Posted this to tifu, got removed because nothing significantly bad happened, so I'll put it here. A couple of years ago, when I was an undergrad, I worked retail on the side. One busyish day, as I was ringing up a guy for his purchase, he asked me if I was a student and what my major was. Figuring he was just trying to make small talk, I told him I was a pre-med student. Right away, he started telling me he worked for a company where he worked with a lot of doctors and that it helped a lot of undergrads get high-paying jobs right out of college. He was really talkative and strangely enthusiastic for someone promoting a company to a stranger he just started talking to.
He made it sound like a company that set people up with internships and jobs for pre-med people and then told me about one of the company's orientations that was taking place at a nearby hotel a couple of days later. Without even asking him the name of the company, I decided it was worth a shot, so he gave me the address and suggested that I wear business casual clothes. For reasons I can't remember, my parents had to drop me off. This gets relevant later. I decided to go all out and wear a suit and paid good money to get it dry cleaned and pressed. I thought it was a sure thing.
When I got to the hotel and the orientation started, holy fuckbuckets, it wasn't what I thought it would be. The main speaker at the orientation talked about how a person can make boatloads of money without even really trying, showing us a slideshow that looked like it belonged in a child's school project. The speaker didn't mention how a person that joined the company was supposed to make any of this money at all. At this point, I still thought it was a potentially lucrative offer, so I kept listening.
After the speech ended, he called on a bunch of slightly creepy, wide-eyed people to talk about their individual experiences with the company. They used the same nebulous tone the speaker gave, but again, I still had dollar signs in my eyes. After they were done talking, the guy who invited me to the orientation came up to me and started introducing me to the aforementioned creepy people, and as they talked to me about their supposed success stories, all I could think while I was nodding my head pretending to listen was, "What kind of creepy ass cult meeting did I get dragged in to?" But just like before, I kept listening for more info instead of noping out of there.
After talking with a bunch of people, the guy who invited me came with me to the lobby of the hotel and gave me a bunch of promotional materials with an Amway logo on them. I had zero idea what Amway was or what it did, no thanks to the orientation speech. The guy then brought out some registration forms and asked me, "So how would you like to pay for your registration? Cash? Check?" I was still open to the possibility of joining, but decided to give the decision more time and told him as much. He was really insistent about my joining and gave me his number and asked to call him back later when I've made up my mind.
When my dad came to pick me up, the guy came outside with me and talked to my dad for a little while. He didn't mention Amway to my dad. On the ride back, as soon as I mentioned the word "Amway," my dad said, "Oh shit, do you know what you just got yourself into?" He then told me that Amway is a company where employees are expected to buy products from the company and sell them door-to-door. Employees are also supposed to recruit new employees and make commission based off of what the recruits sell. They actively go out and talk to random strangers, a lot of the times young college-aged people, trying to recruit them into their business like they did with me. My dad then told me that when he and my mom were just married, they were recruited by Amway similarly to how I was and lost a lot of money because of the registration fee and because they weren't able to sell enough stuff. Some of my parent's relatives and friends also lost money joining Amway. Obviously, I decided not to join. The kicker is that if my dad didn't have to drive me, I'm not sure I would have mentioned the word Amway to my parents until I'd already joined, and at that point, getting out probably would have been a lot harder. In the end, I still lost money on getting the suit cleaned for nothing, but I think I dodged a bullet.
TL;DR - Didn't listen to my gut several times, almost joined fucking Amway.
Submitted March 30, 2017 at 03:36PM by AsylumJim http://ift.tt/2nAv7DI
