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The combined weight of agents in Tom Ryder’s office is 1782.53 kg. 1782.53 kg ÷ 18 agents = an average weight of 99.02944 kg. The largest agent weighed in at 140.6 kg, making him well above the average. His framed photo still decorates the Hall of Fame hall. The man sold a ton of insurance and his name is revered. He is retired now but if you look hard enough you can still see the imprints of his shoes in the carpets. The second to largest agent is Walter (call me Wally) Russ. His record is no less outstanding, but he is not retired. Walter weighs 138 kg and sells a vast number of policies. His picture hangs top heavy in the Agent-of-the-Month slot, which seems to be perpetually reserved for him.
Down the hall from Tom are two women (89 kg and 94 kg) and four men (120 kg, 108 kg, 113 kg, and 126 kg) He is sandwiched tightly between this weight. Through no fault of his own Tom cannot top 70 kg soaking wet, making him sadly below the company average. He knows there must be smaller people employed here but he has never met any of them. He imagines them in the cafeteria struggling to keep up.
Tom was never self-conscious of his weightlessness until he joined the ranks of Consumer Life. Board meetings were heavy with innuendo: “Not enough meat on this proposal,” this fat man in a gold tie would say, only glancing at Tom. “There would never be enough in this portfolio should the client start eating away at his own reserve,” a ball of pink flesh would moan out of the top of her sweater. All eyes would be on Tom. He would listen and try to nod. He would try to make it look like he knew what was happening while pushing his pathetic stomach out to substantial proportions. He avoided wearing black, which everyone knew was thinning. “Tom, can you give us the skinny on this prospect?” the manager would say, and Tom imagined snickers all around. Tom would reply: “I’ll put some pressure on him.”
“You can try.”
Only Walter (Call me Wally) Russ speaks to all the new agents in the office. “I’ve often heard,” he often says, “that u$ old timer$ $hould only advi$e you rookie$ once you’ve been here a full year. To me, that’$ bull$hit.” Wally wants to help. He guides. He advises. He confuses. He meddles. He intrudes. He controls. He makes $74,500 per year without even getting out of bed in the morning. It is rumored the man grosses $650,000 in an average year. “You know how?” He asked Tom once. “Doing what you’re doing right now. In the trenche$. Getting the dirt done. Doing the dirt.” Tom was never sure what he was doing. But he did feel dirty. Sales seemed to be a tricky business and, after his first training session four weeks ago, Tom was thinking it was more trick than business.
Wally was the training facilitator. “Your potential client$ will alway$ talk themselve$ out of purcha$ing your product.” He told Tom and another recruit. “They will think of every excu$e not to buy life in$urance; we can’t afford it, maybe when the kid$ are older, my job ha$ in$urance coverage, whatever. The$e are called ‘objection$’.” Wally used air-quotes a lot. “Your job, a$ agent$ of Con$umer Life, i$ to ‘overcome’ the$e ‘objection$’ and thi$ can be difficult, but there i$ $kill involved. Which I will teach.” He held up one sausage-like finger, “Fir$t, I will teach you ‘word track$’ which are phra$e$ and analogie$ to help them make the right deci$ion.” Tom and the other recruit nodded. Wally continued with his finger still in the air as if checking for wind, “Never appeal to intellect or rational thought. Alway$ go for the emotion. You u$e analogie$ to $tart the client thinking of wor$t ca$e $cenario$. It’$ called ‘di$turbing’ the client. Now, my favourite analogy to u$e i$ the one I call the ‘$pare tire’ analogy.”
The ‘spare tire’ analogy went like this: Let me ask you: you have a spare tire, don’t you? You know, a spare tire. In your car? I’m betting you do. Sure, you do. It probably came with the car when you bought it. But have you ever had to use it? Have you even seen it? Would you know how to change the tire? Maybe. Maybe not. But it better be there, right? When it was needed. You depend on the spare tire being there, don’t you? You wouldn’t think of going on a long trip without it being there, right? You’ve got your family to think of, after all. Think about it. Dark night. Cold. Twenty-five below. Snowing. Flat tire. But you got the spare. Or do you? Maybe not. You asked yourself a month before you took this trip: why would you need this spare tire? Takes up space. Sell the spare tire, you thought to yourself. And now there you are. Wife in the seat beside you. Baby asleep in the back. The older one starting to cry softly. Scared. Car only has a quarter of a tank of gas. You could walk fifty miles back to the last gas station. Would it be open? Would the heater work if the car ran out of gas? You don’t know. You would have to walk through the snow. Suit jacket and all, you rugged pioneer. Would your family freeze while you were gone? You’re afraid no one would stop to help them. Then you’re afraid someone would. After all, you never know who could be on these roads at night. Your family is helpless. Your family is in serious trouble. Who would have thought the spare tire could alleviate this much pain? After all, you don’t even know what it looks like. You sold it, thinking you would never use it. Now look. Frozen stiff family. Frozen stiff father who never had the forethought of a spare tire. That’s all life insurance is, my friend: a spare tire. You might never need it, but it sure as hell better be there when you do.
