Are You Stuck in your job?

Are You Stuck in your job?
-or-
Face Value


While I was at work yesterday, busily straightening things (I often busily straighten things because it gives me an excuse to stand around and not actually do anything), a woman came in and asked if I worked there. The fact that I actually work there is, if I am not standing behind the counter, not immediately obvious to customers as there is not really a dress code and we don't wear name tags though a good hint in the winter at least is the fact that I am not wearing a coat. I said that I did and the woman said something that took her a little while to say but that the automatic filter my brain uses translated as having no meaning whatsoever. She handed me a piece of paper, smiled, and left.

I waited until she had gone to look at the paper she'd handed me. Even though it was simply black on white I assumed it was some kind of flier trying to sell me something. My eyes immediately went to the center of the flier where people always put a picture of the product or the most important text. What I read in the center made me back up and dismiss immediately throwing the paper away or handing it off to my boss. "You are invited to a Business Overview Open House".* Back up. Back up. What in the world is a "Business Overview Open House"? My first thought was that it was some kind of job fair. But the wording didn't really jive with that concept. No. The wording seemed to imply that it was a presentation about one specific business.

I decided to start reading the paper from the top. The first words that greeted me were: "Are You Stuck in your job?" Oh. Right. It had become immediately obvious to me what kind of "Business Overview Open House" this was going to be. The flier was so classic an example of one of those kind of businesses that I have to wonder that it's still worth the time of the people running them to make them work. If I had started reading at the top of the page the first words would have immediately made me realize that the rest of it was a waste of my time. And yet- enough people must believe it in order for it to be worth the money to rent a conference hall, drive all around town handing out fliers, register a domain name for a website, and bullshit at a bunch of people for an hour.

First, I'd like to try to imagine taking all of this at face value without knowing what I already know. You with me? Alright. Let's go. "Are You Stuck in your job?" Yes. The economy is dead. I applied to sixteen places before getting a single interview and I have to thank my nervous inability to shut up for getting me the job I have because my boss hires people because she likes talking to them. No really. I asked her about it. The job is simple enough that anyone literate can do it. Ideally my boss likes to hire people who like to read but it's not a requirement, you just have to be able to have a pleasant conversation with her.

"Do You Feel Like You're Worth More Than You're Getting Paid?" Abso-freaking-lutely. I work for minimum wage and if I ever want a raise I have to petition the company that owns the company I work for and hope they're feeling like I am an amazingly hard worker who deserves it even though they have no idea who I am. There are two pay levels where I work. Me and the manager. And the only way to become manager is to achieve seniority among the peons and then pray that my boss has a heart attack.

"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Really? Never really happened to me before. I could go for that. Seems like everyone else always has all the luck. "Visit: pplsucesschannel.com"** I am uncertain about why the webadress is printed here under the previous statement instead of at the bottom with the contact information but whatever, that does not concern me greatly. They have a website, they must be a legit business.

"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Oh my, the large font and the fact that this one statement takes up a quarter of the page makes me feel as though this is very important even though what a "Business Overview Open House" is is not clear.

"This Thursday, February 3rd, 2011" Okay, this Thursday. Alright. I am fired up to go to this and I will not forget because it's happening this week. "Located at the" Semi-classy Chain Hotel, 357 One of the Main Roads in Your Town, for some reason the postal code for your state and then the zipcode as though the last two are important for you to know to locate this place.

"Registration: 7:15 PM Presentation: 7:30-8:30 (Free to all guests)". Oh? I have to register. Meh. Going to assume the presentation is following the registration and not twelve hours later and oh- Hey. Look at that. It's free to all guests. And I was invited so I must be a guest.

"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Thirty-nine years? Wow. That's twice as old as I am. That must mean this company is legitimate. I am motivated and I'd certainly like to be my own boss and taking control of my future sounds great. I can't wait to go to this thing.
Flier Lady, Manager Contact information including phone number with areacode for my state. Oh. And there's contact information if I have questions, yet another sign of legitimacy.

