My sales job
I remember my old sales job. It was horrible. I was stuck with a group of extroverted young people with social lives, dating lives, and the like. Literally all I could think about when I was out on the field, going door to door, was how much less I had accomplished relative to them, how much better they were than me, how much smarter and more emotionally intelligent they were than me, and so forth. If I had to express it another way, it was like they "got it" and I was a ****ing clueless, half-baked amoeba.
I got very squirmy and uncomfortable when they started joking and playing around, taking the piss out of one another, and being bubbly and social. It annoyed me because I could never tell if someone was joking or being serious when I became the topic of discussion. Either way, it stung like an ice cold knife through my lung.
When I pitched my first person, I was so damn nervous that the lady offered me a glass of water and a cigarette, noticing my frenetic shaking, the beads of sweat trickling down my forehead, the conspicuous cracking and shaking of my voice, the mumbling, the faulty, incoherent delivery of my sales pitch, and my anxious eyes darting all over the room, as if looking for a way out. I am 100% certain that she ended up giving me the sale because the felt sorry for me.
Even two months later, I would still be quizzed by my fellow team member's about why I was so visibly nervous. I didn't have an answer for them.
When we got back to the office, late at night, everyone would fill out their activity sheets for the day, then go into the group room and catalog all their sales for the day, in a chatty and excited manner. I purposefully made sure I was the last to do my activity record, so I didn't have to go into the room where they all were. Fear held me back. I envisioned walking in and everyone's eyes all gazing at me, making me the center of attention, their cold, judgmental stares seeing right through me, into the center of my soul. The anxiety was so bludgeoning to my psyche, it made even saying goodnight to the group a Herculean exercise in self-discipline and gritting willpower. After I plucked up the courage to do so, saying farewell to all and exiting via the stairwell, I would shuffle off across the road, lost in thought, totally, white-hot furious at myself: "why, WHY the **** are you so pathetic? Why can't you just be like normal people? Stupid moron."
This nightly, repeating episode would be made a hundred times worse if I had failed to get sales for the day; two hundred times worse if everyone else had hit their targets. On extremely rare occasions, if I had reached my goals, the pain was dulled by self-pride.
During the mornings prior to leaving for the day to get out on the field, there would be about 7 or 8 of us in the main room, waiting for our team leader to give us a speech. People would hang around and make chit-chat about what they got up to the night previously, or discuss random topics. I never plucked up the courage to join in. So terrified I was, that I deliberately brought a newspaper with me every morning so that I could *pretend* to be reading something, and avoid looking like an awkward loser that was too afraid to interact with my fellow salespeople.
It became clear that I was not a very good salesperson. This made me even more reticent in my interaction with others. I had to regularly ask for money off my already poor mother to pay for food and rent, because I was making so few sales. And the little money I did make would be spent on lunch with the sales team, since I didn't want to look like the odd one out bringing my own packed lunch (I was too self conscious for that).
During my sales pitch, I would be pressured, anxious, and unbelievably self-conscious. I had an inability to relate to most people, and anyone that was even slightly forward or bold would intimidate the hell out of me. If I made a gaffe, it would be all I thought about for the next hour, and if it was a bad gaffe, there was literally nothing anyone could do: I would not be making any sales that day.
In a nutshell, there is nothing good I remember from working in sales. It did not fit my love-shy, social phobia, unconfident personality, and it certainly was not a financially rewarding job.