This is the last of my draft posts that I wrote in the weeks preceding the official announcement that my company went out of business. This was written on January 13, 2008. And let me say it here first: I do wish she was a tad more progressive, but I’ll give her some leeway – Gillibrand! 2016…
I had an interview today. It was my second one since I started looking for a new job, and my first one since I bought the skirt to match my suit. I got this interview after a recruiter saw my resume online and contacted me. The job was for insurance sales, a position that is most frequently preceded by the words “if you don’t study to do better in school, you’re going to end up in,” and is a goldmine of hilarity for stand-up comedians who want to graduate from bits about airline food.
Despite that, in this economy, a job is a job, and I would rather badger people about life insurance than lose my apartment. But that’s only because it’s a really great apartment. Besides, there’s always a chance that there could be something exciting for me in insurance sales.
Because I am a conscientious interviewee, I did some research on the company before going to the interview. My first red flag was when I Googled them, and the company’s website was the first hit, and the second hit was “<Prospective Company> Insurance Interview SCAM!” That’s when I read a lot of stories about a lot of unhappy people who worked for this company.
The long and the short of it is that reps only get paid on commission, spend many hours a day on the road, those miles are not reimbursable by the company, if they fail to make your numbers their bosses tell them they’re not trying hard enough. In addition, job candidates have to go for three weeks of training where they train you for the licensing exam (that you pay for) and indoctrinate you to the company, using many tactics similar to cults. Those three weeks are wholly unpaid. For many folks, working at this company was an insufferable nightmare.
But still, I already had the interview appointment, so I figured I’d go there just to get some practice interviewing, and at least give them a shot to prove themselves better than the internet haters.
What I got was about a dozen “I have to blog about this” moments.
First off, the office was a complete wreck. The “conference room” was a collection of plastic tables and mis-matched metal chairs on top of stained carpet. There were photocopies of motivational posters tacked to the wall, and charts tracking how many sales the reps have made. The lighting was simultaneously harshly florescent and incredibly dim, which I think was an effect created by the tinted windows in the back offices. There was a filthy coffee pot and a discarded Dunkin’ Donuts bag on a table in the corner, and as I sat on a folding chair to fill out my application, a draft repeatedly reminded me that I was wearing a skirt.
As I was filling out my forms, one of the current sales reps, a rather disheveled looking gentle giant, came over to me, drinking Yoo-Hoo out of a half-gallon carton.
“hey, do you like Yoo-Hoo?”
“um, not particularly.”
“Oh, man, it’s too bad that you don’t. Because I just found a place where they sell it in these cartons!”
“how nice for you.”
“You really should drink it, it’s got lots of calcium.”
And then he shuffled off to his lair office to work on his leads!
As I was finishing up my employment paperwork (refraining from giving them my social security number at this point,) another applicant walked into the office. I had overheard that he was running late due to an inability in finding the office (you make a left at the gigantor yellow sign on the main street of the city right in front of the new construction. Seriously unmissable.) He sort of meandered in, and my first thought was that he was drunk. A quick smell-test as he sat next to me confirmed that fact. The top button of his shirt was undone, his tie was askew, he hadn’t shaved, it looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, and when he talked, he slurred.
If someone were to make an internet video of “interviewing do’s and don’t's,” he’d be “Johnny Don’t.”
While drunk guy filled out his application, I went for the one-on-one interview with the branch manager. If you need a reference to picture this man, think of a perfect blend of Steve Carrell’s and Ricky Gervasis’ characters from each version of The Office. Then add a few more moles on the nose. And make him shorter. And now add a pin to your character’s suit pocket that says “teamwork.”
His first question was why I was looking for work. I told him about the company’s likely demise, and the next question he asked me was if I was getting a severance package. That seemed like an oddly personal follow-up, and I told him no. We went back and forth with some standard interview questions, mixed in with him making some odd jokes and talking about how he’s a friend to his staff. He told me that the job was to call on sales leads and then pointed to stacks of blue cards of former policy holders. These were the exact same blue lead cards from the movie of Glengarry Glen Ross, I swear.
He told me about how if I took the job, the company would send me to Albany for three weeks to train and license me, at their own expense. That’s when I decided to have some fun.
“Except you mean that’s unpaid training, right?”
“Well, we pay for your hotel room. And we pay for all the training materials. And you get lunch.”
“But you don’t actually pay a salary at that time, correct?”
“Um, uh… no. That’s why I asked you if you got a severance. I usually don’t tell people about those details until later. How did you hear about that, by the way?”
“Well, I Googled you.”
“To find the company page, right?”
“Yes, I found that. I found some other pages, too.”
“There are some negative people out there. Most of those people just didn’t have the chops to be effective sales leaders.”
I told him that’s why I came here, to give him a shot to prove the haters wrong. That calmed him down a little, and when we each had no more questions, he said it was time to take the Wonder Lick test!
OK, it’s actually the Wonderlic test, but it makes me wonder how that was the best name they could find. It’s an IQ test similar to the ones that flash advertisements at you while you visit various middle-of-the-road websites. You have twelve minutes to answer fifty questions, and only one in 44,000 people finish all fifty correctly! (He stated this fact like three times.) In order to get the prestigious insurance job, they prefer that you get twenty questions correct. (But don’t require…) We went back out into the main holding pen conference room where drunk guy was still trying to fill out his application forms. The front of the sheet of the test had a place to fill out your name and two example questions. I filled it out, read the questions and sat there waiting to begin.
Drunk guy was still reading the questions. We waited. He read. The recruiter asked if he was ready to begin after two solid minutes of reading one side of a piece of paper. He was not. We waited. Finally, drunk guy was ready. We were allowed to open the test, and damn if I wasn’t determined to ace that fucker. I was told by the interviewer that “the nerdiest girl in the office” scored a 32. She used to work at a bookstore, too! “A Walden something or other.” I was able to finish all the questions in the allotted time, and ended up with a score of 33. Ha! Take that former corportation that sells books employee!
I don’t mean to be a show-0ff, but what can I say, sometimes I’m an intellectual snob. It’s the least I can do after spending all that time educating myself.
I really, really wish I could have stayed to see drunk guy’s score, but without looking, I can probably guess that he was still working on the first question, not realizing that it was one of the example questions. As we left it, the recruiter told me that I should come back for the next part of the interview, which was going on the road with one of the sales reps to see what a typical day was like. I could choose to do that on a Wednesday or Friday, but not Tuesday or Thursday, because those are the days that he does interviews. Evidently, that’s how expendable the employees are, that he looks for new ones twice a week.
I did get a follow-up call from him the other day, and despite my fears that I’m not going to get a job, I told him no thanks. I’m not ready to enter the world of yoo-hoo, abysmal offices and scrounging for leads. I’ll leave that to drunk guy, who is about to become the star of the company, I bet.
