From "Hired!" to "Fired!" in 6 months flat − 29 December, 2006
Part 1 -- June, 2006
I'm sitting on the couch in the living room of my apartment. It's 1:30pm on a Tuesday afternoon, and it's not a holiday. I'm not sick, and no one I know has died.
This has been my life for the past three week. I'm a commission-only "Field Agent" selling Life and Health insurance with United American Insurance company, and I'm wondering where that mythical $50,000 that I was going to "average" for this year has gotten off to. It occurs to me that this job was pretty much over when my manager accused me of being both sexist and ageist. Considering that I'm gay, and only about 18 months older than her, I had my doubts that what she was saying was legitimate. Since then, I've been "working from home" because I don't want to see her face, or the face of anyone else in the office. They remind me of the $50k I don't have, and the job I left -- which was at least paying me a salary and giving me health insurance.
I decide that an average $400 a month is not going to get me by. Isn't getting me by. This job is a scam, and from this moment on, it's time to firmly realize that job is just straight-ova, and a new place of business is in order. I put my laptop back on my lap and find the number for a State Farm recruiter, something my dad suggested, knowing that I already have my Health & Life sales licenses in Arkansas -- may as well use them, right?
A woman picks up on what sounds like a cell phone. Strange number to have posted on the website of the largest auto insurance provider in the U.S., but okay, we'll run with this. She proceeds to sell me on the glories of being a State Farm agent. Own your own business! Set your own hours! Have your own office! Make lots of money! "How long does it take?" I ask. "Between six and 12 months," is the un-ironic answer. Okay, not an option. I'm living on credit cards and I'm currently the subordinate of someone who is barely out of diapers.
The recruiter concedes that some State Farm agents in the area may need staff to help them in the office. I ask her to pass on my resume as I e-mail it over to her. By Monday I've gotten one response -- a woman in West Little Rock who "needs help in the office." It won't be for another month before I realize how literal that statement is.
The Ringer -- Foreboding
I'm going to go ahead and blow the ending of this sad story for you, but only by confirming what the title of this series is about. I end up getting fired -- sorta. We'll get there, don't get ahead of me. But until then, let me say that I should have known from the very beginning that this woman was going to put me through the ringer.
After a brief chat on the phone, she invited me in for an interview. The first was nerve-wracking as most interviews go, but livable. I was told I was going to need to come back for a second interview, something I'd never had to do before. All of the jobs I'd ever applied for had hired me on the spot, or within a few hours of having interviewed. I'd never had to schedule for a second interrogation.
At my next interview, there was a new component: a blond power-"consultant" who grilled me about what I was currently doing, and put me on the spot by asking if I had just been "sitting around for the past few weeks" or if I had actually "been trying to make any sales." I went for the neutral ground and said I was continuing to service business but was not actively pursuing new clients, knowing that I was not intending to be around to service them. I figured it was an ethical, sturdy, non-true, non-slacker answer.
Even that was not enough. Still not hired -- had to come back for the third round. Finally, at this third round, I got some hard numbers to work with. Half of my health insurance paid, a $50k five-year-term Life Insurance policy with State Farm, 10 days of vacation a year, 10 days of sick and personal time, $24k salary.
Unbeknownst to me, I was already caught up in another ruse. As seems usual in the insurance industry, what you're going to get paid is only assured by what you're actually getting paid. Commission only? Expect nothing. $24k salary? Expect $24k. Confused? So am I -- still.
My new boss laid out in front of me a grid depicting commissions for the year. She assured me that she had quotas to hit, which meant that she had to get these numbers, so they were "assured." The biggest lot of my commission would be the money coming from "raw new auto" sales, which meant new auto policies that I was writing up for people who were not currently State Farm customers. The remainder of my commission would mostly be from Life and Health insurance. If we worked hard, I would make it to $40k in one year, between my salary and commission. The kicker? Commissions are only rewarded for "personally produced business." Meaning: if you walk into my office and ask for auto insurance, without me having contacted you previously to solicit that auto insurance, I don't get paid anything except my salary. But, if I sell you a life insurance policy to go with your auto insurance, then I do get the commission off the life insurance. Seems fair, but that's before you start working there...
Nonetheless, I was desperate. I didn't give a shit if she was paying me in cow hides and petrified dung -- as long as I could pay the bills with it. I asked her, point blank, if I was hired. She (finally!) said yes -- so long as I immediately enroll in my Property and Casualty insurance sales license classes and get them done. That was June 29th. The next day, I called the Insurance Training School of America (ISTA!) and enrolled in the upcoming P&C class starting on July 5th. It would go from Wednesday to Sunday, and I would start work on Monday. With dollar bill signs in my eyes, again, I wrote up a check for the fees, and started classes.
