More Wacky Adventures Embarked Upon Whilst Not Watching LOST Part 2
A little later I was again hanging around The Shake Shack to see when they were going to get back to me about my possible employment with them when I got a phone call. I answered and couldn’t hear what the person on the other end of the line was saying due to the din of the city, so I ended up sealing myself up inside an elevator to escape the racket. Once I could hear the other person clearly I heard the same sports company spiel repeated to me that I had heard the receptionist reciting over the phone whilst waiting in the office for my last interview. With some measure of amusement I agreed to the interview, not expecting much to come of it (partly because the receptionist had been doing nothing but inviting others to interviews when I had been waiting in the office) but thinking it best to know I’d exploited all opportunities. So I soon found myself in the same office as before, waiting for yet another interview, filling out yet another questionnaire, this time exaggerating my enthusiasm for swimming under “interests”. On this occasion I got to do the interview by myself, with a different manager, in an office next to the one the last one had been in; this particular office was absolutely filled with sporting paraphernalia. This manager looked like a rugby player to me, although he was wearing a suit with a pink lining. He sat me down and started telling me about the company confidently and unfalteringly, giving me lots of information without telling me exactly what my job would involve. He then said that I had been selected out of hundreds of possible candidates for an interview, and he said that out of those that had reached the interview stage, only a percentage would make it to the last step. He then asked me to give him two reasons why I should be part of the percentage to go onto the last step. After having heard the number of people who were being recruited for the position last time I was in the office, I was very doubtful I would get the job, and I wasn’t overly interested in sport and still keen on the milkshake thing, so I wasn’t especially enthusiastic on it either. However, all this meant I didn’t get nervous when he put me on the spot with his questions, so I pondered it for a moment and responded that I was eager to please and that, due to doing two very different degrees, I would have two very different perspectives on solving problems. I was fairly self-satisfied with my answers, and much to my surprise he seemed satisfied as well as he handed me his business card and said he was intrigued by me and would like to organise an observation day as the last stage of the recruitment process. I was pretty shocked by this and quickly agreed to his suggested times with added thanks, and made my way home experiencing some slight anxiety as to how working for a sports company together with joining a gym would impact my geeky identity, managing to forget to tag on between Leederville and Perth in the process and thus receiving a $100 fine, but I managed to make excuses and go through the motions to avoid having to pay it.
I went in for my observation fairly early in the morning and sat in the same place I had whilst waiting for my interview, although this time there was nightclub music coming from beyond the door for some reason. Eventually people started emerging from behind the door, amongst them an Irish guy named Dave who would apparently be taking me out on my observation that day. Together with another guy, named Dan, who was taking another girl out for observation, we got into Dan’s car to be taken to the place Dave and Dan would be working that day. The girl and I were given questionnaires to be filled out, which included questions for an assessment the person we were be taken out by would be doing of us. One of the questions was “Did the observation ask a lot of questions?” which quickly prompted me to ask a whole bunch. I was listening very hard at first because I thought the questionnaire was going to be an exam that we’d have to fill out at the end of the observation based on what we’d heard and observed, but to my relief it turned out it was something we’d be talked through. Once the four of us arrived at our destination, a shopping centre not too far from where I lived, it became clear exactly what the job involved. Turned out it involved being one of those people that sit at the tables in and besides shops that everyone tries to avoid whilst they call out asking if you want to help something or other. That cleared up my confusion somewhat, as when I had initially put myself down for the job I had envisioned working as an assistant in an actual sports store, which really didn’t seem suited to the least sporty person I know, namely myself, so this seemed like less of a threat to my geekiness. I then learnt that the pay was commission based, and my father had specified very precisely that I should get a job with an hourly rate, but at that point I felt I’d gone so far and was doing so well that I was obligated to see it through, and Dave told me not to worry as he generally made at least $100 a day, so that made me feel a lot better about it all. Dave explained some details of the job to me, and at the end he ranked me quite favourably in my assessment, and I then started heading back to the office in Leederville, where after a follow up interview, the Manager of TaylorMade Sports, Peter Taylor, told me I had the job, giving me a congratulatory certificate and everything, making me feel quite special indeed.