“It’$ called di$turbing,” Wally said, “and it work$. Learn it verbatim.” It was disturbing, Tom thought as he stared at the inspirational posters hung on the wall above Wally’s head. They were filled with good looking, well-toned men and women climbing mountains and riding bikes up mountains and sitting smiling at the top of mountains. Captions below these happy people read ‘perseverance’ and ‘integrity’ and ‘attitude is everything’. The posters were meant to motivate, and in the corners of the room were security cameras that were meant to hold you to it.
$$$
The Consumer Life building was at the bottom of Ballast Avenue, a sagging street consisting of mostly financial offices, banks, and car parkades. Tom’s office was on the top floor. His ceiling protected him from a 6,000 kg slab of concrete that held up the other occupant’s Hummers, SUV’s and four-wheel drives. Tom drove a Cobalt.
The large windows of the Consumer Life offices challenged the other windows on Ballast Ave. They reflected the sky. The windows opposite bow in deference and only reflect the street below. No one outside can see in past the formidable glass, but inside a person can look outside if they care to. The massive structure is a serious grey and the oppressive tone persists even at night. And there are 485 people swallowed up inside its belly. Agents, bankers, and accountants are like internal organs inside the giant whale, masticating clients, digesting personal information, regurgitating financial solutions. The janitors are like parasitic fish droning and feeding on the day’s activities. The building, the convivial host, allows itself to be cleaned although it could crush these little, insignificant men. Security cameras like the ones on Tom’s floor are strategically placed all over the building and if these mechanisms and the security guards themselves are the eyes and the ears of the building, it is generally felt by most that the insurance agents are the asshole. Of all the lawyers’ and accountants’ offices in the building, the Consumer Life offices were the least used by any walk-in traffic. Scorn, however real or imagined, was ignored by Consumer Life management. “These other ‘experts’ in this building,” the rhetoric went, “spend their lifetime savings on school and building a practice. Your start-up fees are minimal compared to them. And in a year or two your earnings will be on par.”
A hand-written sign in the coffee room read: “Last year I couldn’t even spell financial advisor...Now I are one.” Management were not amused and pressed for the joker. If they leaned on the culprit a little too heavily, no one commented.
It was true for Tom. There was a suspicious ease with which he had become such an apparently important apparatus in the financial world. With two weeks training and a multiple-choice exam, his name was printed prominently and thickly on a stiff business card. He had 500 of them to give away. He had an office and a mahogany desk he could barely see over. His name was stenciled high on the heavy door and then he was left alone in the room. “Good luck,” they told him and glanced meaningfully at the phone.
That first day, one month ago, he hung his credentials on the wall: a photocopied Certificate of Completion with his name handwritten in the designated area. Below and to the right, the signature of the President of Consumer Life was stamped in black ink. That first day, squeezed between the offices of two senior agents, two industry heavies, he felt something he had never experienced before: calm. He felt secure. He felt optimistic. Perhaps this one thing he could do. There were four nearly blank walls and a large wooden door protecting him. They sheltered and hid him. And the only noise from the offices surrounding him was muffled, intense and quiet, as though someone was trying to move unyielding objects never meant to be moved.
The peace he felt quickly dissipated, however. The first month there was nothing much expected of him: get to know the lay of the land, so to speak. See how operations went, learn some basic sales skills, learn about life insurance products and solutions, commit to memory the various analogies meant to motivate people to protect themselves with life insurance. Get his feet wet making cold calls to total strangers. Learn to handle objections and rejections:
“I already have life insurance.” And he would answer, “Yes but are you sure there is enough coverage?”
“I have insurance through work.” And he would counter with, “Fair enough, but should you get fired or leave the company, you would be much older and harder to insure.”
“How did you get this number?” He would offer a guilty, “It’s in the phonebook, sir.”
“Why don’t you piss off?!” He had no answer for the people that hung up before he could launch into his rehearsed spiel.
It was a small point of pride that both the other agents who were taken on at the same time as Tom were no longer there. It was only one month but he survived longer than two others. The first one to go lasted one hour and thirty-two minutes. He made it through orientation fine, but at the midway point in the initial training video, he stood up in the dark, blocking the projector with his body, said “Fuck this noise,” and left. No one went after him.
