America's superhero used to be Superman who fought for “truth, justice and the American way” even while flouting the laws of physics.  Our leaders fight for camera time trying to appear to be of the people and possessed of the common touch only to get a job doing the bidding not of those they represent, but of those who pay for their campaigns.  We celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit, while embracing the concept of too-big-to-fail.  As a nation, we are compassionate, caring, inclusive, but, as individuals, we are scheming, suspicious and ready to step on our neighbor's throat for the right offer.

How do you reconcile those two personalities?

It's like being marooned in Opposite World.

Is this really what it means to be an adult?

Is this the best we can hope for?

F. Scott Fitzgerald took it as a measure of intelligence to be able to “hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function....”

Psychologists look at it differently.

Is it any wonder that, at any one time, one-in-four of us have a diagnosable mental health condition?

I have been alive long enough to recognize some of the patterns in my own behavior.  I default to taking people at their word and believing that hard work and dedication should speak for themselves.  I am embarrassed when I give the wrong answer and ashamed when my body makes a noise that I did not intend.  I assume everybody else thinks the same way.

And then I turn on my TV each night only to learn how misinformed I am.

Is it crazy to expect some constants, some absolutes, some order?

Is that a crazy dream?

I am still struggling to make my world make sense, find my place, figure out where I fit in—all those things that I was worried about in high school when I opened my eyes.