The day following my observation I went to my training day at the office, where there was a bunch of other people there in the same position. The company’s HR guy Mikey explained some details of how the grand company or whatever that TaylorMade works for, Appco Group, was established and how it all works. Something to do with selling pens building up to owning power stations. We were then given what Mikey called an IQ test, which was basically a page of those trick questions such as “How many of each animal did Moses take on the Ark?” and after we’d done that we had to get ABNs (Australian Business Numbers) because as independent contractors we apparently technically were starting our own businesses. It seems that all you have to do to start your own company is enter some of your details into a website. We then had our pictures taken for our IC badges and were given booklets detailing some information pertaining to our work. I kindled the beginnings of friendship with another girl entering the job and went home after being there for only a few hours. So far so good, I thought.
The next day I woke up at 5:30 in the morning in order to be at work by 7:30am; putting on the suit my parents had bought for my observation day, and putting my hair up in this apparently professional looking and slightly painful clip, along with make-up on my face, things I never bothered with when going to university. I arrived in Leederville a little early, giving me a chance to investigate the area before continuing on to the office. The suburb was littered with many interesting looking little shops and cafes, and had a hipster feel to it overall. I eventually realised that it was the same place I had come with Jess and Kitty when we’d gone to the Luna Cinema and saw Redline. I made a mental note visit San Churros after work.
When I got to the office slightly early there was pumping nightclub music emanating for a disc player on the wall and people milling about, and I did my best to strike up conversation with them. They were all amiable, but I found it a little difficult to find a topic of conversation with them, as I then realised that this was perhaps the first time in two years where I was mingling with a group of people who weren’t a bunch of university geeks, or geeks of some sort anyway. A good portion of them hadn’t finished high school, let alone gone to university. As more people arrived I didn’t see the girl that I had become friends with the day before, despite her offer to get coffee together before work, which I had to decline as a 5:30am start was early enough already. When the office was fairly full of people some of the salespeople there began gathering the others into groups to give little presentations, regardless of the rather loud music competing with them. The manager, Pete, started going around greeting people, and I felt rather charmed by his friendliness. Eventually he turned the music down and everyone suddenly gathered into a large circle that took up the room. Pete then started to engage everyone in the room with a manic enthusiasm and familiarity, telling everyone to hit the person next to them on the back of the head. He then said that due to the number of new people in the office, everyone should go introduce themself to someone in the office they didn’t know using their porn star name, which according to him is a combination of the name of your first pet and your first street, thus I ended up introducing myself to the only man who appeared middle aged in an office full of people in their twenties and thirties as “Rupert Rosewood”. He responded by laughing and saying that was rather worrying. In retrospect it should have actually been “Rupert Stovecourt” but that doesn’t sound anywhere near as porny. Pete then went on to congratulate a number of people in the office that had apparently been doing well, to which everyone responded with matching celebratory gusto.
When the meeting was over people started moving out, and I was given a wad of tickets to sell, an IC badge, and some pitch cards, and told I would be going out on the Paralympics campaign with a guy called Brian. He looked about my age, and gave me a set of fold up chairs to carry as he carried a fold up table and we made our way into Perth via the very short train ride, only to then catch another train to Thornlie, an area of Perth I’d never been to before. To do so we had to go along the Armadale/Thornlie Line, which I’d never before taken but had some vague recollection of it being deemed one of the dodgy ones. The train we boarded was one of the older ones, the line itself being one of the older train lines, unlike the one I regularly took into the city which was brand new. As we headed off the journey was much shakier than I was accustomed to train rides being, and the scenery that passed us quickly went from being urban to slightly industrial, then on to slightly decrepit. One memorable sight that passed us by was “Cuddles Day Care” if I’m recalling its name correctly, which was written out in very faded pastel colours like much of the shops and businesses we passed, and had an overall state of disrepair that reflected the area around it. During the trip there Brian explained the pitch I was to give to customers; we were apparently selling raffle tickets to raise 8 million to send the Australian Team over to the 2012 Paralympics in London, as they get no government funding for such an escapade. Once I was pretty sure I knew what I was meant to be saying, I did my best to engage Brian in conversation, and got a few details out of him. He had apparently been studying sport science before working with the company, and had been there for a couple of months, saying that he enjoyed the job, which was vaguely encouraging.