No one will buy my brand of crazy
I have a rule about where I am employed: never work somewhere that has stained ceiling-tiles. The staining itself creeps me out: where do these stains come from? Are there roof leaks? If so, why haven't they been fixed? And why haven't these ceiling tiles been replaced? Ceiling tiles are to offices as canaries are to coal mines -- they tell you how healthy the place is. An office that doesn't fix the problems leading up to stained ceiling tiles or doesn't replace them after it happens is an office that doesn't, deep down, care about itself, or its employees. Sometimes it's hard to stick to your personal standards, though, when you're just coming off of three months in a volunteer job. I had to overlook the disturbing amount of stained ceiling-tiles and just show that I was a good investment.
The office had two other people working there that I hadn't met during my interviews. Usually I had rushed right past them into the boss' office. The first was Sara, a girl my age who had worked there since April, and sat in the front-office. (Our office had a lobby area with two desks, one of which I was at, and then a front-office that was big enough for a big desk setup, a storage room and a break room, and then the very large back office, in which our boss had her whole setup.) Sara was helpful, but I could see she was unhappy there. Her and the boss were constantly arguing with each other, in the nicest ways possible. You know how it goes -- the conversation that doesn't seem to end, because both sides are just continuing to politely dispute what the other person is saying?
The other person at the office was Jane, a woman in her early-fifties with striking blond hair who tended to wear dresses that seemed just slightly young for her age. Nonetheless, she was incredibly perky and polite, and while I found her grating at first, she would end up becoming a good friend.
The first few weeks at the office were difficult. State Farm has an inane and rigorous training program that involves hours upon hours of computer coursework paired with tests which don't seem to have been made with the intention of actually testing the material that you were just taught. Meanwhile, State Farm also has two seperate computer software systems for quoting and servicing customers, with each system only handling certain functions that the other does not. Nonetheless, I was able to learn most of what I needed in what was said to be "record time" by the two other girls that worked there, and I found most of the process to be fairly routine on a daily basis.
After a month there, I was mostly finished with training and had begun sales. The boss had given me some of State Farm's proprietary marketing lists, which I had gone to work on, eager to begin making money. The process was onerous and disappointing, as sales usually is. I was working with this agent's current book of business, trying to set up "Insurance and Financial Reviews," a scam set up by State Farm to get people to come in for sales opportunities. Here's how it works: I call you and ask you to come in. If you do, we talk about your current policies and then I suggest other products of State Farm that you absolutely must have for you financial and insurance peace-of-mind. If you don't come in, I put a note on your record saying that you declined an IFR, and in the future when you complain about the fact that you didn't have rental car insurance on your auto policy, or your liability limits were too low, we go back in your record and say "We tried to get you in here to talk about those things, but you didn't want to!"
Of the few people that I actually got to come in, no one was buying what I was selling -- primarily life insurance. Most people never returned calls to come in, in the first place. Apparently they had heard this before.
Only so much I can do
The middle part of this story is the most boring, I know. But we have to slog through it so you can understand the really good parts at the end. So let's talk about the dynamics of my office for a moment: it was hell. After two months at the office, I was keenly aware of how this place really worked, and it was beginning to kill me a little inside. Sara and the boss were clearly unhappy with each other, and it was uncomfortable for Jane and I to listen to their politely violent conversations. Mercifully, the boss was rarely there -- she had a tendency to roll in at about 11am, take a two hour lunch, and then work "deep into the night." How long she actually stayed after we left, I have no idea.
She had two main problems. First, she was lazy. She couldn't get her ass out of bed early in the morning because she knew there was usually no one coming in, so she didn't bother to come in and try and find people to make appointments with. A bit of a vicious cycle, really. Second, she had no idea what she was doing. While she was very well-versed on insurance policy and sales knowledge, the computer was Goliath to her David. What she really spent hours doing, I later realized, was muddling her way through the software trying to run quotes or service accounts. She had difficulty doing even the most basic of tasks, even though the computer system she worked primarily with had been in place for more than eight years.
The office itself was also not conducive to working. Her desk was piled high with papers and policies that had been there for ages. Routinely, she would take a pile that had gotten too large and move it into the break room, where it would become part of a larger pile. Sara and I had to find policies and paperwork from time-to-time in these piles, and I was usually astounded at how old some of the stuff was. It was not uncommon to find sections of these piles which were dated from the mid-nineties. Needless to say, getting things done around there was usually a needle-in-a-haystack feeling.
Meanwhile, I was trying to make sales. A few did come from my efforts, but not nearly at the pace that I had been told I would be making them. After a few weeks, it was clear that the boss was becoming agitated at how little I, and Sara, were selling and things became more uncomfortable. Often I felt that the boss was looking at me reproachfully when she would saunter in right before the noon-hour. I always felt like I needed to be doing something to look busy and to avoid feeling guilty about not having made a sale that day.
Things finally reached a critical mass in October. It had become clear to me that I was not, actually, the one to blame. There was a period of a month where the boss wasn't in the office one Friday, and often not on Monday's as she went on vacations, meetings at sales rallies, and conventions. Sara had given up on her job and had simply started reading People.com from office-open to office-close. There was almost no one coming through the door anymore, a function (I felt) of Sara and I having cleaned up all the open-ends that had existed since before we had gotten there.