Now, let's go back and re-read without all of the assumed optimism and a keener eye for howling errors than the imaginary person reading it before. Should I start with the obvious errors? There's a lot of unnecessary capitalization at the beginnings of words. I assume this is done for emphasis but if you want to make it look less awful you definitely need to follow-through with it. You shouldn't half-ass an unnecessarily capital-rich sentence or you'll end up with: "Are You Stuck in your job?" It just looks funny apart from being grammatically uncomfortable. As my friend assured me some conventions of grammar don't matter that much as long as you're consistent.

"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Not only am I uncertain why this is in parenthesis but that comma (located smack-dab in the middle between those two non-independent phrases) does not belong there. Words like "if" and "might" don't really belong in exclamatory sentences so that exclamation point probably doesn't belong either. Also, seriously, why is the web address right below the parenthetical statement instead of with the rest of the contact information? I don't get it.

"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Again with the awkward capitalization and failure to punctuate appropriately. The date and location seems okay at first but the lack of a qualifier (am or pm) for the time of the presentation itself is puzzling. "(Free to all guests)". Again, really, parentheses? They're so out of place I almost forgot to add them when I typed the quote and again punctuation is a thing which most people enjoy.

"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Oh god. Run-on sentences. Exclamation points. Inconsistency. Spelling errors. Oh god. Oh god, I just know that the grammar nazis of the internet are getting that uncontrolled twitch in their eye as they read this.

Now, if I can manage to stop cringing every time I look at the paper I can check the legitimacy of this flier. I'm going to ignore the website and get to that in a moment. Let's get to that paragraph at the bottom again. Meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a thirty-nine plus year old industry? Who are these people? Customers? No. More likely they're people who at least supposedly have been doing the job that's being pitched to you as your future job. Whether these people actually have or not is debatable and the only thing that's really important is that these are testimonials. Testimonials are used to make you think that it's possible and even easy to make money at this job. They will use certain key words and phrases to convince you of what your optimism wants to hear without actually lying or saying anything definitive at all. And that thirty-nine plus year old industry? Notice that they don't say that either the business you would be working for is over thirty-nine years old or what the "industry" itself actually is.

Now the name of the "Manager" and the phone number listed after it. I looked up the name in whitepages.com for my city. No hits. So I took a chance and checked for the entire state. We're in luck. The name is unique enough that I got only one hit. The town listed for the person is near-by where I live, maybe a forty-five minute drive tops. The age listed matches Flier Lady. And the listing says she's married. Flier Lady was wearing a wedding ring. (No, I wasn't checking out Flier Lady to notice this I just have some extreme difficulty with eye-contact with people I don't know. I can tell you a lot more about the hands of our regular customers and what they buy than anything else about them because that's what I look at.) Now, I know that area code is for this state but the regional code is for a cellphone and not a town. So I use the reverse lookup on whitepages to see about this cellphone. The owner lives in the same town as the listing for Flier Lady so I'm not going to bother punching in my own phone number (and paying them two bucks) just so they'll text me the cellphone owners name. So, what kind of manager of a supposedly thirty-nine year old business runs around handing out fliers to people like me, eh?

Now I'll check out their website. First I try a little trick I know to evaluate potential scams. You type in the business or address you think is suspect along with keywords like "scam" or "phony" or "rip-off" or "ponzi scheme" and Google it. No hits from the Better Business Bureau or even Yahoo!Answers. That's only marginally comforting. It just means that if this is a scam or scheme it's not very widespread. I type just their url into google (and no I'm not feeling lucky, thank you). I get a handful of hits. One of them is a domain name registry company. The registry informs me that this domain name was purchased on the sixth of January of this year. The website is not yet a month old. I'm feeling like there should be some alarm bells going off in most people's heads. I check the website itself. I don't get a WoT (which is Web of Trust, a Firefox add-on that will prevent you from going to pages full of nasty viruses and warn you when you are being inexplicably redirected and it has ratings for websites based on trustworthiness) warning which is also marginally comforting. The website is exactly one page and contains a thirty-minute video and two paragraphs of information.

