Door to Door

My little sister has arrived.

Actually (of course) that was two nights ago, but yesterday was NOT a good day at work, so it did not get posted. BUT before I post anything about MMK coming, let me post about something else.

There is a story about before my little sister arrived that I wanted to comment on. I made the mistake of inviting a door to door Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesman into my house. I really did not know what I was getting into, and he was offering to clean our front carpet for free, which is something we have wanted done for a LONG time. So, he came in and started doing his spiel. I did not mind sitting there and listening to him, and the vacuum cleaner was impressive.

The problem came when he got the mistaken idea that we had already agreed to buy it. We thought it was a tactic at first, he said lets go over and sit down and talk about the paper work, and we figured this was the part where he told us we were going to get a great deal and offered us some sort of financing that we would then turn down and say we ultimately were not interested. As it turned out, he thought he had made the sale, despite the fact that "we want to buy it" or "we are in" or even "we are really interested in the possibility of buying it" never crossed our lips. We, of course, are not the types of people that impulse purchase anything that is two hundred dollars, let alone anything that is two grand (which was the price of this vacuum). He went so far as to call his boss and say he had made the sale (which we also thought was a tactic). When we voiced our lack of willingness to purchase, he was all shocked, as in actually shocked, not just trying to acted shocked to make the sale. I felt bad, but seriously dude, ask if people are going to make the purchase before assuming they are.

The funny part is that as the beginning of the whole thing he actually said "at the end of this I am going to ask you for a yes or no on whether you want to purchase this, I don't care which answer it is, but I will ask the question just so you know." He never asked that question, he just assumed yes.

Anyways, so he went back to cleaning the carpet, then called in the big guns, and someone I assume was a level above him showed up and started helping him clean the carpet and talk to us. She was nice enough, but we of course told her the same thing - we don't do impulse purchases like that. She offered us a greatly reduced price ($799), but we still said no, and they started to pack up. She sent him outside with the first box while she finished up and then took the opportunity to ask us what the guy had done to piss us off, saying she would be expected to explain to her boss how he had lost the sale. We tried to explain that he had not lost a sale so much as thought he had it when he didn't, so hopefully he did not get into too much trouble because he seemed like a nice enough guy.

One other comment on this experience. At one point, after having vacuumed up a ridiculous amount of pet hair from one little section of that carpet (he said it was the worse he had seen... oops!), anyways, after doing this, one of his little "trying to make the sale" comments was "So, you agree that cleaning is a priority for you". We both had to fight the urge to burst out laughing. Um. Do you think if cleaning was a priority for us that you would be able to get that much hair out of our carpet? That we would have this many stains? I don't think so. We pointed this out to him, but agreed that perhaps cleaning should be MORE of a priority. Honestly, while I am sure none of our carpets are great in terms of pet hair, I am also sure that that carpet is by far the worst in the house (hence why we had him work on it). Rather than making me want to purchase a new vacuum cleaner, the whole process made me want to take that 2K and pay to have wood or laminate floors put down in that room. That carpet needs replacing.

And that, folks, is my door-to-door salesman story. I did get some benefit out of it - my stairs look better than they have in probably a year. But, from now on I am adopting DH's motto - turn door-to-door salesmen away on shear principle that we don't want them coming to our door, even if the product is interesting