We eventually arrived at Thornlie station, where we then started to wait for a bus. We were meant to have been at our site by 9:00am, but it was nearing 10:00am by that point. After a while our bus arrived and took us to our destination, Thornlie IGA. Brian set up the fold out table outside the entrance and I did the same with the chairs, before Brian placed a table cloth over the table and used safety pins to attach a number of pictures of para-athletes to the front and bunches of balloons to the corners. It was all rather different to my observation day, where we had taken a car rather than public transport to our destination, and said destination had been inside a shopping centre rather than outside an independent grocer, where the table had already been set up as opposed to being carried in by us. We each took a seat of either side of the table and began to pitch people that went past, which basically means asking every person that walks past you to come over. I remembered the very mild dread I would experience whenever I’d see a salesperson attending a station in the distance (although mainly because I never had any of my own money to give them), and brace myself for the inevitable greeting. Now I was experiencing it all from the other perspective. One guy who rounded the corner to find us responded to the pitch by jokingly noting that we were a pair of trapdoor spiders. Eventually I got my very first sale, from a slightly spacey old woman who claimed her name was Kindness...and that her last name was also Kindness.
About half way through the day a worker at the centre came up to us and claimed that we weren’t supposed to be there, prompting Brian to leave me to speak to the central manager; turns out we were at the wrong IGA. Packing up the tables and chairs, we carried them over a bridge in the midday heat, back tracking much of the distance we’d travelled by bus. We then set up outside another, smaller IGA. Unlike the last one, where we’d been sitting in a shady alcove, this one just had an awning to protect us from the sun. A girl working at the IGA came out and asked us how we didn’t get ridiculously bored sitting around all day; I said nothing, as it wasn’t clear to me either. Eventually 3:00pm rocked around and Brian had sold about 15 tickets and I had sold about 5, when Brian started suggesting leaving the site early, as the place was completely dead. I was a little surprised to hear him suggest such a thing, as in the meeting that morning Pete had been going on about how there was no such thing as a bad site only a bad person and that one should always wait for the law of averages to kick in. I wondered out loud if this was meant to be some sort of test of character, and Brian responded with a chuckle and an unconvincing suggestion that it might be. I then noted that I’d only collected $50, but Brian then assured me that my score would not reflect poorly on me. Soon afterwards I sold another ticket, putting me on six, and Brian again asked if we should pack up, and I got the feeling he really wanted to leave, and I wasn’t particularly keen on sticking around myself. So I got to leave work early on my first day, having made $12.
So the next day I got up at 5:30am once more to head into Leederville. That morning was very much the same as the last with the nightclub music, training in sales, and incredibly zealous morning meeting. However when I was given my tickets, they were not for the Paralympics campaign, and I was told I was instead being sent out on the Royal Life Saving campaign with the older guy I’d introduced myself to as Rupert Rosewood the day before, whose name was apparently Greg. I felt a little put out by this, as I was worried that they were putting me on a different campaign because I hadn’t done very well the day before, even though Brian had thought that the problem was the site (something we were told was never a valid excuse). I did nothing to indicate any discouragement and went along with Greg, who was taking out an observation that had a car to take us to our site, so that was nice. We did manage to get lost on the way there, but I needed to learn a new pitch so I was grateful for the extra time. The observation Greg was taking out was a woman around his age who had just decided to quit her job at a cafe (I couldn’t remember if she said she was its owner or not) and try something different.
We eventually arrived at an IGA in someplace or other and Greg set up a table by the door and noted that he didn’t like sitting down all day so he hadn’t brought chairs. So as Greg helped his observation through her questionnaire I stood next to a table and tried to convince passersby to gamble for the sake of preventing toddler drownings. It seemed to work pretty well at first because within the initial hour a guy came up to me and bought five tickets, $50 dollars worth, which was almost as much as I’d sold all day before. Once his observation had left Greg congratulated me on learning my new pitch as quickly as I had and took a place on the other side of the table. Shortly afterwards a man in a suit who turned out to be the central manager came up to us and claimed we weren’t supposed to be, directed his objection to our presence more in my direction rather than Greg’s, and articulating said objection in a hilariously dickish way, emphasising how only local clubs were allowed to do promotions outside his IGA and repeatedly reminding us that he was the central manager by reciting his full name each time reiterating the point, and generally coming across as incredible full of himself. We gave him a phone so he would be able to talk to Pete, and then listened to him berated Pete in much the same hilariously dickish manner. Eventually he finished and then pretty much said we could stay for the day if he never saw us again. Once he was gone Greg noted that he never wanted to come back anyway and then apologised that I was the one that had received the brunt of his dickishness, but I just said how funny I found it all. As the day went on I spoke to Greg a bit and found him to be a rather interesting character who had me laughing a fair bit; my legs also grew progressively sorer and my sales certainly did not keep up the same rate they had started out at. I ended up selling about 19 tickets and I think Greg sold twenty-something.
