Massage To Go

It was a week later and I still couldn’t believe it. One day I was a sales manager on the "fast-track" for my corporation and the next, I was "pursuing opportunities outside the corporation", corporate-speak to explain why I wasn’t in my office anymore without having to say they’d fired me.


The whole problem started when Division promoted a senior accountant to the job of Director of Sales and Marketing. He didn’t quite understand that a sales department can only sell what customers want to buy, and if the company’s products weren’t that, selling was pretty difficult.


He kept harping about the amount of money we spent on travel every month without having anything to show for the cost. He couldn’t believe customers would pay half our price for the same product made in some third world country just because it was cheaper. I tried to explain the concept of product differentiation and its impact on sales, and I tried showing him the customer feedback reports that said our product wasn’t any better than our foreign competition. I pointed out that customers buy for price if everything else is equal, and only pay more if they believe they’re getting more. His answer was, "It’s thinking like that that’s killing American industry", whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.


I admit the mistake was mine. I’d had enough one day, and walked into his office, closed the door, and tried to explain the realities of sales to him. Somewhere along the way, it’s possible I did say he wouldn’t see the truth if it bit him on the ass. It’s also possible I said I didn’t know how he managed to wipe his ass since he couldn’t see that either. I really don’t remember.


Anyway, the next morning, my email said I had an appointment with Human Resources at nine. It didn’t take long. At nine-fifteen, I walked out of the building without my badge. I had their assurance they’d clean out my desk and send the contents to me as long as they didn’t deem said contents to be company property.


So, after a day of asking my scotch bottle why there were so many assholes in the world, and another of asking myself how I could be stupid enough to drink a quart of scotch at one sitting, I started to think about my new-found freedom.


I was twenty-five and single, had no debt other than the payment on the house I’d bought a couple of years earlier, and had six months severance pay in the bank.


It was also pretty certain that it would take those six months to find a job equivalent to the one I’d just left, so I had some time on my hands. I couldn’t very well go flip burgers, because interviews have a way of happening at any hour of the day, but I couldn’t sit at home without going nuts. Then, one day while flipping through the local newspaper I saw the answer.


LIKE PEOPLE? WANT TO BE YOUR OWN BOSS?


LEARN MASSAGE THERAPY AT NATSA COMMUNITY COLLEGE


There was some small print at the bottom of the add that said credits would probably not transfer to another college and that there was no guarantee, express or implied, of employment after graduation, but that didn’t matter to me. I was envisioning how many girls I could get in bed by offering them a massage.

Next Page »