The essential problem with a "personally produced sales" commission system is that it works great when there's lots of business coming through the door, because you have lots of opportunity to "up-sell." But it works horribly when there's no business at all. Without new people calling for auto quotes, and without current customers stopping by for service or payment issues, you're pretty much left either having to call current customers to set up IFRs, or to sit and wait for something to happen.
I realized that it is really the agent's responsibility to bring people through the door, through marketing and being in the community. An associate like me can call people all day long, but in the end they don't want to talk to a 20-something. They want to talk to their agent about new lines of business.
Sara began looking for a new job, and I wondered if I should too. I made some calls and sent out my resume, but I wasn't sure if I was ready to make a move yet. Sara found a new job at another State Farm agent's office, who actually paid her employees for all of the sales they made regardless of whether they were "personally produced" or not. I was envious, but also looked forward to having her office -- the desk I was at was uncomfortable and cramped, not to mention completely non-conducive to making a sale while sitting in the middle of what was essentially the lobby.
Confronting crazy
Sara notified the boss that she was leaving, which was a shit-storm in itself. The boss felt like Sara should have told her first, which I found completely unreasonable -- when does an employee ever tell their boss that they're looking for a new job?
I decided it was time for me to make a stand. Every day in the office felt like torture, as I avoided the boss' eye, and tried any diversion tactic possible to not talk about sales. Nonetheless, the boss was constantly dropping comments in my direction about how we needed more sales and that I needed to make more calls.
I went back into the boss office one Thursday afternoon and sat down. I told her that this clearly wasn't working, and that I didn't want to come into the office feeling like I was doing a poor job. I told her that I felt like I had done tangible good for her book of business by servicing them to the best of my ability, by creating new systems of working between the two computer softwares we had, and by organizing processes that hadn't been done in ages. I told her that despite all that, I felt like I was not being appreciated, and I was prepared to walk away from the job, no hard feelings -- we could just say that it didn't work out.
The boss stared at me for a few minutes, dead-eyed, and began to tell me that I just needed to make more of an effort, and that I needed to make a plan for more sales. She said that I had misrepresented myself as someone who was able to make sales, to which I responded that she had misrepresented the amount of business that was possible in this office. In a tense moment, I told her that the disappointment over my employment here goes both ways.
She told me that I should stay for at least another 30 days, and we would see what we could work out. Just as she had finished this sentence, the power-blond consultant and another member of our "Agency Field Office" walked in, interrupting our discussion, to hand out Halloween candy. They were both dressed up in medieval garb.
The worst is over
Things went uphill quickly. Sara left, and I felt like things changed immediately. The boss stopped making comments about sales, and I started to relax. I made more sales in the next six weeks than I had made in the first four months -- still a small amount, but it was progress. The holidays came upon us, and things seems downright cheerful at the office. I had moved to Sara's desk, and felt empowered by the new digs. Jane, while still over-cheerful at times, became my only confidant about the discontent I still felt about making so little money. She constantly told me how smart I was, and that without me there she would have no idea what to do when simple things came up. That was true in a sense -- she had been there for over a year at this point, but only worked part-time, Tuesday through Thursday. Her main job was to do marketing, but she rarely did that, instead doing service tasks when they were within her realm of knowledge. She was learning, but slowly.
Soon, the boss hired a new woman to sit at my old desk. She was short, and in her late 40's. She was African-American, and while forceful about asking questions, she seemed to have difficulty grasping some basic office things, like taking messages and not interrupting me in the middle of appointments to ask me questions. I felt like she was a harbinger of doom for me in this office -- it seemed like the boss was preparing to replace me. It was only after a week or so with the new woman, Debra, that she told me that she hadn't actually been hired and that she was still on a "working interview." Despite her ephemeral position there, she was quickly taking up my "old" position. She seemed intent on impressing the boss, and took many duties from my desk, like working the morning report. The writing was on the wall as I realized that these were the same things I had done to Sara when I first arrived at the office.
Nonetheless, the boss and I hadn't revisited our conversation in late October, and I felt like things might look up in the New Year. I felt worried that I was not spurred to leave this under performing job, but it was also comfortable to come to the office and just do a job and then leave -- a lot less stress than I had dealt with in the last year.
I took my last two vacation days of the year on Wednesday, December 28th, and Thursday, December 29th. We were closed the Monday and Tuesday before that for Christmas, so it was almost like I had a full week off. On Friday I returned to seemingly normal day or work.
At 5:00pm, I was still on the phone with a random customer who had called in to ask for an auto quote -- a rare occasion these days. I sold her on a life-insurance policy, as well, and she was making plans to come in late the next week. Jane popped into my office and whispered to me that the boss wanted to talk to me. I nodded and said goodbye to her and Debra as they left.
As I was hanging up, the phone rang again and the boss picked it up. It was one of the two customers I had had wranglings with earlier in the day. The situations were going to be easy to resolve, but they were strangely reminiscent of early times at this office when our customers were difficult on a daily basis.
