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Sigh...time share sales pitch

Do you ever wonder about "those people"? You know, the ones that willingly subject themselves to a time share presentation just to get the "fabulous free gifts"?

Well, chalk me up as one of those people.

You see, the last home renovation show we went to, Corinna went hog-wild filling out the "enter for a free draw" contests. Of course, what those draw boxes are REALLY for is to get contact information of poor suckers that are used by telemarketers, timeshare salesmen, and other assorted bottom-of-the-barrel salesmen.

Well, sure enough we got called. We "won" (and I use that term loosely) a digital camera, $100 spa package, and 3-day (2 night) stay at a luxurious resort. All we had to do is spend 90 minutes of our time listening to a presentation on the benefits of time share ownership with this company.

I was steadfast fucking against going. My parents got suckered into it ONCE...and that was one time too many. I rebelled against going and it nearly started World War Three. Cori was of a different opinion, thinking that it would be "easy" to tell them that we weren't interested. As she saw it, it was ONLY 90 minutes and that's it.

I told her she was prolly sitting in a running car in a parking garage if she ACTUALLY believed that shit...but she would have none of it.

So we went to the presentation. The "client service representative" we had as our hostess was brand spanking new to the job and didn't know the first thing about sales. She was ALSO in her second year of University so I don't blame her. She asks us some "data collection" statistics and Cori and I are top-notch clients. Example: We have spent money on vacations to Australia, to Mexico, Stateside, and plan on going to Greece and Italy in the near future. We are in their top income bracket AND we have no kids. We are young, too, which means we have many years of vacationing in front of us.

In other words, we couldn NOT have had bigger targets on our back if we tried.

We go through the presentation and we get to the "sales room". As I said, our hostess blew at sales and didn't do a good job convincing us. We asked for our free gifts (because, lo and behold, we had gone PAST the 90-minute timeline) and she told us she couldn't gift us until we had talked to a "senior sales relationship manager".

So we finally meet said manager. And it's ANOTHER kid of 21 years of age who, again, has no sales experience. He tries a few tactics to make a sale, but it's clear we're not going to bite -- I mean, c'mon, we're two University educated people...you're NOT going to be able to pull a fast one on us.

In the end, here's what we "won".

-- A 100K pixel digital camera. That's right...about the biggest piece of shit that you can imagine. (By way of comparison, our own digital camera is 5 MEG pixel camera).

-- A stay in the said condinium that they were trying to sell us on, and a spa package at said condo. The only catch? We have to listen to ANOTHER sales pitch!



I am REALLY tempted to go. After all, the place looks gorgeous and it's in Canmore (read: skiing). I'm going to get Cori to book a ski trip, and we'll invite 2 other couples to come with us. The catch is that one of THEM will have to go to the presentation!

posted by Team Shawn Michaels @ 8:31 p.m.