The second new agent to leave was called David. During orientation David told Tom that he could tell right away they would be longtime friends. He told him within minutes of their meeting. They would be partners in this new gig called Consumer Life. They would take on the world of sales. Their pictures would sit side by side in the Hall of Fame hall. In a few years, they would be running this company. Maybe open a branch of their own somewhere. Maybe compete with Consumer Life eventually and corner the market. David pointed out all the things the company was doing wrong. He could tell the first day on the job that they were doing things ass-backward. During the first board meeting, David was going to tell the other agents the great ideas he had. They would be impressed, he was sure. And Tom could take credit for some of these ideas if he wanted. “That’s ok,” Tom said, and David winked.
It wasn’t that the ideas he presented during the first board meeting he and Tom attended weren’t good. It wasn’t as though his ideas did not hold any water. The problem was David himself could not hold any water. All the heavyweights were there, and the managers stood in front of them introducing the new recruits. Tom nodded to the applause and the murmurs of welcome. David stood when introduced, and told everyone how happy he was to be a new member of the Consumer Life family.
When Stan the senior manager smiled, it took his whole face by surprise. His eyes wrinkled, and the corners of his mouth touched his ears. His hairline moved back ten years. “We heard you have some great plans for the office here, David.” And then he indicated to David that he had the floor, even though David was already standing.
“You heard...? Plans?” Tom could tell David had lost some of the bravado he exhibited when they were in private and David was expounding on his ideas. His usual squared shoulders sagged a bit and he emitted a small, nervous laugh, “are the walls in my office bugged?”
Stan the senior manager’s smile faltered, and he glanced over at Walter (Call Me Wally) who nodded once and said, “It’$ a joke.” Stan the senior manager’s smile returned, and he closed his eyes and held his head back and shook his shoulders twice. Tom assumed this was a laugh.
“Well, mostly just stuff I was thinking about, from my last place of employment.” David spoke softer than Tom had heard him speak before. In their few encounters he was loud and liked to be loud about two inches from Tom’s face. “I worked for a security company, selling security alarms...”
“Go on.” Stan the senior manager coaxed.
Tom suddenly did not want David to ‘go on’ with whatever story he was going to tell. If it was the story he thought it was, then it was a bad idea. It was something David had told Tom and the other recruit (What the hell was his name? The ‘fuck this noise’ guy) sometime during their first few days. “This thing they call ‘Disturbing The Clients?’ It’s nothing new, man.” David had told them over coffee. “We used to do it all the time at the security company I worked for. You’d go to someone’s door and tell them we were installing a security system across the street,” He held up his hand to the side of his face pretending to whisper, “We weren’t.” He grinned. “But we would say we were installing this security system in their neighbourhood and would they be interested in checking it out for their own home. And sometimes that worked and sometimes no. But if they hesitated we would tell them about break-ins happening. The wife gets scared and they let us in and that’s practically a sale. But the tough ones, the ones that say no thank you no matter what you tell them?” Here he leaned in close, but his voice was still loud, “We would give a kid, like, $50 to scope out the house and when they weren’t home the kid would bust a window. Not go in or take anything, but just bust the window so it looked like someone broke in.” He laughed, “Harmless, but it worked. The next time we came around the wifey would be drooling to sign a contract for the best security they could get. It’s called disturbing the client. Same thing.”
If this was what David was about to tell the management and agents at Consumer Life, Tom wanted no part of it. He shifted uncomfortably and tried to catch David’s eye to tell him to shut up. But the managers were smiling and Stan the senior manager was smiling, and Wally was smiling. The other agents were staring down at blank notebooks. One of them sighed audibly.
“Go on.” Stan the senior manager said again.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, David reached for his bottled water and swallowed three big swallows. “Well,” He tried to clear his throat, but his face contorted and he dropped his chin giving it some impressive rolls. He began to cough silently, internally, then louder as his whole body rocked with convulsions. He put his hand to his chest and then outwards to the group, begging their pardon. He turned away and coughed. Soon his shoulders stopped moving and he turned back, red faced and trying to smile. Then the coughing started again. “I’m... sorry...” He was sputtering, “wrong hole...” The coughing and sputtering got worse and he placed both hands on the table in front of him and leaned over, “Son of a bitch!” He croaked loudly and everyone in the room began to rise from their seats to offer help or escape, Tom wasn’t sure. “What the fuck?” David shouted and threw up a small stream of clear fluid on the table. He spit a few times and looked up at Stan the senior manager. “Wow.” He tried to smile.
“Ok then.” Stan the senior manager said as everyone stirred uncomfortably in their seats. “Why don’t you step outside and walk it off.”
“Wrong hole...” David said moving to the door and waving apologetically to the room.
“Of course.” Stan the senior manager said and winced at the pool of bile on the boardroom table. “Let’s call this a meeting and get to work, eh?” There was shuffling of papers and scraping of chairs as the agents rose to their feet.
Tom never saw David again. At the next meeting Stan the senior manager told the group that David had left to pursue other interests. “What can I $ay,” Wally told Tom later in private, “He puked on our table.”