I waited around for almost 10 minutes for the boss to finish her conversation with the customer. It was about 5:12pm at this point in time, and I didn't appreciate being made to wait. We were going into a three-day weekend, and I didn't get paid overtime, on the basis of the fact that we only worked from 8:30am - 5:00pm, so there was an extra two-and-a-half hours in the week that could be used before we hit 40 hours. Finally, the conversation was done and I went back into the boss' office. I sat some papers on her desk having to do with the customer she was just speaking with.
From the moment the boss opened her mouth, I knew what was coming.
"Thank you for the card you left me this morning..." she began. I had given both Debra and Jane a Christmas card the week before, but had forgotten the one for the boss at home, so was making up for that with a "Happy holidays/new year" card that thanked her for being so great to work for. It was a joke, in my mind, but I figured it would score points.
She continued, "...it was very sincere, which makes what I'm about to say so much more difficult. I've just done my business plan for 2007, and I'm needing to make some changes. We talked two months ago about your need to make more sales here, but I haven't seen any new efforts from you. I gave you thirty days, and it's been sixty. I need to go into the new year with a fresh start, and I just can't afford to keep you here anymore."
It was true, I hadn't made any efforts after our discussion. I thought I had made myself clear during that conversation that the problems did not lie solely with me. Similarly, with both Jane and Debra there doing almost no service work, I felt like they were better tasked at making appointments for business than I -- that it was better that I serviced the book of business while they marketed. Apparently, the boss didn't feel the same way.
"So, are you thinking today is my last day?" I asked. She pursed her lips and nodded in what appeared to be an attempt at a sad clown-face.
I tried to be cordial about the whole thing. It occurred to me immediately that this was really what I had wanted 60 days ago. I told her I just needed to get my things, then walked out of her office and went straight to my computer. I figured she wasn't savvy enough to have already called the technical support line to have my access turned off, and I was right. I cleaned out every file I had ever made, and destroyed the history of internet surfing, and all my past e-mails to friends I had made at other offices, including Sara. With that done, I grabbed a large plastic bag branded with the red-and-white State Farm logo and started dumping my few personal possessions in. I then told the boss I was done and "best of luck with everything." I told her to check my desk for loose ends she needed to wrap up, to which she tried to engage me in a discussion about them. I cut her off and told her that she could find the open tasks in a pile in my "inbox" and that I'm sure Jane could help her sort it out. She asked for my key, and I left.
Ring in the New Year
Let me end this series by saying that I was not entirely surprised or disappointed by the turn of events. No, instead I was angry that the boss had sucker-punched me. Just 60 days earlier, I had been completely ready to give my two-weeks notice when I had walked in her office to confront her. I had given her an "out," but she hadn't taken it. I felt like she had taken advantage of me for the holiday season, so that I could work during her long vacation after Thanksgiving, and during the times she was out of the office in late December. She had gotten someone new who could eventually take my place, and now she was dumping me.
I felt like she really didn't have the right to fire me -- I had already quit, but she had asked me to stay. I had done her a favor, and she was, in the spirit of Christmas, making sure it didn't go unpunished.
I shouldn't have been surprised, though. This was her way. During the entire six months I worked there, she had never once conceded that there were any problems except me, and while she was there, Sara. It didn't matter whether I confronted her with firm evidence that she had done something wrong, or that the office itself need her attention to make sales happen, it was always someone else's fault. And now, it was entirely my fault that I hadn't done any better, and she was letting me go.
In most places, people call this "cutting off your nose to spite your face." While I have no illusions that the office will collapse without my enormous intelligence and organization, I will concede that the office ran better when I was there. Jane, for all her best efforts, is still in the training phase of learning, having only just recently switched to a more active role in sales and service from her primarily marketing role. Debra, too, is just beginning to grasp the bigger picture of how the software systems and processes work at State Farm, and with her current rate of learning it will be at least another month before she is able to routinely make the complicated everyday changes on the system. But more than anything else, without the boss there on a daily basis, from morning until evening, to take care of the things I was doing for her, things won't go anywhere fast. All bullshit aside, I filled the very critical role of "the person in the know" who gets things done. With the boss' track record of letting things pile up, and without me there to clean up behind her, she is going to be lucky if she digs herself out of this mess in the next six months.
Good riddance, I say. If she thinks I was too expensive to have working for her when I was actually there greasing the wheels for her, wait until I file for unemployment insurance. I was practically working for pittance as it was, so not having a job really isn't that much of a step down. I was employed there from July 10th until December 29th, and in that time I actually took home $9,286.20 after taxes. Before taxes, I made just $184.85 in commission over the entire course of my employment with her.
I'm writing this on New Year's day, as I ponder what my next step is going to be. I started 2006 with a job I hated -- too much bureaucracy and bullshit. I left that job for what I thought was going to be big-money, and ended up making almost nothing to show for it. I found another job for what I thought was going to be livable-money, and ended up below the poverty line for the year.
I suppose it's good that she fired me before the new year had started, because like her, I need a fresh start. I'm a graduate from one of the best colleges in the south. I'm computer savvy, and have a certification to back me up on that. I have two professional licenses to sell insurance in Arkansas. I've worked at Disney, the foremost customer-service company in the World. I've been abroad three times at the age of 25, and have been to over 40 states. I deserve more than this, and I'm going to get it.
