I am not a salesperson, by nature, and if I had ever doubted this it was proven by the summer job I took after my freshman year of college doing grassroots fundraising for Greenpeace. To my credit, I somehow didn't realize the job would consist of standing outside supermarkets asking the laid off men and women of the Silicon Valley to give me their credit card numbers on the spot because now it was more crucial than ever that they find a way to give Greenpeace $20+ a month. I lasted 3 days.
When my boss told us we would be working the booth at the Ad:Tech trade show, I was excited, which I confess was in no small part motivated by the very large open-bar parties I would told would occur in the evenings. Since I am still a fairly new resident of San Francisco I am not one to turn down a party. I was also lured by the number of males under 30 attending that I could stare at and theoretically speak to, because since my boyfriend and I broke up a couple of weeks ago I've resumed my former pasttime of staring at strangers that I ostensibly could date but will most likely not even think of a way to speak to, and it makes better fantasy material if these strangers are unmarried and either devastatingly attractive or ultra-nerdy (and in my book, those two are frequently synonymous).
I work for an advertising firm that's really more like a startup, working with those tiny sponsored search ads to the right of your Google and Yahoo search results. They dressed us in highly unattractive dress shirts embroidered with our logo and wished us the best of luck. I think sales is phony by nature, but I still hate myself for not being good at it, and as I fumbled through our sales pitch and our improperly functioning powerpoint slideshow (I think powerpoint is the most mediocre computer program in modern usage, which I may explain later) I realized that it was going to be a long day, also because my pathetic vegetarian immune system was beginning to give over to some kind of cold.
I am way too intense to casually deliver a sales pitch, which I spend most of my energy trying not to botch and end up frowning and looking heavy while I deliver said pitch. I am not sure about this, but I think if I videotaped myself to confirm it I would become so emotionally damaged at watching the results that I would need intense hypno-psychotherapy to resume everyday existence. I peaked sometime before lunch and then crashed out (I stole this phrase) and hoped nobody would approach the booth until I could break for semi-good Financial District burritos.
The trade show is an ultramodern contemporary phenomenon where everybody and everything is for sale, buying and selling at any moment, and flirtation is highly-integrated with opening and closing deals. Needless to say I was not cut out for this environment.
The majority of those who approached our booth were involved in dubious direct e-mail campaigns, pop-under ads or companies that 'drive traffic to their site to then direct them to affiliates' sites,' to which I had to hold my tongue in order to not say "You're a professional middleman on the internet, and you actually want to cut us in as an additional middleman?"
On breaks I collected as many consumer products with company logos that I could locate, including a frisbee, a stress-ball in the shape of a boxing glove, and a letter-opener in the shape of a very small floppy disk (what nostaligia!).
Other highlights of the day included the running commentary that our new sales executive delivered under his breath to me about the ever-self-replacing 'booth babes;' visiting one of our competitor's booth which was decorated with giant foam stones and wheelbarrows as a Disney's Toon Town-appropriate gold mine; having a jobhunting Sales Executive ask me several questions about my genealogy and then hand me his card telling me to "call him anytime" for no reason but blatant pickup; and entering a soundproof booth labeled "Truth" to record a truth in exchange for a t-shirt or tall shotglass printed with "Can you handle the truth?" These truths would later be available in MP3 form for our enlightened listening pleasure, and if we could not think of our own truths, they would provide us with cards that said such truths as "I leave my toothpaste in the sink" or "I don't know my web site's demographics." I entered and could think of nothing else but to say "I am incredibly insecure." That's the thing about closed soundrecording booths labeled "truth:" they really bring out the honesty in you.
At the end of the show, we packed up the booth's contents on feet aching from standing all day and loaded up the car. Once my coworkers had taken off, I briefly considered what I most felt like doing with my disgruntled self, and debated whether I wanted to go to sleep, watch television, mindlessly purchase consumer products or drink alcoholic beverages. I didn't feel like walking, and like a sign I saw it: the Looksmart trolley. It wasn't a real trolley, but one of those tourist buses shaped like a trolley that you can rent for corporate events or hotel tours. Looksmart had an open bar in the back, and so I figured I'd hop on to take a rest, even though it was obviously not going anywhere near my neighborhood.
A 2-mile loop and two glasses of chardonnay on an empty stomach later, I was throwing myself at a Looksmart employee until he used the words "Marin" and "got married" in the same sentence, to which I casually transitioned to sitting down and talking to a girl sitting next to me. All the while I was wearing my very unattractive company logo shirt (If I had had any sober sense I would have changed into my "can you handle the truth" t-shirt in order to not put my company's reputation in jeopardy), and while they spoke of the various parties (a party at 111 Minna, a MySpace-sponsored party at a yet-undisclosed location, and the AdDrive-sponsored boxing match at the Mezzanine) I fully intended to attend one or all of these parties, but decided that I should change out of my company's shirt before I did anything else stupid. I de-boarded at The Embarcadero and stumbled through the streets back to Muni. By the time I had gotten home and eaten every frozen-food item I owned, I realized that I had nobody to go to these parties with and wasn't feeling all that healthy anyway, so I stayed home and hung out with my remarkably awesome roommates. And honestly, it was more fun.
