When I check the want ads in the local paper, interspersed between ads for specific positions in named companies, there are dozens of vague want ads. Typical ones go like this…
WANTED Motivated people for fast growing company. No exp. necessary, will train. Excellent pay. Ideal for students, homemakers. Call Jerry at 555-5555
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Every day there are about a dozen such ads. Some stay in there forever, others change from time to time. They never give a business name or address, promise good pay with no real experience, but offer no specifics. I think every city’s paper has those jobs.
I assume they are for things like evelope stuffers, email spammers, telephone sales or other such “jobs”. But has anyone really called any of those numbers, and obtained any sort of gainful employment?
You assume correctly. I’ve called a few of those numbers and they are usually telemarketing or sales jobs. Real job offers will state the nature of the job upfront.
Yeah, I answered one of those. I can’t really remember what the wording was - something like “LONG HAIR? WE DON’T CARE! Make $$$$ after our free training!” Long hair was a hiring issue 30 years ago when I did this.
The free training, of course, involved purchasing some materials. Not much, really. They were running so many people through this I guess they couldn’t afford to give us all our three ring binders full of questionnaires and product brochures.
It was a door-to-door, or however you wanted to approach it, sales job for a discount club called Club America. Most people made it through about 2 days of work after the 2 or 3 day training. I stayed with it for a few months, and sold a few memberships.
The sale I feel the worst about was one where I’d knocked on an apartment door and met a freshly returned 'Nam vet (the war was still on - it was a year until my draft lottery). He and his wife bought a membership and invited me to come back the next night to meet some friends of theirs.
I did. This guy was about 3 years older than me and they were drinking Spanada and vodka. I passed out. When I awoke I found he had sold memberships to two of his friends. My best night in the field!
I came to feel bad about that sale, and all my others, as I gradually learned that the organization just didn’t perform as promised. I’ve never sold anything since that I have not checked out and truly believed what I was saying.
The ads I used to wonder about when I was in that end of the job market were the ones for a low (usually minimum) wage that required that you actually come live at a dog kennel to be a dog wrangler. Later in life I met people who did that. I still don’t understand.
I went in for one of those ads when I was young and hard-up. (Get your mind outta the gutter!) I went down even though they wouldn’t tell me what the job was on the phone. Silly me. When I got there, they gave about a dozen folks huge hockey bags filled with tacky stuffed animals, which were supposed to be hawked on the street. I was irritated enough that I actually hopped on a bus with my “trainer”, carting this huge bag, and we got out to an outlying area. Then I stepped of the bus with him, set the bag down, and said “You know, this is degrading,” and went home, leaving him to deal with both bags. The jerk.
Multi-level marketing, usually Herbalife. Most of the “MAKE MONEY FAST” signs that are popping up like dandelions on the nation’s roads are from Herbalife MLMers, or a modern day version of the envelope stuffing scam.
Could be worse. It could be some acquaintance you barely remember calling you up and inviting you for coffee. All you do remember is that she was pretty good looking. So you say OK, and you meet her at a place she had suggested, but before you go in for coffee she asks if it would be OK if you went with her to stop by her office while she picked something up there. And when you both get there, there’s a big meeting on multi-level marketing going on, and you feel obliged to sit down just for a moment, and it turns out you listen to this pitch for TWO HOURS. And then when it’s finished, you turn to her and say NOW are you ready for coffee, and she smiles sweetly and says that she’d love to, but her boss there needs to talk to her, maybe next time.
And she’s still good looking enough that you wait until you’re outside to scream to the heavens:
I actually called about one of those jobs once. I had gotten extremely drunk and a concussion the night before, I also suspected that someone may have slipped me some acid but I couldn’t remember anything. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking straight at all when I called (I also kept forgetting where I was and crying for no reason).
Some of these vague-sounding jobs involve selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. They’re usually aimed at college-aged kids. I had the unfortunate experience of witnessing one literally begging my then-boyfriend to buy a magazine subscription or else “my boss will do something terrible to me!” He went on to say that every morning 5-6 of them would pile into a van (driven by the supervisor) heading for parts unknown. The van would let them off in a random neighborhood, where they had X number of hours to sell X number of subscriptions. If they didn’t meet the quota, not only would they not have supper, but they’d have to sleep outside the van.
Maybe he was telling the truth, I don’t know. It sounded very cultish…my ex almost bought a subscription from him, and probably would’ve if I hadn’t intervened.
I answered a similar ad and ended up selling insurance door-to-door. In 1994! I actually stuck with it for almost a year and made a decent living, but I couldn’t live with the guilt that most of the people that bought from me didn’t really understand what they were buying, even though I was very clear and thorough on exactly what the policy was good for. So I quit and got a job fixing up low-income housing, which was ironic because I ended up visiting many of the same houses.
For a while there were signs up in bus shelters all over town. They typically appeared in pairs: “MAKE $$$ AT HOME!” and “LOSE 40 LBS IN ONE MONTH!” Both had the same phone number at the bottom.
To me, these in combination spell neither “safe and effective weight loss” nor “excellent job opportunity.”
