Testimony 080211.2

I sold for one summer....one summer too many. I was recruited out of Colorado by my manager who was pregnant at the time. After training in Nashville, I was sent out to Ohio with my team. My roommate, Dwayne, was from K-State. Dwayne and I hit the sales field and started looking for our place to live. Day 1 - nothing. Day 2 - nothing. Day 3 - 5 - Nothing!! We stayed/broke into abandoned homes; went to churches and got put up by pastors for a night here or there; stayed in my car. All the time, we were in touch with management, and the "encouraged" us to just keep trying. Finally, after Day 5, I called my manager and told her that I was done. I was going home. MIRACULOUSLY, I got a call 30 minutes later from the area manager (Curtis) saying that they called an old family who had hosted students before and they agreed to host Dwayne and me. Thanks, SW, for letting it go that far.....a real character builder.

So Dwayne and I started selling the next day. To be honest, sales is not my strong suit, and my results showed it. But Dwayne was a different story. He evidently had bought into the "get-rich-quick" sales pitch. And to be honest, he was a worse sales person than I was. So instead, he started stealing from homes that he gained entry to - a camera, a laptop, etc. Then, one day, I get a call from home asking if I had started using checks from my home bank account. "Of course not!" I say. "The company said to set up my own local account, so I did." I am then informed that I have had over $650 in checks cashed in the last two weeks out of that home account. I looked into my check book and found a set of checks missing from the middle of the book. I called Curtis immediately to report Dwayne for stealing the checks (by this time, my manager had returned home because she was too far along in her pregnancy to continue on the sales field).

Amazingly, Curtis encourages me to "put it out of my mind" and just keep selling. Gratefully, the local police did not share Curtis's point of view. They arrested Dwayne and I never saw him again. Unfortunately, the last I heard, when he was released from jail, he returned to our host family. They were a wonderful elderly couple. The husband had been dealing with cancer and was getting weaker and weaker. Dwayne talked Grandma (that's what I called her) into letting him stay in the house with the understanding that he would help her out around the house. I guess his idea of "helping" was to steal their television and other electronics one night while Grandma and Grandpa were sleeping.

Thank you, Southwestern, not just for "impacting" my life, but also for damaging the lives of two of the kindest people I have ever met.

By the way - Curtis made a point to sit down with me in Nashville during the checkout process. The first thing I told him was that I was completely aware that he had a "sales pitch" to bring me back for another year. I told him that if he used one word of that sales pitch, I'd punch him in the face and walk out. I never heard from Southwestern again, and Curtis kept his pretty-boy face "as-is".

One last thing - while in Ohio, I had found a toy hand grenade. One of the most therapeutic things that I have ever done in my life was to toss that hand grenade out the window as I left my sales field. It felt soooo good!!