I'm sitting on the couch in the living room of my apartment. It's 1:30pm on a Tuesday afternoon, and it's not a holiday. I'm not sick, and no one I know has died.
This has been my life for the past three week. I'm a commission-only "Field Agent" selling Life and Health insurance with United American Insurance company, and I'm wondering where that mythical $50,000 that I was going to "average" for this year has gotten off to. It occurs to me that this job was pretty much over when my manager accused me of being both sexist and ageist. Considering that I'm gay, and only about 18 months older than her, I had my doubts that what she was saying was legitimate. Since then, I've been "working from home" because I don't want to see her face, or the face of anyone else in the office. They remind me of the $50k I don't have, and the job I left -- which was at least paying me a salary and giving me health insurance.
I decide that an average $400 a month is not going to get me by. Isn't getting me by. This job is a scam, and from this moment on, it's time to firmly realize that job is just straight-ova, and a new place of business is in order. I put my laptop back on my lap and find the number for a State Farm recruiter, something my dad suggested, knowing that I already have my Health & Life sales licenses in Arkansas -- may as well use them, right?
A woman picks up on what sounds like a cell phone. Strange number to have posted on the website of the largest auto insurance provider in the U.S., but okay, we'll run with this. She proceeds to sell me on the glories of being a State Farm agent. Own your own business! Set your own hours! Have your own office! Make lots of money! "How long does it take?" I ask. "Between six and 12 months," is the un-ironic answer. Okay, not an option. I'm living on credit cards and I'm currently the subordinate of someone who is barely out of diapers.
The recruiter concedes that some State Farm agents in the area may need staff to help them in the office. I ask her to pass on my resume as I e-mail it over to her. By Monday I've gotten one response -- a woman in West Little Rock who "needs help in the office." It won't be for another month before I realize how literal that statement is.
The Ringer -- Foreboding
I'm going to go ahead and blow the ending of this sad story for you, but only by confirming what the title of this series is about. I end up getting fired -- sorta. We'll get there, don't get ahead of me. But until then, let me say that I should have known from the very beginning that this woman was going to put me through the ringer.
After a brief chat on the phone, she invited me in for an interview. The first was nerve-wracking as most interviews go, but livable. I was told I was going to need to come back for a second interview, something I'd never had to do before. All of the jobs I'd ever applied for had hired me on the spot, or within a few hours of having interviewed. I'd never had to schedule for a second interrogation.
At my next interview, there was a new component: a blond power-"consultant" who grilled me about what I was currently doing, and put me on the spot by asking if I had just been "sitting around for the past few weeks" or if I had actually "been trying to make any sales." I went for the neutral ground and said I was continuing to service business but was not actively pursuing new clients, knowing that I was not intending to be around to service them. I figured it was an ethical, sturdy, non-true, non-slacker answer.
Even that was not enough. Still not hired -- had to come back for the third round. Finally, at this third round, I got some hard numbers to work with. Half of my health insurance paid, a $50k five-year-term Life Insurance policy with State Farm, 10 days of vacation a year, 10 days of sick and personal time, $24k salary.
Unbeknownst to me, I was already caught up in another ruse. As seems usual in the insurance industry, what you're going to get paid is only assured by what you're actually getting paid. Commission only? Expect nothing. $24k salary? Expect $24k. Confused? So am I -- still.
My new boss laid out in front of me a grid depicting commissions for the year. She assured me that she had quotas to hit, which meant that she had to get these numbers, so they were "assured." The biggest lot of my commission would be the money coming from "raw new auto" sales, which meant new auto policies that I was writing up for people who were not currently State Farm customers. The remainder of my commission would mostly be from Life and Health insurance. If we worked hard, I would make it to $40k in one year, between my salary and commission. The kicker? Commissions are only rewarded for "personally produced business." Meaning: if you walk into my office and ask for auto insurance, without me having contacted you previously to solicit that auto insurance, I don't get paid anything except my salary. But, if I sell you a life insurance policy to go with your auto insurance, then I do get the commission off the life insurance. Seems fair, but that's before you start working there...
Nonetheless, I was desperate. I didn't give a shit if she was paying me in cow hides and petrified dung -- as long as I could pay the bills with it. I asked her, point blank, if I was hired. She (finally!) said yes -- so long as I immediately enroll in my Property and Casualty insurance sales license classes and get them done. That was June 29th. The next day, I called the Insurance Training School of America (ISTA!) and enrolled in the upcoming P&C class starting on July 5th. It would go from Wednesday to Sunday, and I would start work on Monday. With dollar bill signs in my eyes, again, I wrote up a check for the fees, and started classes.
No one will buy my brand of crazy
I have a rule about where I am employed: never work somewhere that has stained ceiling-tiles. The staining itself creeps me out: where do these stains come from? Are there roof leaks? If so, why haven't they been fixed? And why haven't these ceiling tiles been replaced? Ceiling tiles are to offices as canaries are to coal mines -- they tell you how healthy the place is. An office that doesn't fix the problems leading up to stained ceiling tiles or doesn't replace them after it happens is an office that doesn't, deep down, care about itself, or its employees. Sometimes it's hard to stick to your personal standards, though, when you're just coming off of three months in a volunteer job. I had to overlook the disturbing amount of stained ceiling-tiles and just show that I was a good investment.