The next day I again showed up at work to the sound of the club music and the sight of the level two sales people training the level ones, and in my case, level zeros. Pretty soon we gathered in our teams with our team leaders, the level threes, for our briefings. My team leader was a tall Maori guy we all called Tee, who was on the verge of being prompted to level four, assistant manager. He went over the goals of the team, and then congratulated those of the group that had done well, including congratulating me on getting a new personal best the day before and tripling my sales, telling me that I’d surely keep up such an exponential trend. I blushed and felt earnestly encouraged by his words, and was then further encouraged when I was told that I’d be sent out with Greg on the Royal Life Saving campaign again, this time to a shopping centre quite close to my home. I was convinced that the sales at shopping centres would have to be better than outside IGAs, seeing as there are many more people at shopping centres, plus I expected that people’s mentality towards spending large sums of money would be different in shopping centres, since I considered them the sort of place one would go for large purchases, whereas IGAs are just for regular grocery shopping. Greg had assured me that wasn’t the case and that ICs make the same average amount at both IGAs and shopping centres, due to people stopping a lot less frequently at shopping centres, but he had also said that he usually did pretty well at the shopping centre we were going to, so I remained positive.
The shopping centre was at Kwinana, just down the freeway from my home; we didn’t have to take chairs and tables as they were already there for us, although Greg still spent a good portion of the hour after we arrived arranging his tablecloth, picture cards and balloons, as he considered a very well presented table as a large part of his success. We certainly saw far, FAR more people in the shopping centre than in the IGA; at the IGAs I’d only filled out the first half dozen or so lines on my Test and Measure Card, a sheet of paper with boxes used to record how many people we’d spoken to, stopped, and sold to; at the shopping centre I filled out the entire sheet and had to turn it over. Whilst the stopping rate was indeed less frequent at the shopping centre, I still certainly ended up doing much better there than I had at either of the IGAs; at the end of the day I had sold about 45 tickets, earning myself “solid gold”, meaning I’d sold between 40 and 50 tickets, thus meeting the company expectations and getting myself a mention in the following morning meeting along with a bunch of other workers who had done the same or better. My only disappointment was that I had not hit 50 tickets, which would have made me $100, and perhaps gotten me $20 bonus which I believe was for people who sold 50 tickets in shopping centres and 40 at IGAs, where the company doesn’t need to rent out the space.
Greg and I were at the same shopping centre on the same campaign for two days straight, where my performance was a little lower on the second day if I recall correctly, but still much better than at the IGAs. That may be due to the fact that on the first day, much to my surprise and delight, a fairly unassuming woman bought a $100 pack of tickets off of me, ten tickets in other words, which greatly helped my sales. Despite the apparent sales averages in the office, I was amazed I was selling any tickets at all, let alone ten in one go. Most of the raffles I had encountered sold tickets at two or three dollars each; ten dollars each seemed ridiculous to me as soon as I got the job, and I felt very awkward asking people to buy them. Worse still was asking people about the packs, which were basically bundles of tickets given positive names and said to correspond to certain costs of the cause, to make people more inclined to buy them. They started at three ticket packs for $30 going all the way up to 100 ticket packs for $1 000, and we had to ask if they wanted the highest packs first, generally by showing them a page just displaying the three highest priced packs without giving them any indication that there are any lower options, and I’ll tell you that when I started out I did not feel comfortable asking random strangers out to do some causal shopping to give me a thousand bucks. Still, whilst a lot of potential customers left as soon as they found out the minimum price was $10, a surprising number of people did spend over ten bucks at our table. Also because it was near where I lived there were a few people there that I knew, so I ended up selling a ticket to the father of a girl I had known at high school and to Mr. Roberts, my old high school physics teacher, although I had to yell at him that he had to buy one off me as he was walking off, which probably made me look like a pretty psychotic sales person, and his wife was giving me some cold looks, and Greg, who used to be a school teacher, said it was probably because she would be suspicious of all her husband’s female students. That kinda creeped me out, but then Darcy did have a crush on him when we were at school, so whatever. At the end of each day Greg filled out my evaluation sheet, and told me that I had been meeting all the expected requirements and should be able to pass my test and advance to level one as soon as my six day evaluation was over without issue. He also noted that I had been committing to the principle of working my law of averages a little too much and that I should really take a break, as I had been sitting in my seat from 9am to 5:30pm without getting up to stretch my legs, eat or use the loo. I must admit, it was having a weird effect on my stomach at first.