As for the content of this website. Well, I tried watching the video, I really did. I watched a solid two minutes of it before I was ready to smash my face against my keyboard. If you want to know what the video was like- well I'll put it this way: Have you ever seen a thirty-minute infomercial in the wee hours of the morning? It was like that except instead of acne cream or rotisseries this was trying to sell you a... uhm... "business opportunity". The infomercial originally aired on January first of this year on the Fox Business Network. Bolded for reasons I'm sure you can discern.

The following is the text content of the website: "Publicly traded Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. gives individuals the opportunity to make a living while making a difference. Our sales force, comprised of Independent Associates across the United States and Canada, are involved with our company because it provides them unlimited income potential and the ability to set their own hours. They work as often or as little as they like. The service they share with others is something everyone needs and is affordable.

Their members benefit greatly from the legal service and identity theft shield plans. They receive access to professional legal counsel for things such as buying a house or a car; creating a will; handling a problem with an insurance company; dealing with identity theft; and much more where legal review should be routine, but rarely is. These events can be among the most important events in a person's life, yet there is a tendency for them to take place without proper legal review. For Pre-Paid Legal members, access to legal counsel is only a toll-free phone call away."

I only found one obvious grammatically uncomfortable sentence in this one (the last sentence of the first paragraph) but it's riddled with key phrases that make you think that not only can you make a lot of money by doing hardly anything but that you're actually helping people. Phrase intended to induce comfort and imply legitimacy: "Publicly traded company". Phrases intended to imply you can make tons without doing anything: "make a living" "unlimited income potential" "set their own hours" "work as often or as little as they like" ("They" referring to the sales force which the company wants you to be a part of.) The entire last paragraph is intended to make you think that the service you are selling would be helping people.

The website is copyrighted by a company called "Pre-paid Legal Services, Inc". For a fun trip, type that into Google or straight into your url bar and check out their website. Be sure to check out the page where they explain that they'll pay you $100 for each $26 referral you make to them and how that works. It made me actually literally laugh out loud. It was that funny.

So, allow me to summarize. There's this company, Pre-paid Legal Services, and they want to pay you $100 every time you sell someone a $26 dollar referral. I can't imagine that that twenty-six dollars isn't monthly. And if, by some miracle, that's not twenty-six dollars every month from each person they are going to send these people so much crap mail that if they ever need legal services they'll hire them and get money from that. And if the people don't hire them they could still make money from sending them junk mail or selling their mailing list to other companies who send junk mail. More than likely it's at least the first two if not all three.

Sure, you can make 100,000 dollars a year if you can sell just three "referrals" three hundred and thirty-four days a year (which, even if you worked five days a week every single week of the year at a regular job is seventy-four more work days, or two and a half months of extra work days). But do you know 1,000 people? Or how to go about convincing 1,000 people every year to buy this service? Most likely you can sell the service to your friends and family and co-workers (if you're smart enough to keep your day job) and that's a few hundred dollars for you while your friends and family shell out hundreds more to this company and receive a bunch of junk mail and start to wish they didn't know you before they finally sell their soul to the devil or cancel their credit cards in order to stop paying out on their subscription. And you'll still be stuck at your day job (or trying to find a new one) at the end of it all.

To conclude the question I ask you is not "Are You Stuck in your job?" but "Do you really think opportunities like this are better for you than the company who made them up?" And with that, I'm going to go get paid minimum wage to read and shuffle some books around because I have to go to that job I'm stuck in.



*Please note that I have intentionally kept the fidelity of any quotes used (spelling and grammar mistakes included) unless I otherwise mention that I've added emphasis or intentionally altered information to protect the identity of my victim subject.

**Please note that there is actually a typographical error in the website name as it is listed on the flier. It should be pplsuccesschannel.com with two Cs in success.