JANUARY 4, 2024 – After final exams at the end of spring semester, I parked myself for a week at my sister’s house in Jamaica Plain, just outside of Boston. It would be my last stretch of freedom, I assumed, until summer’s end. If everything worked out as planned, after the sales job I’d return home and spend a week or so up at the cabin before heading back to college. Often, however, things don’t work out as planned.
At the end of freedom week in Jamaica Plain, I packed up and on a one-way ticket flew to Nashville, headquarters of the Southwestern Company. Why a company based well east of the Mississippi River was called “Southwestern” was a mystery to me, and when I asked around—including Mike and Keith early on in the recruitment process—no one seemed to know or particularly care. And there was no such thing, of course, as the internet or Google or Wikipedia, which 50 years later provided me the answer in less than 50 seconds: the company was founded in 1855, and at the time, Nashville was in the southwestern (more or less) of what was then the United States.
Gathering with me that Sunday were scores of other recruits from American college and university campuses hither and yon. We were greeted by company representatives who then shepherded us to a cheap but acceptably clean motel in the midst of a busy and unattractive part of town. Mike caught up with me just outside the motel and tried to liven things up with his usual energy.
“Act enthusiastic, you become enthusiastic,” he said. Given the oppressive heat and humidity, I found it hard to share Mike’s level of enthusiasm. He assured me that where the sales training would take place—inside a nearby movie theater rented by Southwestern—conditions would be more comfortable.
I don’t remember much about that first night surrounded by a pack of fellow recruits, except that a disproportionate number had Southern accents and were on the boisterous side. Mike called them “enthusiastic.” I suppose I could’ve called them extroverted, but I settled on “different,” especially given how many went by two initials in lieu of a proper name.
This convention baffled me. I remember introducing myself as “Eric” to the first among many salesmen-in-training who in turn introduced himself by way of two initials. “So what’s your name?” I asked.
“T.R.” the guy repeated them.
“No, I mean what do the ‘T’ and the ‘R’ stand for?”
“Nothin’” he said. “Just T. R. That’s what I’m called—T.R.”
In disbelief I persisted, but T. R. was just as insistent that they “didn’t stand for nothin’.” I’d been certain he was pulling my Yankee leg, but his utter lack of humor in the exchange caused me to rethink my assumption.
Many of the recruits seemed to know one another, either from school or because they were more extroverted than I, at least among people who shared some variation of a Southern twang. We slept several to a room, which seemed to draw out a locker room mentality among the extroverts. I felt like a stranger among foreigners—in a land quite foreign to Yankee Maine and Minnesota, the North Star State.
The next morning the phone rang at 7:00. It was our wake-up call, courtesy of the reception desk working in cahoots with Southwestern’s sales training team. Shortly thereafter we were rounded up and led to a nearby family restaurant for breakfast. It was my first exposure to such fare as “grits,” though when it came to ordering, I went with the familiar—scrambled eggs and toast. Meals were on our nickel, we’d been told, as was everything else involved with the job—except the “free sales training.” Nevertheless, when I reached into my pocket to scrounge up a tip, Mike informed me that Southwestern frowned on tipping.
“They want you to learn to be frugal,” he said. “The less you spend, the more you make.”
A couple of weeks into the gig, I understood better the rationale for scrimping and saving: you were more likely to endure the self-funding sales job if you didn’t burn through your money too quickly.
By the time we began assembling at the movie theater, word got out that last year’s top salesman had just arrived. You could see his brand new, bright yellow Porsche in the parking lot. He’d made enough dough selling the one-volume encyclopedia to splurge on the car. His status as a killer salesman plus the car made him a rock star, and our handlers leveraged his reputation effectively. “See, you work hard enough, and you too could be a big man on campus next fall.”
I couldn’t discern much frugality in the purchase of a Porsche, unless “frugality” was defined as buying a car that had no back seat.
At 8:30 sharp the show began—not a movie, but the much-hyped week of sales training. (Cont.)
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
