Sitting and listening to the pretty blonde lady describe to us, me and my fellow coworkers, the wonders of the new, improved sales technique we would be learning this year, I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with the last five sales techniques I had learned over the last 15 years. What was the cause of their obsolescence? Had humanity evolved so dramatically in the last fifteen years? I tend to doubt it, and am inclined to believe my presence in that room on that particular day had more to do with the effectiveness of the purveyor’s sales pitch to corporate than it did to any truth about a miraculous, new sales method that would double our sales overnight. As it turns out, there are still plenty of people pushing snake oil.

For shits and giggles let’s call today’s twaddle System X. As far as I could tell, System X largely involves insulting your customers in order to win more business from them. Conceptually ridiculous, I know, but the blonde lady seemed 100% convinced. Indeed, she specifically told us she was “all in” on the blarney, though she quite naturally did not specifically refer to it as “blarney.” To do so would have revealed to her audience that she really wasn’t “all in.” Of course, had I, or any member of her distracted captives, asked for any empirical evidence to support her cult-like belief in System X, I’m quite sure the response to the query would have been the sound of crickets or, better yet, some type of protestation explaining how the sample set wasn’t yet big enough to prove a causal link between System X and any actual increase in sales or profitability. Perhaps even more likely, she would have responded with a stream of corporate gobbledygook meant to throw the interlocutor off the scent. Indeed, as it relates to corporate gobbledygook, I took the time to notate, with tick marks, every time the corporate shill used some version of the phrase “Call Out,” as in “Thanks for calling that out, Marge. That’s a really important question!” I kept the record as an amusement, but according to my log, she used this phrase no fewer than 23 times during the course of her three-hour meditation. For those of you doing the math, that’s about eight times an hour, and I’m 90% sure I didn’t catch her every time she said it, mostly due to the recurring hysterical deafness I was experiencing as a direct result of extreme boredom.

I will admit, however, that at some point in the three hours of blather I was forced to endure at the hands of my corporate overseers, our blond tormenter did say something that was absolutely true, or at least something that was mostly absolutely true. She told us we would only retain 20% of what we heard her say about System X. I wholeheartedly agreed with her, in respectful silence, of course, but lowered that number an additional 7%, again in a respectful silence. There was no way I was walking out of there remembering 20% of the codswallop to which I was being subjected. Hell, I was quite sure I’d forget 50% of the 20% just out of spite. (I must also admit here, with some measure of shame, that I don’t actually remember if she said 20%, again most likely due to the hysterical deafness. She may well have said 13%, only to have my brain give me credit for lowering the projected retention percentage.)

Oh, and the piece of resistance? It was revealed near the end of the three-hour bilge binge that those hours that had been stolen from us were not even part of the actual training for System X. Those hours were merely the introduction to the training for System X. What?! My level of frustration having had risen steadily over the course of the oration, by then it was all I could do to keep from jamming a pen deep into the recesses of my aural canal. Why in the hell did we need a three-hour introduction to this particular load of bunkum? Does my corporation have that much extra money? Do they believe me and mine have nothing better to do on a Thursday morning? It didn’t matter. In the end knowing the answer to any of those questions wasn’t going to stop the migraine from coming on like a freight train. And I couldn’t even blame the migraine for my discomfort.  It was only a symptom of that discomfort. The migraine was an innocent bystander to the prattle that was the introduction to System X.

Given the above, it should come as no surprise that at the end the end of the three hours I quite naturally came to hate System X and wanted nothing to do with it. Personally, it’s an impossibility that I would emerge hopeful under these circumstances, given the mental and physical weariness that accompanies this particular type of agony. I simply can’t be expected to endure such a trial and be all hand-clappy about it at the end. But, as it turns out, it wasn’t all bad, as few things are. On a positive note, if there is one, I’ve since completed a case study in how to make people hate something before they even know what it is. Now that’s some useful knowledge.