Collecting toys is a weird hobby. I know that. Being a weird hobby, it tends to build one's tolerance for weirdness in general. That's why, when some weird guy starting talking to me in the Walmart toy aisle the other day, I tried to be as polite as possible and let him do his thing. It wouldn't be the first time a stranger tried to talk shop while browsing through G.I.Joes.
After trying to talk shop, though, it became painfully evident that this guy had no idea about anything geeky and was merely bluffing his way through the most basic of pop culture references. Indeed, he seemed more interested in asking me what kind of work I did for a living than in talking about the travesties of Michael Bay. I began to suspect the motives for the chap's seemingly random desire to talk to me (I even began scratching my nose with my left hand out of a narcissistic homophobia).
Fortunately, Isabel showed up out of bathwares and managed to whisk me away.
As we neared the exit of the store, however, Isabel noticed the man had begun following. He eventually intercepted us, told us his name (and blinked awkwardly when I would not tell him mine), and then asked whether my job permitted me enough free time to make some extra money on the side doing some "marketing." I explained that my job took about 110% of my time, wished him luck, and briskly departed.
It spoiled an otherwise enjoyable trip to the toy aisle (I never managed to take advantage of the sale Walmart was having on their G.I.Joe Anniversary figures).
Stranger, yet, however, is that this is the second time this has happened to us. Down south, we were once accosted by a fellow in a Target with a similar routine (what do you do for a living, how do you like your job, am I from the area, etc.). He was a bit more aggressive and less friendly, though...as he became indignant when I refused to hand him a business card after he shoved his at us.
Subsequent to this second encounter, I grew more curious about what had happened (I was willing to dismiss the first case as a crazy person). It turns out that this is a fairly common phenomenon, and it has a name, as I learned from a blog post (following a very exhausting Google search): Network Marketing/Multi-Level Marketing. According to Ramit Sethi's blogpost, it's essentially a low-level (and legally spurious) ponzi-type scheme where people sign up to sell legitimate but usually worthless products for a fly-by-night company. The sellers are then pressured into / rewarded for recruiting new sellers as well as typically buying the products they are supposed to sell (and they will usually try to sell them to friends and relatives). It's kind of like the Avon Lady system gone bad...or a hybrid offspring of Tastefully Simple Parties and Scientology.
These guys had all the aggression of evangelical cult members, only without any of the spirituality.
So the next time a random person in a store asks me what I do for a living, I think I'm going to cut him off at the pass and tell him I make $100,000 a year as a network marketer selling power juice to my neighbors.
That happened to me once when I was out of town. I took the guy's card and even called him a couple times from the place I was staying to try to figure out what he was talking about. He eventually got angry with me when I refused to meet him again to discuss the matter, and said that if I wasn't ready for the "opportunity" he was offering, he had better things to do with his time. Looking back on it, I'd rate the experience somewhere between being approached in parking lots to buy magazines/candles/cookies and having my thetan levels tested by scientologists.
Posted by: Mike | August 14, 2009 at 04:38 PM
Are you sure that wasn't just a drug dealer, Mike?
Posted by: Peter Terp | August 15, 2009 at 04:28 PM