The office had two other people working there that I hadn't met during my interviews. Usually I had rushed right past them into the boss' office. The first was Sara, a girl my age who had worked there since April, and sat in the front-office. (Our office had a lobby area with two desks, one of which I was at, and then a front-office that was big enough for a big desk setup, a storage room and a break room, and then the very large back office, in which our boss had her whole setup.) Sara was helpful, but I could see she was unhappy there. Her and the boss were constantly arguing with each other, in the nicest ways possible. You know how it goes -- the conversation that doesn't seem to end, because both sides are just continuing to politely dispute what the other person is saying?
The other person at the office was Jane, a woman in her early-fifties with striking blond hair who tended to wear dresses that seemed just slightly young for her age. Nonetheless, she was incredibly perky and polite, and while I found her grating at first, she would end up becoming a good friend.
The first few weeks at the office were difficult. State Farm has an inane and rigorous training program that involves hours upon hours of computer coursework paired with tests which don't seem to have been made with the intention of actually testing the material that you were just taught. Meanwhile, State Farm also has two seperate computer software systems for quoting and servicing customers, with each system only handling certain functions that the other does not. Nonetheless, I was able to learn most of what I needed in what was said to be "record time" by the two other girls that worked there, and I found most of the process to be fairly routine on a daily basis.
After a month there, I was mostly finished with training and had begun sales. The boss had given me some of State Farm's proprietary marketing lists, which I had gone to work on, eager to begin making money. The process was onerous and disappointing, as sales usually is. I was working with this agent's current book of business, trying to set up "Insurance and Financial Reviews," a scam set up by State Farm to get people to come in for sales opportunities. Here's how it works: I call you and ask you to come in. If you do, we talk about your current policies and then I suggest other products of State Farm that you absolutely must have for you financial and insurance peace-of-mind. If you don't come in, I put a note on your record saying that you declined an IFR, and in the future when you complain about the fact that you didn't have rental car insurance on your auto policy, or your liability limits were too low, we go back in your record and say "We tried to get you in here to talk about those things, but you didn't want to!"
Of the few people that I actually got to come in, no one was buying what I was selling -- primarily life insurance. Most people never returned calls to come in, in the first place. Apparently they had heard this before.
Only so much I can do
The middle part of this story is the most boring, I know. But we have to slog through it so you can understand the really good parts at the end. So let's talk about the dynamics of my office for a moment: it was hell. After two months at the office, I was keenly aware of how this place really worked, and it was beginning to kill me a little inside. Sara and the boss were clearly unhappy with each other, and it was uncomfortable for Jane and I to listen to their politely violent conversations. Mercifully, the boss was rarely there -- she had a tendency to roll in at about 11am, take a two hour lunch, and then work "deep into the night." How long she actually stayed after we left, I have no idea.
She had two main problems. First, she was lazy. She couldn't get her ass out of bed early in the morning because she knew there was usually no one coming in, so she didn't bother to come in and try and find people to make appointments with. A bit of a vicious cycle, really. Second, she had no idea what she was doing. While she was very well-versed on insurance policy and sales knowledge, the computer was Goliath to her David. What she really spent hours doing, I later realized, was muddling her way through the software trying to run quotes or service accounts. She had difficulty doing even the most basic of tasks, even though the computer system she worked primarily with had been in place for more than eight years.
The office itself was also not conducive to working. Her desk was piled high with papers and policies that had been there for ages. Routinely, she would take a pile that had gotten too large and move it into the break room, where it would become part of a larger pile. Sara and I had to find policies and paperwork from time-to-time in these piles, and I was usually astounded at how old some of the stuff was. It was not uncommon to find sections of these piles which were dated from the mid-nineties. Needless to say, getting things done around there was usually a needle-in-a-haystack feeling.
Meanwhile, I was trying to make sales. A few did come from my efforts, but not nearly at the pace that I had been told I would be making them. After a few weeks, it was clear that the boss was becoming agitated at how little I, and Sara, were selling and things became more uncomfortable. Often I felt that the boss was looking at me reproachfully when she would saunter in right before the noon-hour. I always felt like I needed to be doing something to look busy and to avoid feeling guilty about not having made a sale that day.
Things finally reached a critical mass in October. It had become clear to me that I was not, actually, the one to blame. There was a period of a month where the boss wasn't in the office one Friday, and often not on Monday's as she went on vacations, meetings at sales rallies, and conventions. Sara had given up on her job and had simply started reading People.com from office-open to office-close. There was almost no one coming through the door anymore, a function (I felt) of Sara and I having cleaned up all the open-ends that had existed since before we had gotten there.
The essential problem with a "personally produced sales" commission system is that it works great when there's lots of business coming through the door, because you have lots of opportunity to "up-sell." But it works horribly when there's no business at all. Without new people calling for auto quotes, and without current customers stopping by for service or payment issues, you're pretty much left either having to call current customers to set up IFRs, or to sit and wait for something to happen.
