VVV cont'd...

Job #2 - Chumco

"Are you a hunter, are you a closer, are you eager for the money, is your grandmother a bankable asset, do you want to sell sell sell?..."

I assured the slick ponytailed gentleman that indeed she was and indeed I did, and in doing so secured my position as the newest member of West London's premier crack frontline sales team; dammit, we'll sell it to you before you even realise you've bought it and then sell it to you again when you call to complain.

The "it" in question referred to a wide variety of products to suit all needs and desires: Ice Melt, Graffiti Removal kits, Toner Cartidges, Bic pens, and - the icing on the cake, the Chumco flagship product - the Millennium Bug Protection Cd, yours for £399 including post and packaging ("What's that you say sir? The disk was blank? Did your computers get infected with the millennium bug? No? Well then...").

"Leads" consisted of a well-thumbed copy of the telephone directory, resulting in much time spent trying to convince old ladies that they had great need for industrial quantities of strip lights or wood adhesive. That said, all that was required to put a "deal" up on the board was an affirmative indication that some poor individual had agreed to accept the product on a weeks trial, at which point several pallets were dispatched complete with invoice and no return address, along with the "sweetener" - a "genuine Premier League football shirt for the team of your choice", ie: a Fruit of the Loom T-Shirt with an embossed trophy and the word "Goal" embroidered below.

Our office was a run down series of rooms above an electronics shop on Kensington High St - presumably intended to give the impression of legitimacy - below a flat occupied by a horrendously over-stretched perma-tanned leopard-print-leotarded crimped vision of faded grandeur named Marina, who occasionally swayed and wafted down to slur encouragement to the sales force flashing more flesh than any of us would have wished, and who may or may not have been sleeping with the aforementioned slick ponytailed chap. She was the (stapled) face of the operation, as the two directors - lets call them the Silver brothers - were generally tied up dealing with "legal" issues of their own.

I recall that summer as being a very happy one; despite the clearly disingenuous nature of the role, we were all young and carefree. A weeks wages spent in one Friday night session could easily be replenished the following week with a few questionable "deals", cigarettes could always be pinched from Louis The Greek, who never left the house without at least eighty Bensons on him, and a generous hooker in the flats behind obligingly took her clothes off in her window every day at 11am on the dot.

But summers - as they tend to - change to autumns, and new challenges were calling. University, in fact, was calling. And that is a story that will have to wait. For now.