Monday, May 5, 2014

EPISODE 36


I found that tracking prospects during the daytime was infinitely easier than doing so on the night shift.  If I caught them at home, they weren’t in a rush to go anywhere.  Second and third shift workers were delighted to talk and I found that my booking rate rose markedly just because of that. I also discovered that even if I couldn’t catch my prospect at home, it wasn’t all that difficult to find out where he worked.  You would be appalled by the number of wives, girlfriends, or children who were only too glad to give out the work numbers of the guys I was tracking.

“This is Michael.  Ted asked me to give him a call.”

“Jeez, he’s at work now and don’t expect him home until 3 or 4.”

“Shoot.  I don’t even know what he called me about.  I found a message on my desk saying he called me.”

“Well, I guess it’d be okay to give you his office number…”

And I was in!

A third trick I learned was that even the most diligent office manager or receptionist could be coopted.  The gatekeeper had one job to perform: to make sure that shmucks like me never got through to my prospect while he was supposed to busy at work.  But I figured that my boy had called us first and therefore, if I could just get him on the phone, I could probably make my pitch.  The problem was how to do so in such a way that he thought I was actually doing him a favor by interrupting whatever he was doing to talk about his insecurity over his hair loss, which had been of paramount importance to him at 1 in the morning a day, or week prior.  It occurred to me that by feigning to preserve his privacy might be the best way of affecting that.  So I would approach the gatekeeper thusly.

“Hi, this is Michael Drabek from BI Management.  Ted left me a message yesterday and asked me to give him a call.”

“Ted is in.  Can I tell him what this is about?”

“Sure.  He wanted some information and I’ve got it for him.”

Now, a good gatekeeper might have smelled a rat and would ask “Ted” if he knew what in the hell I was talking about before buzzing me through.  In many cases, that would be the end of the conversation and I would have effectively burned the lead.  But there were plenty of times that that door wasn’t closed in my face.  The gatekeeper would get flustered and put me straight through, figuring that I had serious business with whomever it was I had asked for.  After identifying who I was and why I was really calling, it was simply a matter of apologizing to “Ted” for using a bit of subterfuge to speak with him. 

“Sorry to use that line with your assistant, ‘Ted’, but I didn’t want to get too specific about this with anyone else but you.”

In almost every case, the Teds of the world thanked me for my discretion and I was just that much closer to booking them.  What was even more remarkable to my mind was that never once did “Ted” ever ask how I got his office number.  It was like some unspoken secret between us and oddly enough, it seemed to bond the client more closely to me.  On one extraordinary afternoon, I got a guy at his office, after calling his home first.  His teenage daughter had been home from school and she gave up the old man’s number without any kind of a fight.  I dialed the number I’d been given and was pleasantly surprised to find that my prospect answered the phone himself.

“’Afternoon, Lew!” I said.  “I’m Michael Drabek from BI Management.  You called us up the night before last, looking for help with a hair loss problem.”

Lew didn’t speak immediately.  However, after a second of two, he cleared his throat and responded.

“Yeah.  I did.  I mean, yeah.  That was me.”

I plunged blindly on.

“So Lew, How long have you been losing your hair?”

Again, there was a pause.  I was on a roll that day, having booked an average of two appointments an hour so far, so I just kept asking those damned questions.  But Lew was clearly of a different mind.  He paused a good long time before speaking and when he did, I realized that this wasn’t just another sales call.

“I dunno, Michael,” he said haltingly.  “Maybe this was a mistake.  Maybe I shouldn’t have called in.”

I knew enough to understand that I didn’t have a quick comeback for this one.  I had to hold back to keep from asking another question.  Something felt wrong here and I figured that the best thing I could do was to keep my mouth shut, in spite of my propensity to do the opposite.

“You still there?” Lew asked.

“Sure.”

“I’m sorry.  I really am.  It’s just been so hard.  I don’t want to burden you.”

And that’s when I understood my role in this conversation.  Lew had gone through a bit of hell in the recent past.  His motivation for calling our toll free line had something to do with more than embarrassment, or a need for sex, or any of the more base motivators that I was used to exploiting.  Lew fucking hurt.

“No,” I replied.  “It’s okay.”

“Well, 5 months ago, my wife passed away.  She had breast cancer.  They did the surgery and the chemo and we all hoped that it was going to work out.  But it didn’t and she just got sicker and sicker.  After a while, she couldn’t do much of anything except lie there.  They doped her up to keep the pain at bay, but I knew she still felt it.  She’d wake up and look at us and we just knew how much she hurt.  She was so weak.  Christ, I don’t think she weighed 90 pounds towards the last week or two.  When she finally died, I thought I’d feel relieved, but I didn’t.  I was even worse.  My two daughters were strong though.  They’ve basically been what’s kept me together.  I keep feeling like I have to be there for them, but they’ve been keeping me from losing it.

