Living with my Dad in our apartment on Hornby Street could be kind of exciting. I enjoyed being downtown in the midst of everything, but it was also strange and lonely to be away from my old neighbourhood and my friends.
The Fly by Night Dukes
Dad convinced me that I had to find a job. I needed my own money and something to keep myself busy. I hated scanning the classifieds, looking for a job. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I needed to do something for money.
I saw an ad for door-to-door sales, which repulsed me at first, but the product was a do-it-yourself fingerprinting kit with information sheets. It sounded like the kind of product that might be socially redeeming. I liked the idea that I might be helping people rather than just pestering them to buy a product.
I found the interview in a shabby office on Hastings Street, located above a hardware store, in some rented office space, like where you’d find little cold call centres and other temporary operations. All of the other employees seemed just a few years older than me. It was commission sales, so I figured I wouldn’t make crap for wages. I felt like a sucker, but would try to stick it out and see how it all worked out.
Our “managers” were two twenty-something yahoos from Calgary, with names like Kurt and Mike or something. They looked like the love-children of The Dukes of Hazzard and a hair metal band: one was blonde and the other was dark-haired, and they drove a dirty, rusted orange Camaro that looked like it had just made the drive out from Calgary that very afternoon. Being the eighties, the Young Dukes wore their suit jacket sleeves pulled up on their forearms like Don Johnson on Miami Vice, even though the November evenings in Vancouver were starting to get chilly. The Dukes were hustlers, persuaders, salesmen, and bullshit artists out to make some money. They seemed friendly enough, but I didn’t trust them.
We were told that we were selling personal identification kits that families could use to record their children’s vital statistics and fingerprints in case they ever got abducted. Part of that explanation made me feel like we were on the side of the angels, but the fact that the business traded on public fear generated by the crimes of monsters like Clifford Robert Olsen made the whole operation feel rather sleasy and desperate. Each kit contained information cards for the vital statistics and the ink and pads for doing fingerprinting. It was modelled after police fingerprint forms and things, to make it all seem legit.
Me and a few others would pile into the Duke’s orange Camaro and drive all over town looking for neighbourhoods to sell our wares. I dreaded it the whole time. The Dukes seemed to be targeting lower-middle-class neighbourhoods and housing co-ops. Sometimes we went up into the townhouse projects of North Burnaby or Coquitlam, and other times, we were down into False Creek or wherever the density of housing seemed to give us more doors to knock on per square metre.
False Creek was very familiar to me – it had been my pedicab tour route during the previous summer. It was weird to be back in that area again during cold winter evenings.
I’d had no luck selling all night, and was happy to get someone who would even listen to my whole spiel before closing the door in my face. At one townhome, a man answered the front door holding a martini in a very familiar fashion (this wasn’t the first drink he’d met that night). As I earnestly started into my nervous sales pitch, I was remembering what The Dukes had said about how well-off some of the people in this neighbourhood were. They’d be more willing to spend money on the safety of their kids, the Dukes had said.
That wasn’t exactly how it went for me though…
Me: “Good evening sir, my name’s John and I’m with the Fly-By-Night-Fingerprinting-Scam company, and we’re in your area tonight (blah blah blah). Let me ask you sir, do you have any children?”
Him (drunk and smirking): “Yeah, little bitch is probably around here somewhere.”
Me (hoping for a hit): “Um, well, are you ever concerned about your child’s safety, like if they ever went missing? Because we’re selling…”
Him: “Hell, if they can find her, they can have her! Ha ha ha!” A man’s voice called from behind him, asking who it was, and to close the door already.
Me (flummoxed and shocked, believing him): “Um, well, I, um, have a good night sir.”
Him: “Ha ha ha!” *SLAM*
I decided he had no kids and had been having fun at my expense, and it made me feel like a rube. Well, fuck that guy anyway, I thought.
Some of the housing in False Creek was market condos or rentals (like where Mr. Drunken Sarcastic Guy had put me on), but other housing was made up of co-operatives for lower-income families. About 30 minutes later in a different block of housing, I had more luck. I knocked on a door where two first nations mums were much more interested – enough so in fact to want to pool their money to buy one kit between them. Looking inside, I could see a few little kids playing with their toys on the livingroom carpet.
They invited me in while I was still finishing giving my front door spiel, and they began discussing splitting the price with each other and rummaging through their purses and pockets. It was really gratifying to meet people who wanted to do something to protect their kids, and it was the only sale I was really proud of.
I quit the job after a couple of weeks because I hated door-to-door sales. I’d only sold a few kits so I’d made almost nothing. I learned later that the North Van RCMP didn’t appreciate some private company selling fingerprinting kits and stirring up fear in their community. In fact, soon after I quit, the RCMP actually banned this company from operating on the North Shore. I’m certain that The Dukes and their bosses just moved on and set up shop again somewhere else.
One great thing that happened from this job was that I met a woman who became my girlfriend for the better part of a year. That relationship lasted about twenty times longer than my relationship with the fly-by-night Dukes, and ended up being way more fulfilling.
