upsold

I like to tell stories.  I really like to tell lies.  I like to tell incredible whoppers and see if you’ll buy what I am selling.  It is the one thing I really, really like about my current job.  I get to talk to people and see if they’ll buy into me, my product, and how much money I can make off them.  Concurrently, the most important qualities for me in a friend is for you to be loyal and either interesting or intelligent.  I can’t stand people who are indiscrete or boring; I can overlook just about any fault if you have those two attributes. 

 I love telling lies so much that when I was little my father gave me a Pinocchio doll before a deployment.  For years I would blame everything on this doll or claim it told me to do the naughty things I had done.  I am unsure of how this doll met his demise but I am pretty sure that a three-year-old Chaos Bean led an angry mob of toddlers and they burned it at the stake. 

 I also like when I am buying something for the salesperson to sell me something.  Yeah, I usually do some cursory research before I get to the store and generally know what I want but as a salesman I enjoy being sold to.  I can usually repel the advances of the other salespeople; today was not one of those days. 

 I didn’t need a new phone, but I could get a deal on one and had the money for it.  I annoyed my friend Darren at the Apple store with a million questions about the phones and which one was best for me when I had done something that probably voided the warranty on the iPhone I had.  Darren is also a hero of the Revolution and because of this I trust him implicitly – as I trust all the other partisans from that long ago.  I cannot believe he fleeced me the way he did, I am very proud of him. 

 He used a very classic move that isn’t as easy as it sounds.  He talked the product down and pointed out how I didn’t need it.  This worked because Chaos Bean was there to point out that, oh no – I really did.  You see, size matters.  I could have lived – and maybe even been content – with eight gigs but I would be happier with sixteen.  My Internet will be faster measured in metrics that are beyond my comprehension and I will be able to hold twice as much video that I am not even sure that I will take.  It is going to be amazing. 

I deserved this; just the day before I took people off a perfectly good Jetta Wolfsburg and into a Passat Komfort.  They spent ten thousand more than they intended to and I didn’t make a dime more than I would have if I had sold them the smaller car.  I sold these people the Passat to do it. 

I used to do this to my students when I taught when they asked questions about nonessential information like, “How exactly was the Continental Congress called?”  I have never known the answer to that question because when someone asked that question in a history class where I was a student the response, from a peer, was that Benjamin Franklin stuck his head out of a window and shouted, “Continental Congress.”  That is far more interesting than however it actually happened.  I had a student, God bless him, who’d ask where the different punctuation marks came from and I attributed every last one of them to Horatio Ashby – father of English Grammar.  If you don’t know the answer or the answer is boring there is absolutely nothing wrong with making the answer interesting. 

So, Karma came on Sunday, and it came full circle.  I not only bought a new phone – something I had been able but too stingy to do for a while – but I bought the enhanced phone because I fell for the “you don’t really need this,” mind trick and found myself saying, “go big or go home.”  There is always a bigger fish, there is always a better salesman, and even if you are a master of the Jedi mind trick if you let your guard down it can happen to you. 

As Chaos Bean was using the navigation features on the new iPhone to make sure we were headed at the right bearing on a road we’ve traveled a thousand times I realized what had happened to me, that I deserved it, and that I didn’t care.  I still haven’t called anyone on the phone yet or received a phone call but rest assured I am very pleased with this purchase.   

Comments

[Joanna]

You're my hero.

[Margaret]

You have a very creative mind, that's for sure. So, what goes around comes around,eh? (in selling/buying anyway) :)