So I spent most of my first week with Greg, but when I went in for the next week it turned out I was no longer on the Royal Life Saving campaign, but instead I had been transferred to the Surf Life Saving campaign and would be going to an IGA in the northern suburbs with Dan, one of the guys that had taken me out on my observation. For the Surf Life Saving campaign I was given a Surf Life Saving t-shirt some sizes too large for me to wear whilst campaigning, and then Dan and I went off in his car towards the IGA in question. Dan had just returned from a road trip, in which certain ICs were sent out to regional areas to sell for the causes and the company, and started complaining that people were much ruder in the city than the country each time someone refused to acknowledge us. We struck up a bit of a conversation with one another and I told him about my university studies whilst he told me about his propensity for spending his free time free styling and his plan to eventually start a career in the rap industry. He got rather excited when a member of a Perth band he liked (“Spiral” or something) apparently passed us by but was somewhat disappointed that he didn’t get the chance to talk to him. There was also this woman near us who was telling her really sweet seeming little son that he should stopping being so nice and should bash the kids at school that bully him; illustrating her point with physical gestures and frequent coarse language, much to our bile fascination. This was in a suburb near the beach, so it must be said that the socio-economic status of an area still isn’t a good indicator for the standard of behaviour to expect from the inhabitants.
I was sent out to this same IGA on the same campaign with Dan for two days in a row. I was finding it a bit disorientating being transferred from a campaign called Royal Life Saving onto one called Surf Life Saving so I stumbled a bit with my pitch. I was also having trouble telling which people going in and out of the IGA were people we’d already spoken to, as I have a lot of trouble with facial recognition, something Dan kept calling me out on. He also told me that my pitch to passing customers was too repetitive and that I should mix it up more, plus it was too loud, although when I toned it down somewhat it was suddenly not enthusiastic enough. On the second day those of us on the Surf Life Saving campaign were given handheld banners to draw people’s attention which I used liberally, but then it ripped. I also made a mistake where I sold someone some tickets but forgot to actually give then to her, so Dan made me go looking for and then call her to give them to her, even though I had her details so she didn’t need the tickets to actually win the prize. Being rather self-conscious of my abilities all this left me feeling rather demoralized. One customer Dan was selling to did manage to cheer me up a fair bit however; Greg had told me I shouldn’t talk to the customer my partner is pitching because it would disrupt the relationship building between them, but when I noticed what I had at first thought was the Aboriginal dot painting of sting-ray was in fact an Oriental style picture of the Serenity from Firefly I did this geek out thing that the woman in the t-shirt soon noticed and in that moment we had the understanding. Yeah, you know it. It didn’t disrupt the sales because she still bought a ticket or two off Dan but we still managed to have a conversation about the obvious topic of Firefly, leading on to the fact that she’d apparently named her little daughter after Kaylee, as well how she’d got her T-shirt from ThinkGeek. Now that was all awesome enough, but to add to that about half an hour later she came back to the IGA with a T-shirt that had “JAYNESTOWN CANTON” written on the front along with a picture of Jayne’s statue, which she said she and her husband had ordered but was much too small for either of them. She let me try it on and it was a perfect fit, thus it is now mine. That was certainly a highlight of the overall experience.
Whilst it was an opportunity to meet some pretty awesome people such as that lady and then ask them for money, after those two days the job was beginning to wear thin and I was getting quite literally tired with all the 5:30am starts and having none of the free time I so cherish. Whilst I had been sent out with Dan I had been getting phone calls which I hadn’t been able to answer at the time, but turned out to be from the boss at a Nissan Dealership responding to my application for a part-time receptionist position. At first I wasn’t sure what I should do about it, but by Tuesday night I was ringing him up to find out if I could somehow organise a meeting around my pretty much impossible schedule. I almost got a meeting but then I felt that I should mention that I would be away for a week around Christmas, which turned out to be exactly when he wanted someone to work, and that was the end of that. Back to Plan A, I thought...or Plan B...or wherever the hell continuing to work my ass off in the ticket industry fit into that sequence.
