Sales Pitch
I came late to dinner with her. What she doesn’t know is I’m never on schedule. Something about it bothers me. My boss knows it. Lucky for her, I deliver more than any other employee.
When I was a kid, I looked at those salespeople wherever I went. It was magical to hear their sales pitch. The better ones had a good storytelling along the way. If they didn’t, mother nature was kind enough to give the teller a captivating smile. The common folk doesn’t notice it, but a smile goes a long way in convincing the other part of the bargaining table. It doesn’t matter if the seller is the same sex as you or the sex you aren’t attracted to.
Today sex life is complicated. We are back to the Roman Empire in many ways. This gets me bitter because the fate of every empire is to crumble and fall. And all look as stable as ours before their end. We are bound for turbulence soon. Still, this has a lot to do with my current occupation.
I’m a hope seller. I get on the streets with a charity shirt, disturb people’s walks, and offer them the next best piece of fashion there is. To help out those in need. To give food to starving children. To cure, not cancer, but a far more stupid thing like flu. Stupid, but deadly.
Imagine this little harmless flu in a war-torn town. All hospitals overcrowded with wounded people. Or a rural area where civilization only comes disguised as soft drinks and salty snacks. Some may have electricity. Hurray! Provided through fossil fuel generators only at set times.
Long story short, it’s easy to sell hope, but you gotta cross that huge barrier first. A stranger in selling uniform approaches you. Natural instinct, run like hell. Always no time, I’m in a hurry, no way I can spare a single buck to save five lives from starvation. The good thing is we know this default behavior. People train us to go through it without turning personal. All we need is the buyer’s attention for a few minutes.
Two minutes is our little eternity. In these two, you will be denied three times. People will walk past you and you will follow. You’ll say something smart and catch them or lower their guard. Then, you will be denied or lied to because you said something about them giving away their money for free. By now, a minute passed if you did everything right. This is the first break-point. Many go away after the subject turns to money and all the effort you put on that first minute will be in vain.
That will feel like you killed a random amount of people based on the kind of charity you work for. If you are in Education, the damage is minor. It takes time for an uneducated child to become a killer. In one minute, you didn’t kill anyone. Maybe. If Health or Nutrition is your thing, then you already let some people starve or die. If you help your own developed country, one or two kills. If you work for any African or other war zones, make it a handful of casualties.
I find it so wrong this word casualty. Makes you think something casual happened, not someone’s death. While training, some charities use strong words. Starved, deceased, shot dead, etc. In my training, they made us watch many documentaries. The one I remember the most was about a group of rich white guys who went to a Latin American rural village. They had to live on one dollar a day which is the line of extreme poverty. In one scene, they look into their finances. They notice all the rice and beans they could buy won’t give them more than 600 calories a day. Many burgers in fast food franchises have more than this and I don’t know people who eat the sandwich alone. There are fries and drinks involved. The combo.
So when I fail to pitch someone in, I killed a couple of people. Ok. What bothers me is to see the guy or gal who refused to donate is about to eat for lunch what those poor folks won’t eat in a day. Anger defines my mood in those days I can’t get many followers to our cause.
It has been a few years since I started this path. Sometimes pay was bad, I couldn’t afford a comfortable living. In other times, I refused to spend eating while so many starved. Those were days I was bad at my job. You let more than a hundred die today and you dare eat this warm plate full of food?
Many days I dared not.
The year after the last financial crisis, 2009 I think, things were terrible. Not a new soul contributed for days. When we returned to the offices, people told us many donors canceled their subscriptions. I recall how hard it was to sleep through those nights. When summer came that year, I was overwhelmed. I asked my supervisor for an unpaid leave. Then, I bought a ticket to Congo, one of the places we donated the collected money to.
I planned to live a month there with the starving and the deceased like those guys in the documentary. I ended up staying the rest of the year. All my self-inflicted fasting and bad accommodations let me save some money. I had no trouble buying tickets overseas and I knew I could live well for at least a year there. That was not what I had in mind though. I longed to feel their pain with my own eyes and skin and nose. To watch this on a screen was impactful, but the first week in that rural village somewhere in Congo, it made those movies…
Oh man, a thousand movies wouldn’t make me feel what I lived there. I worked for free at one of the foundations we helped. There were dorms for us volunteers, but I rarely used mine. On paper, I worked from 7 to 7, but people were so thankful every day I had invites to dine with them. They couldn’t spare the food, but they insisted on showing me their local dishes. What should have ended by 7 pm, extended to 9, then 11. From Monday to Saturday, sometimes even Sundays I slept in one of the village’s houses. It was common to see people fighting to decide in which one I’d sleep in after I became a regular. It was kind of an honor to them to have me, a foreign stranger, among them.
It sounds so joyful when I tell this story. Even for someone as stoic as me, it was hard getting used to that environment. The sun toasted your skin brown, you sweated like a pig. Food was scarce, sometimes tasted bad. When it tasted good was worse, because you knew it would end soon and you were stealing it from them. I had mixed feelings about my post work stays. I couldn’t decline those eyes calling me to eat this thing with a funny name I couldn’t repeat.
The first month was harsh on me. Minus 12 pounds. The other five were a flash though. Once I stopped to think about my time there, I had stayed six times the plan. People back home worried about me. My boss sent me a mail. Not e-mail, a paper letter. There was no internet for hundreds of miles. To tell the truth, she e-mailed the foundation main office and they sent me the letter, but still…
Why are you crying, girl? Didn’t you want to know what I did for a living?
I told you a romantic dinner was not an appropriate place for it, haven’t I? Oh, come on, don’t feel bad. You can start helping now. There are plans starting in one dollar a day and for the upper limit, the sky is the limit.
You want to hear what happens in the second minute of the pitch I do on the streets? It’s not necessary. You just heard me non-stop for half an hour without leaving the table and walking away. You lived the second minute, let me see, 29 minutes ago.
Am I doing a sales pitch on you? Wouldn’t you?
I killed near a hundred people since I entered this restaurant, but you can save the same amount, maybe more.
All you need to do is stop reading this, grab a cause you believe in, and help them.
