Cattle Calls

In my industry, it is a rare and cherished gift for a salesperson to find themselves sitting in front of a customer, alone, with no other competitors in the room. I had one of these last week and left at the end of the meeting feeling the way I always do under the circumstances... like I nailed it to the wall and then hit it with darts, lit it on fire and shot it to the moon.

But in most cases, my appointments are more like cattle calls, a bunch of us herded into a small space being treated like a commodity gets treated... which is to say with the barest of minimum respect.

And it's really worse for a lot of my colleagues who don't have it as cushy as I do... all I do is sales, which means I have few late nights before early mornings. Many of my colleague at these meetings were up all night the night before and had to be at an early appointment after getting the kids off to school and all that stuff, only to be treated like shit by a prospective customer.

The building services, Security, Janitorial, Light Maintenance, are actually called "lesser trades." There's an esteem builder.

I would like these contract administrators, purchasers, cube dwellers and snooty receptionists to go a few days without us picking up after them, wiping KFC grease off their desks, emptying the rotting food from their refrigerators, scrubbing their toilets (only to have them do the most wicked and unspeakable things... I can't... you don't... let's just drop it), keeping the entries safe from people who want to come in and cut people in half with an AK, or making sure the AC and heat works.

It is unfortunate how we are often looked down upon, even though it would be almost immediately apparent if we weren't there. Imagine a city with no garbage collection... actually, don't imagine it, go to Florence, Italy, which has been under the thumb of the trash collectors union for almost 3 years. Litter is in some places FEET THICK on the city streets. "You want garbage on that pizza?" Only a few years ago the city of Hamtramck (yes, that's the way it's spelled, it's a Polish enclave. Polaks don't like vowels.), near Detroit was broke and could no longer afford to haul the trash. So, for over a month of a hot summer, trash littered the entire town... which wasn't much to look at or smell before all that happened.

Bus drivers, cops, fire fighters, janitors, security guards, gardeners... what would the world be like without these critical and perennially low paid people? Chaos.

And for this bid this morning, they aren't happy with their current service. The current service was not present to re-bid. I bet I know why-Even if they had the opportunity to keep the business, they would be better off without it.

Did the client want proposals? Capabilities presentations? Interviews? Financial statements proving we'll be around next year? did they want anything that proved we could do the job better than the outgoing contractor? Nope.

"Just put the number at the bottom of the page. Don't burden us, we're busy." That is a formal quote... I wrote it in my notes.

"And what if you go low bid and the new contractor can't do it for what they quoted? Aren't you considering that?" asked one of my colleagues who drove all the way from Flint, (nearly 3 hours), to be treated like shit on the bottom of a shoe.

"Then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it and you'll all probably be back to bid it again, soon."

No wonder they're so busy. They don't take the time to do their job effectively in the first place and have to do it over and over and over, again; never learning from the previous failure.

Contractors will keep showing up, too, although the best thing we could do it just put up our middle fingers and tell them where they can sit and spin. If we want to pay a living wage to our employee, that's up to us, but if one of the 16 contractors there bids it at minimum wage, they will be chosen. That contractor may even put in an illegal worker who is not insured, not paying taxes and essentially has no recourse or rights as a worker. This person will likely remain disenfranchised, unable to get out of their situation, until they get hurt and dumped on the street or found by the cops and deported.

If this sounds a little maudlin, I assure you, it is the truth. It happens over and again like the tides. 18 months ago in my city, a building services contractor was busted. The owner was illegal, as was a majority of his workforce. The big embarrassment was that this guy, the owner, was on the city commission for Hispanic relations and his company cleaned many or most of the city/county buildings. And even after that debacle, there is no language in the city/county bid requests that requires proof of citizenship for a contractor's employees.

Translation? "We didn't see nothin'."

So, moo... You got me. Out of bed at 6 on a Monday to shower and shave and dress and preen, only to be led through a gated labrynth, over a sluice floor and eventually shot in the head and processed like so much meat.

And that's what life is like at the bottom of the food chain.