I Was a Travelling Door to Door Encyclopedia Salesman

I've liked backgammon since I was a kid, but never thought much of it until a book about backgammon theory found its way into my hands and opened my eyes to the depths of strategy and thought contained in that deceptively simple game.  One day on the road, I mentioned this to Andy Bailey, and he said, "Dude!  I love backgammon!  You should totally get a set next time we're in town and we'll totally play all the time on the next road trip!  Wanna make it interesting?  We can play for a quarter a game!" I had never gambled on backgammon (or anything else as far as I can remember), but a quarter a game seemed pretty harmless, and I did want to test the book's theory about the strategic effects of the doubling cube on multi-game series, and a stake was the best way to do it, so I agreed. The next time we were in Vancouver, I went to my favourite game geek store in Gastown and picked up, for 20 bucks, the set that I use to this day.  Not a cheap-o magn...

One time, back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman, we went to Grande Prairie, Alberta.  It was cold. Grande Prairie, at around 40 thousand people, was one of the biggest cities we worked in my 6 months of purgatory.  We stayed there for a whole week in February of 1994, and I'll probably have a few tales to tell in future posts from just that week alone. But mostly, it was cold. Indeed, it's the coldest I've ever been.  One morning it got down to -47 Celsius (-53 Fahrenheit), but the first few nights we worked it was merely -45 (-49F) until it started warming up.  Folks, until you're outside knocking on strangers' doors in -45 degrees, you don't know what a tough day at work is.  I remember how different the physical world is at those temperatures.  When I would breathe in, the inside of my nose would instantly freeze, and when I exhaled, it would instantly thaw.  Ten times a minute.  And my coat sounded d...

I certainly never meant to be a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman.  I was looking through the job ads, and there was something about educational products, and I called for an interview.  I met with Richard, a 50-something gentleman, articulate and impeccably dressed.  He immigrated from Jamaica as a teenager, dirt broke, and had climbed to his current position of relative power all by himself.  I can only imagine how many encyclopedias he had sold, and he certainly sold me this job without my even realising it.  Of course, almost everything he told me was a flat out lie.  No travel ("Well, after training, we like the new trainees to go out with the crew leader for a week or ten days, to get away from distractions, you know"), no cold calling (lie!), and any number of other falsehoods and misdirections. But by the time we had invested a week or more in training, gone on our first road trip (Three frigging weeks in Saska...

I realised as I was writing the last story that  just getting to Courtenay was half the excitement.  Well, not really, but it is a story.  You remember John Schlesinger, my boss, the cheapskate from a  previous post .  Well, he came with us on the road this time too, so it was his Volkswagen Jetta we took.  As I believe I've mentioned before, the deal (if you can call it that) is that the driver pays all the transportation costs in exchange for a cut of the crew's commissions.  Everything else is on us; we split the cost of the motel, pay for our own food, etc. As you may have figured out, since Courtenay is on Vancouver Island, simply driving there is not so simple.  In fact, it is a two hour  ferry ride  from Vancouver (actually the major metropolis of Tsawwassen) to Nanaimo on the Island.  So as we drove up to the ferry terminal, John, with an air of insouciant  nonchalance  (quick, keep writing before the ...