how to get promoted to customer as a salesman - tales of corporate chicanery
26 Nov 2025 - marmar
If there’s one thing I never imagined myself doing, it’s sales. It’s not a career path I ever envisioned for myself, and after trying it, I hated it so much that unless I were at risk of homelessness and had no other choice but to do sales to survive, I might still be hesitant about it, as that would mean I might actually have to sell my soul to a company and potentially sacrifice my integrity over a paycheck that came from selling some bullshit product to a customer who doesn’t need it.
I know that’s not true for all sales. I worked in an company that has a reputation for building and maintaining strong relationships with its customers (though I think that’s some bullshit other companies also use to try to manipulate people into spending more. they were honestly kinda weird about it too) so there was something satisfying about genuinely helping somebody out, especially when they called me, and not the other way around. If they were calling in, they definitely needed something, or at least wanted something and just needed a little confidence boost in making a purchase by talking to an “expert.” I can’t say this was enough of an upside for me to have more positive feelings about sales. But perhaps if server crashes were more frequent and my paycheck wasn’t dependent on how many people I tricked into spending more or how much more stuff I made them buy, the experience would have been a little more bearable. The best days in sales were the days when the servers went down.
The moment our system started lagging, you could hear groans of disappointment down the hallways of cubicles, as that could impact our ability to make sales and meet our goals. But you would also hear laughter, cheers, and other celebratory sounds as the servers finally crashed, which would then be interrupted by a manager attempting to get the salesmen to do their jobs through a mobile platform that was often not enough for us to actually do our jobs. I’m sure they tried to get us to use the mobile platform so that the company could continue making money to please the private equity firm that acquired it and so that managers could brag to one another about some bullshit metric for the teams they manage. Naturally, one way around this demand was to prevent inbound calls from customers by calling a fellow salesman on the floor. You can’t get any calls if your phone line’s busy.
I can’t exactly remember how this started. It might have been my friend who initiated this server crash ritual. He would call me as soon as the systems stopped working. Usually, the first thing that would come out of my headset when I picked up the phone was some strange noise like this meme. Other times my friend would say something dumb, usually a reference to a meme, with the whole mic in his mouth to create the effect of loud, distorted audio. I would respond exactly the same way, saying the same dumb thing or making the same strange sound. The sounds themselves were funny, but what would make me crack up was the awareness of doing this in a cubicle, where I pretty much shared a desk with another salesman. Across our cubes were two other cubes, and on the other side of our cubes another two. On the other side of the phone, the same was true for my friend, but his cube, along with his cubemate’s were right next to a manager’s office.
The thought of these shenanigans occurring in these circumstances absolutely killed me, but my absolute favorite thing about the chaos that ensued from servers crashing, specifically from this weird ritual of mating calls of the wild over the phones with my friend, is that all calls, internal and external, are recorded. So in some server in this company, our meme impressions and every strange sound we made over the phones are immortalized in audio recordings. Audio recordings which they will one find and use as examples in training of what not do on the sales floor. How to not spend your time when the servers crash. As they would often joke in training, “This is the fastest way to get promoted to customer!” will probably be said one day in some kind of lecture as the sounds of our screeches, snores, impressions, and laughter play in the background.
Suffice to say I don’t work there anymore. I walked out when I had the chance. What followed was about a year or so of the horrors of retail.
hello. thanks for reading my first blog post :)
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