My poor brakes.

 

When I was 22 or so, I bought a used car from a dealership and the salesman told me that the brakes were covered under warranty, so I took it back to the dealer who fixed them and then charged me a buttload of money. The salesman who told me that the brakes were covered wouldn't back me up, and of course now I know as an adult that of course brakes are never covered by warranty, but at the time I was pissed.

 

I'm not pissed anymore though, like practically everyone else in America and the world at large, I now have a deep-seated distrust of anyone who sells anything anywhere at anytime. I don't even believe girl scouts at my door. This distrust bordered on mania, and didn't help me at all when, years later, I embarked upon a sales career of my own.

 

I found that I wasn't any good at sales, as I lack the ability to persuade anyone to do anything that they don't already want to do, which basically is all that sales people do.

 

They kid themselves and act respectable, and say that they're to "provide a service" or "grant opportunity," but when your entire livelihood depends on how high your numbers are, believe me, any good that you do when getting those numbers up is incidental. You want to sell, sell, sell! Keep the numbers going up, and any benefit that anyone gets from what you're doing may be nice, but in the end makes no difference.

 

Maybe it's not fair of me to prejudge everyone in the sales industry based on my own limited experience. Maybe I should be more even-handed in my assesment of people as individuals, and realize that everyone is different and unique and that we all have faults and strengths.

 

Maybe I should.

 

But I don't.

 

On TV and in the comic books, everything is much simpler. Everyone has a role to play and all of their choices are pre-determined by how they're cast. You know, for instance, that Superman isn't going to kill anyone, that Conan the Barbarian isn't going to walk into a restaurant and order fondue, and that Freddy Kruegger isn't going to help a kitten out of a tree. Just like you know that salesmen can't be trusted.

 

This traffic sucks. O wait, it's moving again.