I realized that it is really the agent's responsibility to bring people through the door, through marketing and being in the community. An associate like me can call people all day long, but in the end they don't want to talk to a 20-something. They want to talk to their agent about new lines of business.
Sara began looking for a new job, and I wondered if I should too. I made some calls and sent out my resume, but I wasn't sure if I was ready to make a move yet. Sara found a new job at another State Farm agent's office, who actually paid her employees for all of the sales they made regardless of whether they were "personally produced" or not. I was envious, but also looked forward to having her office -- the desk I was at was uncomfortable and cramped, not to mention completely non-conducive to making a sale while sitting in the middle of what was essentially the lobby.
Confronting crazy
Sara notified the boss that she was leaving, which was a shit-storm in itself. The boss felt like Sara should have told her first, which I found completely unreasonable -- when does an employee ever tell their boss that they're looking for a new job?
I decided it was time for me to make a stand. Every day in the office felt like torture, as I avoided the boss' eye, and tried any diversion tactic possible to not talk about sales. Nonetheless, the boss was constantly dropping comments in my direction about how we needed more sales and that I needed to make more calls.
I went back into the boss office one Thursday afternoon and sat down. I told her that this clearly wasn't working, and that I didn't want to come into the office feeling like I was doing a poor job. I told her that I felt like I had done tangible good for her book of business by servicing them to the best of my ability, by creating new systems of working between the two computer softwares we had, and by organizing processes that hadn't been done in ages. I told her that despite all that, I felt like I was not being appreciated, and I was prepared to walk away from the job, no hard feelings -- we could just say that it didn't work out.
The boss stared at me for a few minutes, dead-eyed, and began to tell me that I just needed to make more of an effort, and that I needed to make a plan for more sales. She said that I had misrepresented myself as someone who was able to make sales, to which I responded that she had misrepresented the amount of business that was possible in this office. In a tense moment, I told her that the disappointment over my employment here goes both ways.
She told me that I should stay for at least another 30 days, and we would see what we could work out. Just as she had finished this sentence, the power-blond consultant and another member of our "Agency Field Office" walked in, interrupting our discussion, to hand out Halloween candy. They were both dressed up in medieval garb.
The worst is over
Things went uphill quickly. Sara left, and I felt like things changed immediately. The boss stopped making comments about sales, and I started to relax. I made more sales in the next six weeks than I had made in the first four months -- still a small amount, but it was progress. The holidays came upon us, and things seems downright cheerful at the office. I had moved to Sara's desk, and felt empowered by the new digs. Jane, while still over-cheerful at times, became my only confidant about the discontent I still felt about making so little money. She constantly told me how smart I was, and that without me there she would have no idea what to do when simple things came up. That was true in a sense -- she had been there for over a year at this point, but only worked part-time, Tuesday through Thursday. Her main job was to do marketing, but she rarely did that, instead doing service tasks when they were within her realm of knowledge. She was learning, but slowly.
Soon, the boss hired a new woman to sit at my old desk. She was short, and in her late 40's. She was African-American, and while forceful about asking questions, she seemed to have difficulty grasping some basic office things, like taking messages and not interrupting me in the middle of appointments to ask me questions. I felt like she was a harbinger of doom for me in this office -- it seemed like the boss was preparing to replace me. It was only after a week or so with the new woman, Debra, that she told me that she hadn't actually been hired and that she was still on a "working interview." Despite her ephemeral position there, she was quickly taking up my "old" position. She seemed intent on impressing the boss, and took many duties from my desk, like working the morning report. The writing was on the wall as I realized that these were the same things I had done to Sara when I first arrived at the office.
Nonetheless, the boss and I hadn't revisited our conversation in late October, and I felt like things might look up in the New Year. I felt worried that I was not spurred to leave this under performing job, but it was also comfortable to come to the office and just do a job and then leave -- a lot less stress than I had dealt with in the last year.
I took my last two vacation days of the year on Wednesday, December 28th, and Thursday, December 29th. We were closed the Monday and Tuesday before that for Christmas, so it was almost like I had a full week off. On Friday I returned to seemingly normal day or work.
At 5:00pm, I was still on the phone with a random customer who had called in to ask for an auto quote -- a rare occasion these days. I sold her on a life-insurance policy, as well, and she was making plans to come in late the next week. Jane popped into my office and whispered to me that the boss wanted to talk to me. I nodded and said goodbye to her and Debra as they left.
As I was hanging up, the phone rang again and the boss picked it up. It was one of the two customers I had had wranglings with earlier in the day. The situations were going to be easy to resolve, but they were strangely reminiscent of early times at this office when our customers were difficult on a daily basis.
I waited around for almost 10 minutes for the boss to finish her conversation with the customer. It was about 5:12pm at this point in time, and I didn't appreciate being made to wait. We were going into a three-day weekend, and I didn't get paid overtime, on the basis of the fact that we only worked from 8:30am - 5:00pm, so there was an extra two-and-a-half hours in the week that could be used before we hit 40 hours. Finally, the conversation was done and I went back into the boss' office. I sat some papers on her desk having to do with the customer she was just speaking with.
