Dear Reed,
I almost decided to not write this letter to you. This letter almost was written to my current doctor (Dr. Julie Dahl-Smith), because this is a letter to someone who changed your life. It didn't specify who changed it the most; it just said someone who changed your life. Dr. Dahl-Smith probably saved my life, which would definitely mean she changed my life. She stuck with me until we got to the root of my migraines. The fact that we haven't been able to knock them out really isn't her fault. I kinda have to look in the mirror and suck that one up myself. She said no stress and I kept the stress, so there you have it. Moving on...
I bet you are now wondering why you are getting this letter. Clearly it is because you changed my life. The weird part about this whole thing is that I didn't even know that you had changed my life until YEARS after the fact. That summer selling books door-to-door in Colorado was hard. In lots of ways it was brutal. That first week I really thought I might die. I hated it. The work schedule was grueling. Knocking on a stranger's door at 8am is just stupid. I thought it was stupid then and I still think it is stupid. No one is in a good mood at 8am. And if they are, it is broken by someone knocking on their door trying to sell them something. It also rained steadily that first week. It was actually cold. Cold and wet. Working a 12 hour day with a brief respite for a sandwich brought from home is not my kind of day. 8am-8pm rain or shine. Come on. I will never forget when the diarrhea hit me after about eight days and I was HAPPY. I was THRILLED. Never been so happy to have diarrhea in my life. I could go HOME. No one can work with that. Ann, my actual manager, called for numbers and I told her the sad truth. I was struck out of the game by a bad case of diarrhea. Her response was, "Why didn't you take Immodium?" Well that was met with silence. The obvious answer was that it would take my precious diarrhea away. I was happy to be on the bench. I was exhausted. I needed a time out. Ann and I never really got along after that. In fact, she stopped calling for end of day numbers when Karen quit and Diana moved to Colorado Springs.
After that, I heard a lot more from you. You were a manager, but you weren't mine. However, you would call me several mornings a week just to see if I was awake. I got really good at sounding like I was awake when I was actually sound asleep, and you had woken me up with your call. However, you never believed me. You always thought I was sleeping. That was irksome when I actually was awake. So, I guess I wasn't as good at sounding awake as I thought. Hmmmm. Sometimes, out of the blue, you would tell me to jump in the car and drive down to your territory. I was going to follow you that day. That was fine. It was nice to have company. Sales is lonely, and you were funny. The thing was this: I never got why you took an interest. You never got paid for helping me. I wasn't one of the people on your team. Calling me didn't financially boost you at all. Making sure that I succeeded didn't help you. I know that you didn't "like" me because you had a girlfriend who was there, and it was very obvious that the two of you were very into each other. But, you continued to kick me in the butt to try and make me better at every opportunity.
I know that I irked you because I got to the point that I pretty much told you the truth. Lying gets tiresome when someone continues to invest himself in you. So, on one those days when I would follow you around and you asked me how I ran my day, I finally told you. I started at about 10am. That is about the time I would be okay with my door being knocked on. I kept at it until I sold something. I had figured out if someone was going to buy the books I was selling, they would buy big. I sold them everything. Why go for the small sale when you can get the large one? Once I made that large sale I could go home and watch my soaps or go to the cheap movies. After dinner, I could work until 8pm and pick up the couple business. Sometimes I accidentally sold stuff. I made friends with my customers and would hang out with the people my age. I was going to a movie with one of them and I hadn't sold the neighbor across the street, but she recognized my car. While I was waiting, the doorbell rang. Turns out the mom talked it over with her husband and she wanted to buy the whole package. I left and made my sale and then I went to the movies with my new friend. Yeah, I am just good like that. I remember you just looking at me and shaking your head.
You said, "Can you imagine how much money you would make if you actually tried?"
I said, "Yeah, but then it would feel like work. I did that for a week when I got here and it gave me the runs. Too stressful. This way, I am making more money than most of the people who are working all day long, and I go to the dollar theatre three or four times a week. Plus I stay caught up on my soap. If you would stop calling me at the buttcrack of dawn, I might could get a decent amount of sleep."
That just earned earned me an evil eye and you didn't stop calling. In fact, I think you called more. You were determined to make me pick up my pace. Looking at it from this perspective, I think that you saw all of this sales potential going to waste and it drove you a little nuts. If it makes you feel at all better, you drove me a little nuts by calling me all the time when I was trying to sleep in. I wasn't going to knock on a door before 10am no matter when you called. You just ruined my extra sleep.
When the summer was over, we had this big party, and we all wrote our names on our Styrofoam cup, so that they didn't get mixed up. You wrote on mine, "Made more $/HR than anyone else." We had all been drinking a bit by then. I am not sure if you meant it as a compliment or if you were still ticked by my lack of incentive, but I decided to take it as a compliment. Anyway, I never forgot it. That was the summer of 1988. Ten years later, my life was going to hit a fork, and I was going to have make the Big Decision: What do I want to be when I grow up? I was an English major who no longer lived in New York, couldn't finish a novel, and didn't want to go back to school to teach. In fact, I didn't want to be a teacher. At that point, it came down to, "What am I good at?" I thought about that cup a lot, and I knew that it was sales. I was good at sales.
It took a couple of different sales jobs to figure out what kind of sales job I liked, but it was sales. I am not sure that I would have known that if it hadn't been for you. You and your constant phone calling when you weren't my manager. When you weren't making any money off of my performance. When you called and said, "You are following me today. Get out of bed, get showered, and get in the car. Hustle." I would hang up and mutter that you had no business telling me what to do, but I still did it. And I always learned something following you. The thing was that you didn't have to take an interest in me and my potential. You gained nothing from it, but you still did it. So, thank you. I admire you more than words can say. I will never forget the words you wrote on that cup; those words changed my life. They gave me a career. When I get well, I am going to have the biggest selling job of my life to do. I am going to have to sell the world on hope. On me. On believing that we can give people the tools to assist them in their journey from illness to wellness. It is going to take millions of dollars. I am going to have to sell the people of this country on an idea. You believed in me. It made me believe in me.
Because of you I know it can happen. All it takes is a few committed people and you can change the world. And that is how you changed my life.
You Are Better Than The Best,
Robin
image snatched from Miss Angie at My So-Called Chaos
