What I Learned About Life from Working at a Shady, Telemarketing Company in Kansas City

I used to work at a telemarketing company back in Kansas City.

Really, it was just a room full of kids like me who, dropped out of school, couldn’t get better jobs and got paid minimum wage to harass people on the phone until they agreed to let a real salesman come to their house.

Anyway, the place was run by slime balls and every once in a while, one of the slime balls would give us kids a “motivational” speech to psych us up for a day of selling/harassing.

One time, a slime ball I’d never seen before (and never saw again) told this story about a salesman who was always struggling.

The slime ball told us the salesman could always be heard saying, “If only I can get over this one hill, then I’ll really start living.”

The slime ball went on to say that that salesman kept repeating that thought over and over again, all throughout his career.

“When I get over this one, fill-in-the-blank then, I’ll really start to live life.” What that salesman didn’t understand, the slime ball said, was that those hills, those ups and downs, were his life. Ups and downs are life.

They say people who are better at acceptance live longer (there’s a great episode of…