Ghetto Watch!

Let me sell you some scurity!

I should have had a clue the first time I walked into the SecureWatch office and there was a weird bald dude lounging on the couch.  Or possibly when the manager Jay nearly hired me on the spot after hearing me talk about myself for only two minutes.  Or perhaps when he said, “We need more professional people like yourself here.”  What does that mean? Isn’t everyone professional?

The fact that it was that easy, that he didn’t ask for a resume and stared at my boobs instead of asking me about my previous  experience, should have been a giant red flag.   I was willing to ignore that little voice inside my head that told me this place was total bullshit when he told me I could easily make $3,000.00 per week!

To someone like me who has only managed to bring home a 1k check a couple of times for TWO WEEKS of work, and then only with ass tons of overtime added, this amount of money was bewitching. I began to envision paying off debts, paying my car off early and possibly even taking that long overdue European vacation.  That German castle was just within my grasp…or so I thought.

I had to quit my job at Memorial Hospital two days shy of a full two weeks notice and they generously agreed to not black ball me for this.  I was scheduled to attend a training class on 9/2/10 and when I arrived there was no class.  I sat there for an entire hour before anyone even really spoke to me.  At around 10:00 a tall black man came in and asked if I was there for an interview.

“I was told to come in for training today,”  I said.

“We don’t have a training class today,” he responded.  This was not the answer I wanted to hear. Through a conversation with him I found out that Eric was now the new Branch Manager and the one who hired me was now the manager of another branch somewhere close to Atlanta.  Jay had not mentioned to Eric that I would be arriving.  I told him I had quit my full time job to do this.

“It’s okay, I’ll get you going today,” he assured me.  And by that he meant he would drive me around in the van with him to watch as absolutely no one earned anything! No actual worked happened until after 2pm.  We were sitting at Moe’s eating lunch until that time.

Then I rode in the van with the other “consultants” and Eric the Branch Manager, until we reached Hardeeville, South Carolina.  They spent the entire day there until about 8:30 pm walking the streets and knocking on doors.  After all Eric’s talk about how good he was at “closing the deal,” they didn’t get one sale that day.  Not that he didn’t try, he had the sweat rings on his purple button up shirt to prove it.  I think he was trying very hard to impress me, but the only thing I took away from that was how ridiculous long the work day was.  We didn’t get back until 9:30pm.

“So what do you think?” he asked me.  I didn’t want to tell him what I thought, and he really didn’t want to know.  I was thinking I had just got myself into a lot of trouble and I was wondering how I could get out of it.  At the end of the night he took my picture for my badge and told me to come back the following Thursday for training.

So I wasted an entire week that I could have been working at Memorial and at least earning something.  I showed up early the next Thursday for class.  The others in my  “class,” were very young and most of them were dressed as if they were just heading out to the mall or something instead of actually showing up to a job.  I heard there was a contest for best “pitch,” and I wanted that money so I stayed long enough to win the contest.  Immediately $100 extra for being able to recite the pitch in front of the class without looking at the paper.

It wasn’t as if I had much competition. A few of those people could barely even read the pitch off the paper much less say it from memory. It was another entire week before I could even try to sell anything because my “badge” was not in.  I showed up every day for work and was told that I couldn’t go out, meanwhile my classmates were going out and getting sales.  I was furious that those ghetto idiots were getting to go out and make money when I had been there a week longer than any of them and hadn’t had the chance to earn anything!

When I finally got to go out I did well. I made around $1,000.00 in one week but the following week I didn’t get anything. Savannah was dried up and we had too many sales people knocking on the same doors every day. The day my first check was supposed to come, it didn’t arrive.  My electric bill was past due and my phone bill was way past due and they were about to turn me off.

I could tolerate all of this though as long as I was still making some money.  The day came, yesterday in fact, when I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  There was just one too many broken promises and I didn’t get to work with my regular crew which I liked.  I had to ride in a van with five other people who might have had three brain cells between them. I sat in the back right beside a speaker while a ghetto lesbian played gangsta rap right in my face.  The smoke from her black and mild gave me a serious headache.

If this wasn’t bad enough, I had a tiny black man in the seat in front of me with “little man syndrome,” trying to ask me out.  He did this while pawing at the trashy little girl in the seat with him who pretended to protest but still laughed and smiled with her gold teeth and fake hair that looked like black straw sticking out all over the place.  I was disgusted.

“I just want to see how you dance you know what I’m saying.  I want to see if you can handle me.”  I had already heard about this particular individuals explosion of temper the previous Saturday and since we were in an enclosed space I didn’t want to have a violent argument with him, so I rejected him a little more politely than I would have otherwise.

“That’s not going to happen.” I told him.

“Why not?”

“I have a boyfriend.”

“So what? Everyone needs to have a friend.”  This particular boy was maybe 19 probably about 5 ft 6″ or something and I’m 5ft 9″  So me entertaining a tiny ghetto boy was just beyond ridiculous.  I had already made up my mind that I was getting the hell out.  There was no way I could put up with this bullshit until 8pm at night.

As we drove around the potential neighborhood blaring profane rap music with our window rolled down, I planned my escape. How could these people hope to sell home security alarms when they looked more like the person who’d be sneaking out the back door with your television?  I didn’t want to be associated with these people in any way.

“I miss eating your pussy all night long,” the cd sang.  At this point I felt I had plenty of evidence for a nice sexual harassment lawsuit but all I wanted was to get the hell out of that situation.

“Stop.” I told the driver.  We were a block from my house.  I gave the team leader my badge.  “This is a waste of my time, I’m going home.”   Thus ended my brief deviation from reality.  Maybe you can make 3K in one week but not in Savannah and not when you work with people who look as if they just got out of jail the night before. I hate feeling like I quit because I am not a person who gives up so easily but seriously, I put up with this shit for a month.

I sat there in the training class last week while my manager Eric explained why a lot of people weren’t there anymore.  “If you’ve noticed some of the faces that were hear when you started are no longer here.  That’s because they couldn’t handle it.  They didn’t want it bad enough.”

“Yeah we have taken out the trash,” the assistant manager chimed in.  The very same assistant manager who quit himself less than a week after making that statement.  The other assistant manager was fired a few days later for failing the random drug test for the second time.

I wouldn’t say they have taken out the trash, I’d say that the office is in fact full of nothing but trash.  The layers of cigarette butts littering the ground in front of the office door only help to affirm my statement. Good luck to those brave enough to continue to try and eke out a living with Ghetto Watch. Peace out.