Door knocking for dummies

As anyone who has seen my recent facebook statuses is already aware, Barbara and I are now fully and legitimately employed as door to door energy sales associates. We got the job a couple of weeks ago pretty easily (replied to a gumtree ad, rocked up to the office for a super informal interveiw and then two days of training) and then we were suddenly thrust into the deep end with a week long roadtrip to a country town to do our thang. I did alright and Barbara did amazingly, due to her excellent ability to talk incessantly until you have to take action to make her stop; for instance; changing your energy retailer. I put this down to a lifetime of trying to be heard over the rest of her family.

We've both learnt quite a lot about human beings and sales in this job, not all of it great, but at least the product we are selling is actually pretty good and I don't have to lie about it to get people to sign up. To be honest, I've heard people full on lying about what they're selling in order to get the sale (even if the person definitely wont pass the credit check), which in my mind is pretty shitty, and I really can't do that. (Which is weird, because when I was young I was a prolific liar. Now I find it really hard even if I gain money for it)

So here is how door to door sales works, for anyone who has not had the pleasure. Every day we are given about 150-300 doors to knock on. Between 10-40% of these will have 'Do not knock' stickers on them, and over 50% will not be home until after 2ish, depending on the area. Today I knocked on about 100 doors, and spoke to probably 30 people, all of whom said variations of "no". Sometimes we end up talking to the same person for an hour, sometimes its 5 minutes. Occasionally we get shouted at, but then people might offer us beer. Its a job of many possibilities.

Today, I had zero sales. Sometimes it happens. On Monday I was just walking down a road and a guy just basically walked up to me asking me to sign him up. This rarely happens. You end up just cherry picking houses that look like the people living there will be friendly and listen to your spiel and end up saying yes, but actually any house could be a sale regardless of how shitty their front lawn is or how many broken beer bottles are outside their house. Some of the people we work with are hideously judgmental, but you end up getting into that mindset when your whole paycheck depends on your confidence, personality and ability to build rapport and relate to people.

In the end its just a job, hopefully I can handle it long enough to save enough money to get to New Zealand and travel a bit more. I have been having fun though, got some great stories already that should probably never go on this blog.

Tamworth!

I suppose its time to update this thing!

I know its been a while (sorry, mum), I'm really bad at this whole writing semi regularly thing. I suppose its time to update this thing! To be fair, its difficult to muster up the energy to blog when the temperature is between 35 and 41. And we were far too busy during tamworth festival, which I shall now tell you about.

I did actually attempt to keep a day by day record of what occured that week but I abandoned that after day 1. So as you already know, the reason we were there was due to our quite unintended stalking of the Hillbilly Goats, who took us under their wings and let us sell CDs and merch for them for the week. We stayed with them in their glorious rented house which had air conditioning and helped them with not only carrying all their stuff from gig to gig (they have a whole lot of stuff) but also promoting them by handing out cards to the thousands of grey nomads that decend into Tamworth to get their Country Music fix. A typical day during the week would consist of two shows, usually 3hrs each and usually in a pub, sometimes on the outside public stages. The audience was all seated, and often strangely stern looking, although even if they looked like they hated it, they still sat there for the full three hours.

The goats themselves are some of the nicest people we've met, despite their clear need for some form of psychiactric intervention. Also, Wild Bill the man from from the bush who rocks up to be their roadie sometimes is the nicest man with no teeth that we've ever met.

I never listen to country music, but the week opened my eyes and taught me many things. Firstly, the majority of country songs are about wimmin', murderin', or trains. Secondly, the hats are no joke. Everyone loves a hat, people here will happily join a queue that stretches round the block to get a $2 Toyota branded hat. Thirdly, if you ever want to make a living making music, country is where its at because old people always buy the CD.

One of the bands we were introduced to turned into our new best friends and current housemates (2 of them anyway) Catfish Voodoo! An exceptionally talented Chicago Blues Band who all rock fancy pants 3 piece suits and are very good at what they do, which is namely rocking everyones socks off. We danced a lot with them and had lots of fun and will continue to do so as we currently reside in their back garden in Melbourne. Hurray! I will probably write a bit more about them later on, as there are many stories to be told (like how Benny hid a tupperware pot full of his own hair under Jordans bed for the last couple of years in retaliation for some  argument they had about tupperware. He still tops it up every time he cuts his hair, I saw it with my own eyes. The worst bit is that Jordan knows about it and hes fine with it being there. All the time. A small pot of ginger hair just festering under his bed.)

Anyway, i'll update again soon, Mum, don't worry, I'm still on it.


Right thats it. Its taken me like 2 weeks to write this due to laziness and the heat, its now 11pm and still stupidly hot all I have been doing today is sweating in a darkened room next to a large fan. its no way to live.