From the moment the boss opened her mouth, I knew what was coming.
"Thank you for the card you left me this morning..." she began. I had given both Debra and Jane a Christmas card the week before, but had forgotten the one for the boss at home, so was making up for that with a "Happy holidays/new year" card that thanked her for being so great to work for. It was a joke, in my mind, but I figured it would score points.
She continued, "...it was very sincere, which makes what I'm about to say so much more difficult. I've just done my business plan for 2007, and I'm needing to make some changes. We talked two months ago about your need to make more sales here, but I haven't seen any new efforts from you. I gave you thirty days, and it's been sixty. I need to go into the new year with a fresh start, and I just can't afford to keep you here anymore."
It was true, I hadn't made any efforts after our discussion. I thought I had made myself clear during that conversation that the problems did not lie solely with me. Similarly, with both Jane and Debra there doing almost no service work, I felt like they were better tasked at making appointments for business than I -- that it was better that I serviced the book of business while they marketed. Apparently, the boss didn't feel the same way.
"So, are you thinking today is my last day?" I asked. She pursed her lips and nodded in what appeared to be an attempt at a sad clown-face.
I tried to be cordial about the whole thing. It occurred to me immediately that this was really what I had wanted 60 days ago. I told her I just needed to get my things, then walked out of her office and went straight to my computer. I figured she wasn't savvy enough to have already called the technical support line to have my access turned off, and I was right. I cleaned out every file I had ever made, and destroyed the history of internet surfing, and all my past e-mails to friends I had made at other offices, including Sara. With that done, I grabbed a large plastic bag branded with the red-and-white State Farm logo and started dumping my few personal possessions in. I then told the boss I was done and "best of luck with everything." I told her to check my desk for loose ends she needed to wrap up, to which she tried to engage me in a discussion about them. I cut her off and told her that she could find the open tasks in a pile in my "inbox" and that I'm sure Jane could help her sort it out. She asked for my key, and I left.
Ring in the New Year
Let me end this series by saying that I was not entirely surprised or disappointed by the turn of events. No, instead I was angry that the boss had sucker-punched me. Just 60 days earlier, I had been completely ready to give my two-weeks notice when I had walked in her office to confront her. I had given her an "out," but she hadn't taken it. I felt like she had taken advantage of me for the holiday season, so that I could work during her long vacation after Thanksgiving, and during the times she was out of the office in late December. She had gotten someone new who could eventually take my place, and now she was dumping me.
I felt like she really didn't have the right to fire me -- I had already quit, but she had asked me to stay. I had done her a favor, and she was, in the spirit of Christmas, making sure it didn't go unpunished.
I shouldn't have been surprised, though. This was her way. During the entire six months I worked there, she had never once conceded that there were any problems except me, and while she was there, Sara. It didn't matter whether I confronted her with firm evidence that she had done something wrong, or that the office itself need her attention to make sales happen, it was always someone else's fault. And now, it was entirely my fault that I hadn't done any better, and she was letting me go.
In most places, people call this "cutting off your nose to spite your face." While I have no illusions that the office will collapse without my enormous intelligence and organization, I will concede that the office ran better when I was there. Jane, for all her best efforts, is still in the training phase of learning, having only just recently switched to a more active role in sales and service from her primarily marketing role. Debra, too, is just beginning to grasp the bigger picture of how the software systems and processes work at State Farm, and with her current rate of learning it will be at least another month before she is able to routinely make the complicated everyday changes on the system. But more than anything else, without the boss there on a daily basis, from morning until evening, to take care of the things I was doing for her, things won't go anywhere fast. All bullshit aside, I filled the very critical role of "the person in the know" who gets things done. With the boss' track record of letting things pile up, and without me there to clean up behind her, she is going to be lucky if she digs herself out of this mess in the next six months.
Good riddance, I say. If she thinks I was too expensive to have working for her when I was actually there greasing the wheels for her, wait until I file for unemployment insurance. I was practically working for pittance as it was, so not having a job really isn't that much of a step down. I was employed there from July 10th until December 29th, and in that time I actually took home $9,286.20 after taxes. Before taxes, I made just $184.85 in commission over the entire course of my employment with her.
I'm writing this on New Year's day, as I ponder what my next step is going to be. I started 2006 with a job I hated -- too much bureaucracy and bullshit. I left that job for what I thought was going to be big-money, and ended up making almost nothing to show for it. I found another job for what I thought was going to be livable-money, and ended up below the poverty line for the year.
I suppose it's good that she fired me before the new year had started, because like her, I need a fresh start. I'm a graduate from one of the best colleges in the south. I'm computer savvy, and have a certification to back me up on that. I have two professional licenses to sell insurance in Arkansas. I've worked at Disney, the foremost customer-service company in the World. I've been abroad three times at the age of 25, and have been to over 40 states. I deserve more than this, and I'm going to get it.
