The Great Corrupter
| No Soliciting -- This Means You (Part 1) |
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| Written by The Great Corrupter | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 27 May 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Here in Phoenix, tree trimming is clearly a growth industry. Hardly a day can go by without someone idling their decrepit truck in front of my house while they come to see if I want my neatly trimmed trees … trimmed. But they aren’t so bad. Most of them are Mexicans and they aren’t stupid. I share that we already have a great tree trimmer and that I am loyal to José (this is, btw, very true) while the dogs share that they’re hungry, and this business is concluded quickly. The few white guys who trim trees in between prison stints aren’t quite as smart as the Mexican guys, but our smallest dog is a pit bull, and they’ve got enough self-preservation in them to leave the moment I mention her breed. Less swiftly dealt with are the door-to-door salespeople. They’re selling anything from meat and ice cream delivered right to your door -- for only three times what you’d pay for it at that newfangled market that’s a whole mile down the street -- to aluminum siding. Yes, aluminum siding. In Phoenix, Arizona, otherwise knows as Hell’s Orientation Area.  Isn't she sweet? Middle of the pack are the sales folks who actually represent a brand in my household, like my phone service. I’m rather loathe to turn them instantly away, since, once, one of them actually saved me over $100 a month and I’m willing to give optimism a try every now and again. These folks, however, are not interested in getting bitten, since they aren’t on commission, so while I’m shouting, “What? What are you saying? Shut up! I can’t hear you. Shut up, dogs, shut UP! What?” and trying to hear their offer, for some reason, they usually give me a bad look and leave. Next up on the scale of difficulty are the kids who want-you-to-buy-their-crap-to-help-keep-them-off-the-streets-and-off-drugs. They always say that sentence as if it were one word, like some urban version of supercalifragilistic-expialidocious, only with no Julie Andrews or Dick Van Dyke, let alone lyric and tune. They really don’t care about the dogs -- they have dogs like mine at home, only theirs are wearing spiked collars and ‘guarding’ their families’ ‘business interests’. I like to point out that I can’t be a party to this charade. Of course, they try to insist that they’re really kids (some of them have looked at least 25 to my eyes), that they’re really from the bad parts of town (this is imminently clear), and that this is really the only way to keep them off the streets and not doing drugs. I have to mention then that, clearly, they are ON the streets, peddling whatever crap it is they’re trying to sell me, and how do I KNOW they aren’t going to take my five dollars for one Twix bar and race right off to the park and buy drugs? They insist they wouldn’t. I insist that my dogs are drug-sniffing dogs and that they go into a frenzy when they smell even the slightest whiff of ganja, let alone anything harder. Since the dogs are in a guaranteed frenzy by this time, I can usually make my point. For the tougher ones I just mention that my brother’s with the ATF and he’s due any minute and this seems to do the trick. . . . (Part 2 to follow next week! Stay tuned!!!)
           
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I work from home and I own three big dogs, which gives new terror to the idea of door-to-door anything.
Excellent idea ... I think I'm going to buy a gun holster and wear it everywhere I go ... It will be part of my new take-no-bullshit personality ...
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