“They keep looking at me, waiting for me to do something.  At first, I thought they were checking to see if I was going to take care of them.  Shit, their mother was dead.  Can you imagine anything worse?  I mean, shit…”

His voice trailed off.  We sat together on the phone, not saying anything.  I listened and I could hear him breathing.  He wasn’t sobbing, but he was clearly having a rough time.  I could hear him hitch just a bit as he inhaled and then he continued.

“Anyway, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.  I hate what’s happened.  I hate feeling like this.  I just don’t want to be this way anymore.  I want to change and I thought that maybe I could, you know, grow back my hair.  I’ve been bald since I was in college, even before I met my wife.  She never cared.  She was so beautiful.  I couldn’t believe she fell in love with me.  So I never cared about it either.  But now I have to get on with my life.  I have to change.  But I keep looking at those two girls.  They’re 13 and 16 years old and I see them watching me.  I know that they see what I’m going through.  They’re just waiting for me to lose it.  They’re terrified of it.  I can’t do that to them.  I mean, if I go out one morning and come back home that night with a full head of hair, they’re going to know I’ve lost it.  I can’t do that to them.  I just don’t know what to do though.”

I waited a bit longer after he finished, to see if he had more to say, but he didn’t.  I could imagine him in his office, baring himself to a complete stranger, a damned telemarketer!  As far as I was concerned, if this guy hadn’t hit bottom, then there was no such thing.  As I went through what he’d said, I realized that I felt like a complete asshole.  I was trying to sell him something that would in no way help him.  It was painful.  Yet, I couldn’t just hang up on the guy.  That would be too cruel.  But what the hell was I supposed to do?  After another few seconds, I went with the only thing I had. 

“Don’t do anything, Lew.”

“Really?”

“I’m serious.  You’re not ready for this, or much of anything.  You may want out of this, but you’re right about your girls.  You’ve got to be there for them.  If they’re getting you through this horror, then you need to make sure that they’re safe.  If you think you’ll freak them out by doing this with us, just don’t do it.  It’s not that important.  I take it that your daughters aren’t at school today?”

“Yeah.  I decided that they needed to take the day off.  They both just felt lousy and…”

“I hear you,” I interrupted.  I didn’t want to him to get back on how crappy he felt.  Of course he was miserable.  Who the hell wouldn’t be?  I was beginning to feel his hurt.  It literally seemed to ooze right through the telephone.  I could see his daughters tiptoeing around him, looking at him with sideways glances and then looking at each other.  Is this when Dad breaks down?  They’d obviously seen him crying and while that’s a natural reaction for anyone who has lost a beloved spouse, to those two girls, they were watching the last remaining adult in the house come unhinged.  What were they going to do when there was no one there for them?  They had to be in a very bad place with that hanging over them, in addition to their own pain after watching their mother suffer through such an awful death.  For them, the nightmare of her passing was followed by the profound uncertainty of what lay ahead.  “Bleak” didn’t do the situation justice.

“That’s good, Lew!” I heard myself exclaim.

“It is?  What is?”

“Taking the time off.  You haven’t healed.  You still hurt.  You need to take care of yourself so that you can take care of your girls.”

“I know, but it’s been months.  I don’t know how much more I can do this.  My job.  I mean, how much more are they going to take?”

“Forget that, Lew.  You’re still mourning.  You have rights.  Take a leave of absence.  Spend some quality time with your daughters.  Be home when they get home for a while.  Just do what feels right.  God knows you deserve it, man.”

Lew was crying now.  He wasn’t loud, but he was very quietly weeping.  I could hear him sniffle a bit and then he cleared his throat.

“Thanks, Michael.  I appreciate that.  I really do.  It’s been so hard and I guess I was making it even worse for myself.  I know what I have to do for my girls.  I know it.  I need something for me too.  I have to change my situation, for all three of us.”

And to my utter astonishment, Lew booked an appointment to come into one of our studios and he bought a hair replacement plan right then and there.  I can honestly say that I still have no clear idea on how I feel about this, even today.  What Lew needed more than anything else was to be validated and I needed to be a mensch.  We both got what we needed, but I’ve always wondered if somehow, in the back of my mind, without ever really consciously intending it – that I’d been selling him all the same.


The next episode of SlipNot will be published on May 12th.
If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

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