So on Wednesday I went back into TaylorMade Sports where I was told that I would remain on the Surf Life Saving campaign, but would this time be going out with my team leader, Dave (Tee was Dave’s team leader, so by extension he was also my team leader at times, to clear up that seeming discrepancy). He had seemed like a pretty nice guy on my observation day, and everyone around the office had been saying what a laugh he was, so I thought it would be pretty fun. We took public transport out to an IGA where we started to set up the table when a couple of girls with money tins showed up and it became clear that the site had been double-booked. Dave went to talk to the central manager; turns out we were the ones that had to leave. So this marked the third time in less than two weeks of work that I had been sent out to a site I wasn’t meant to be at, and more than anything I found this hilarious. Dave called the office and then said that we would be sent out on a business to business venture, and I was delighted, as it meant we would actually be moving around and exploring as opposed to stuck outside an IGA all day, which always felt so incredibly dull to me. Before we left I gave the tin shakers $10 as I felt fundraisers had to look out for each other, and Dave seemed absolutely incredulous towards my action. “That’s $10 you could have spent on yourself!” I recall him exclaiming, and I found that very odd seeing as $10 was the least amount of money he was regularly asking people for. I personally felt compelled to practice what I preached, so much so that I gave the thin shakers an extra $5 on the way out. Plus I was still using my parents’ money at that stage.
We waited a fair while in the sun for the bus to pick us up, before we made our way to one of Perth’s northern most suburbs, somewhere I’d never before been as I lived south of the river. We still had Dave’s tables and chairs with us but he deemed it alright to leave them hidden under a shrub as we went out to sell. We eventually found our way through the large and rather nice shopping centre where I found myself sorely tempted by the many foods on offer to the small business district, where I learnt that going business to business basically involved taking turns going into each sequential store or office along the streets and doing one’s pitch to the people working there. At first I felt a bit unsure of myself but I soon got into the rhythm of how it worked, although that didn’t seem to change the fact that the day prior some salespeople on the Royal Life Saving campaign had apparently walked those same streets and entered the same businesses, making the people there quite unwilling to fork out anything more. We tried the surrounding streets only to receive much the same objection, and in the summer sun we were both sweating quite profusely, and I was grateful that whilst the offices didn’t have willing customers, they did have water coolers, and I believe I made use of every one. Once we had visited a good portion of the streets we had been assigned and sold only one ticket, if my memory serves me correctly, Dave began to consider giving up and calling it a day. I very much liked the sound of that but I didn’t say as much as I was trying to maintain a good impression, so I said it was his call. He decided to ring the office to tell them what had happened once more, and we ended up getting sent back to Leederville to go business to business there, to my secret disappointment. We made our way back through the large shopping centre, getting chips on the way through, and returned to the shrub to collect Dave’s table and chairs, where Dave then deposited his chip box instead, and took the train into Leederville.
When we arrived in Leederville we hid Dave’s tables and chairs near the fish restaurant and proceeded to walk up the hipster street to find what money we could milk from it. Not very much it would seem, but at least none of the people there objected that someone had already gone through the day before. We went up the main street to parts I hadn’t yet seen, and went into businesses specialising in things such as photography, fishing, wedding dresses and one that called itself a compounding centre, and even though Dave was selling to the woman there I couldn’t help but ask what the heck a compounding centre is, and she explained to me in the semi-serious and attentive manner that a science teacher might explain to a student that it was like a pharmacy that makes medicines tailored to the needs of its customers. Once we had visited all the streets in that area we moved onto the street that our office was situated in. After passing the exterior of those buildings several times I was now walking inside them still having no clear idea of what they were used for to interrupt the business of complete strangers. This prerogative to suddenly walk into almost anywhere felt almost unlocking new areas in a video game, although signs out the front of some offices labelled “No Hawkers” made me feel a bit like a leper; ironically enough I later noticed that the office where I worked had a “No Hawkers” sign hidden under the stairs, which could be used to keep its own employers away should it be placed outside the door. Whilst be able to walk into all these random places suddenly made the world feel a whole lot bigger, the fact that most of them contained small dingy offices where the inhabitants would occasionally apologise for their inability to buy a ticket, or more than one ticket, with explanations of financial difficulties and lamentations of being overworked made me feel that these were not happy places. I kept thinking to myself, “I have seen into the heart of small business, and I am not impressed.” As the time passed 5:00pm I was quite willing to give up and go home, but Dave pointed out that there were still some offices left and insisted that we continue on to 5:30pm, so that we did. He ended up selling twelve tickets and I ended up selling five; to be honest I was just happy that I’d finished a book.