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Ripping Lines: Sales, Sex, and Dying the Old Fashioned Way

By Dan McCarthy

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My desk is littered and the office is quiet. A Styrofoam cup taunts the coffee pot flanking it to the right, and I’m pretty sure I just heard someone say we’ve got a research team in Washington. Last night, I had a dream I was at a function for work that took place in a decrepit version of the Playboy mansion. Upper management departed in a safari-colored Jeep and two men wrestled on a damp floor covered by a blanket of broken glass. The view out the window was sun drenched and warm, boasting a rolling hillside covered by a grassy ocean of nameless headstones. Grave after grave; forgotten soldiers or fired marketing executives, paying their dues after buying into the vision of a fact-spitting troll burping on the other end of the phone.

I have one simple task: sell concepts. No tangible product in sight. Abstract, scripted pitches that seem to cover every angle like some slight-of-hand card trick contrived by a two-bit hustler. Figure out what a company does, claim that’s what we’re focusing on, smash and grab, take the money, and run. The best at their job leave the executive on the other end of the phone feeling like some frail woman who's just been raped by the Invisible Man. Dizzy, excited and dirty, we sales reps swoop down upon the companies like Birds of Fire on a dusty hay field. Light it up and cover your tracks – no sympathy for the open-eared here.

The particular corner of Advertising Sales where I lurk is dark and bloodthirsty, demanding sacrifices of all sorts. While trailblazing its Road of Bones, one quickly realizes it leaves more victims than survivors on both ends of the phone. Seems that every week, the ratio of persons quitting, fired, hired, and scoring is absurdly balanced. At the core rests a lair of sleazy directors and apathetic bosses – all out for the quickest buck and thinnest judge of morality. Even the ones you like would still eat their children if it meant a solid commission or a chance for bettering their career. Your closest friend is found in the form of a louse who would sell you and his mother up the river for some good scotch and a bag of fingers with the rings still hugging the knuckles. Earlier, he would boast of his formative years stealing candy from kids in war-torn Africa. Absorbing this, a sane man would grab his check and flee. On the rare occasion you find a genuine article, one of the good guys, it’s like floating over to the last dry life raft while braving a raging ocean of hot sewage.

It doesn’t take much to figure out how I do it, but the naive never see it coming. Like after your uncle shows you how he palmed the quarter and then pulled it from behind your ear, you feel sorry for the sap on the other end if he’s still swallowing the shit you’re shoveling after the first few minutes of the call. Or perhaps they consider the possibility that they’re being duped, but in the end place blind faith in the common decency of their fellow man, assuming, hoping, that perhaps this will be the call that finally restores their belief that business isn’t all wolves and vipers. How wrong they are.

I recently viewed some disturbing video footage that made headlines here in New York: that of an innocent man in a pizza joint on his cell phone waiting to pick up an order. While waiting, a swollen misfit looking like a walking piece of charcoal with a hair full of Amazon tarantulas on her head oozes in, starting a ruckus. She spits on the man with the cell phone after he tells his girlfriend on the other end that “this may take a while - someone just cut in line.” Noticeably pissed from getting spat on by such a diseased and awful creature, he glares at the woman, engaging her in an argument. From outside, her 300-pound gorilla of a boyfriend rolls in, boasting oversized clothes, and a clear penchant for mindless violence. The spineless thug beats the innocent man, a quarter his size, to near death. The metaphorical link was brutally clear: we’re a remorseless con, a violent hell-storm busting into joints and smashing the financial bejesus out of some poor fuck that happens to be on the phone when we came thundering in on a smoldering Chariot of Lies.

The aforementioned worthless ape got 4 years for his violent act. Not nearly enough. We get advertising dollars; in amounts far, far too much considering what is given in return. Both parties are heartless killers, out for ourselves and looking to do as much damage as possible before the authorities check in and interrupt our vicious beat downs. Like the girlfriend watching it all, the sales floor is either too dumb or too blind to recognize the full horror of what we unleash every time we dial a number, breathing fire.

Whispers of interoffice sex, dating, exposition, and backstabbings run rampant through a gossip-vine, unsurprisingly made up mostly of clucking girls with daggers in their eyes and mirrors in their hands. An office-wide tipping point can be found in last year’s Prada, acting like flint sparks on moisture starved desert brush. Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn - a sales floor comprised of warring female factions creates Sulfuric breathing conditions.

At the end of the day, am I any better than those I openly put to the fire? Mostly, I’m aware of the business war crimes we hide, which when viewed from a distance might be seen as the ethical equivalent to the Third Reich. Round ’em up and toss’em in the oven, full blast. Why not? Who cares who we hurt in our grand scheme, right? Case in point: one of my direct superiors told me that, not only have some executives been fired for the disastrous deals they’ve struck with us, but that he himself has successfully pitched the very same raw deals to those offed execs replacements’. Egad. You have to hand it to them - there’s a certain level of demented beauty to it all. Of course, all this takes place under the guise of campy quotes on spirituality and inspirational fragments taken out of context just enough to sound applicable to our particular line of work. But if I’m aware of what’s happening, and remain for the fiscal solvency, the steady work and intoxicating commission it provides, what then? Where do I fall on the broken ladder of moral indignation? Even Gerald Ford, a God fearing man, once proclaimed out on a golf course that he believed he was destined to go to Hell for pardoning Nixon. We all have our demons, forged in the fires of our actions during our time spent alive, and after this saga mine will be no better.

The shit and terror involved in the daily grind is only the half of it. An ironic twist of Fate’s orgiastic mind-humping is well at work on me between every call I make. Too dumb for the academics and too smart for the thugs, I’m the walking physical embodiment of the current, young middle class. I represent the raging duality in all of us. Given a little, blessed with some, and always reaching for more, I’d probably be capable of much more if I put all my eggs in the same basket and finally figured out who the fuck I am. But that’s the world of Ad Sales I inhabit: ripping lines, borrowing ideas, and closing hard on a piss-ridden road to unjust financial heights.

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Dan McCarthy is a writer living in New York City.  He can be contacted here.

© 2004 Me Three