30: The Wall Street Journal
The WSJ recently asked readers to share their best and worst summer jobs. I…had something to share. Here, reprinted from the Wall Street Journal Small Business section, where it was reprinted from my Gmail, is
No sale (Wall Street Journal)
My worst summer job was the one I gave myself. In the summer between high school and college, I sold kitchen knives from a catalog. Before then I’d only worked washing dishes, mopping floors and scooping ice cream. I was excited to put on a tie for my little sales calls. I barely sold anything. They were expensive knives! I knew, because I’d had to buy my own sample set. I did manage to convince myself they were the best knives at any price. And I got my mom to buy a jackknife from the back of the catalog, for my dad’s birthday.
The day it arrived, I excitedly opened the box to show my mom the fine craftsmanship and safety features. I opened the knife, struggled to close it, and sliced my hand open. So Dad got a technically used knife and I learned some important life lessons.
One, that I was a terrible salesman. A “Glengarry Glen Ross” schmuck who couldn’t move product. Likely because I paid attention to what I needed, not what the customer needed.
I also learned a more cynical lesson: Rich kids can sell their parents’ friends an $800 knife set. But the parents in my working-class community weren’t going to buy high-price knives as a favor.
I should have learned some humility, maybe to think before showing off the superiority of my opinion, but that lesson wouldn’t sink in for several more years.
— Nick Douglas, New York City
I’ve been listening to an album recorded at witch camps in Ghana:
While belief in witchcraft is not unique to Ghana, witch camps are. These small settlements, which still exist despite government efforts to shut them down, offer accused women safe haven, albeit within the same framework of belief that drove them from their homes: the chiefs claim to ask the local gods to neutralise their powers and render them harmless. Protection assumes guilt. “If we are here, then we must be witches,” one told a journalist a few years ago.
The context is tragic. The song titles are blood-draining. But the music of these dispossessed women is beautiful and spare. (The lyrics are in local dialects.)
I also listened to the soundtrack of Space Quest 4: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. Multitudes!