My day in sales

I was cruising around the internet, minding my own business, when suddenly my trainer's wife mentions that her mom is looking for people to work a flexible schedule for $13/hour. One of my favorite things in the world is making $13/hour, so after some discussion and and pondering and a few days, I make the phone call and sign up.

The deal is this fella Eric Dowdle is an artist, and he's got his art showing at Costco's around Utah this fall, and he needs people to watch and run the display and answer questions and explain why no home is complete without a piece of Dowdle Folk Art in the parlor. I hoped I'd be mostly a theft deterrent, but oh well. My first station was to be Murray (gas was reimbursed) so I drove forever, learned what I was doing, worked for a few hours, drove home. It wasn't super painful for a salesman gig, but it was still a salesman gig, so I was a little down by the time I got home.

It behooveth me at this point that I explain a main motivator in going for the job in the first place. You may but probably don't recall from one of those tags a while back that I listed six or eight things that I wanted/needed or something like that. At the top of the list was DMC-TZ5. It's a camera. It's about $370 at most stores. Ouch, right? So I figure if I take this job I can earn that much money, buy the camera and be no worse off financially than I would have been without the job, and see if I wanted to keep working. I really planned to earn the money and then pay cash for the camera, but after that first evening I needed a morale booster, so I went ahead and searched online and got the camera brand new for $200. Whoo-hoo!

Went back to work the next evening, and really things were going okay. The art was cool, so at least it was a product I believed in, and ya know, I just like being in Costco. I don't know why, but I do. Not too bad a gig all things considered. But then I started considering all the time I was investing. It came out to 13 hours in two days, which two days I really really needed to get a lot of stuff done and couldn't. Basically I thought it would work out great but it wasn't going to and I thought it best to cut my losses and drop out before they got used to me. So I finished out the shift enthusiastically (don't want to get paid for nothing, after all) and then called up and quit when I got to my car. She didn't seem too offended, which was a relief, cause I like her, and she's my trainer's wife's mom, which is to say she's the mother of the wife of my mission 'father', which makes me sort of a step-grandson-in-law, so we're practically family, and I'd hate to have family not like me.

So that was my schpiel as a salesman. Now I just gotta make another $100 on top of my normal income to pay for the rest of that camera. No worries, I will. You know how creative and ambitious we college kids are. But hey. That Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5 is sweet.