I am working as a door-to-door salesperson.
Well. I’m not really selling. I’m trying to collect information.
My manager’s name is Chuck. He’s one of the most vibrant 80-year-olds I’ve ever met– and he’s always making a sale. Everything is a bargain, a deal, a heck of a price. Incidentally, he has a favorite word. It’s that. Incidentally. He uses it with every transition, whether it makes sense or not.
My first day, he took me to a few doors and we did the knocking thing together. It was much easier with smiling, ever-friendly Chuck there. We got four leads, the information we’re after.
On my own, I’ve knocked on over 100 doors, and gotten the same number of leads. I guess there’s a simple disparity between 50 years of experience, and yesterday’s green. But there’s also a disparity of caring. Because I do care– I have to care– that I am interrupting, invading, these peoples’ lives and homes. I hate doing that. I want to meet these people whose doors I knock. I want to walk up and have dinner with them. I want to make friends. Not sales. I’m not interested enough in the money. Once again, people precede all else. But I guess, if I want to get home, to the people who mean the most, I have to earn some money. I have to keep knocking on doors.
Meanwhile, separately, an itching wanderlust is coursing once again.
I love that word, wanderlust. It tastes good, like all the places I haven’t seen yet. I am planning, thinking, dreaming. Eventually all that thought will acerbate into action; grow so agitated in my head it lights a small but palpable fire, and sets me on my course. Eventually the stable scale will tip, and I will rush headlong back into that roller-coaster-exciting moment of stepping onto a plane– and off my own world for a while.
Loneliness will come too, but he and I are good friends. The kind of friends that have a deep-seated loathing for the other, and know that we’re stuck fast, so we might as well get used to it. We’ve been together for a while, and I guess we’ll be together some more.
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