I Was a Travelling Door to Door Encyclopedia Salesman

One time back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman we went to Edmonton, Alberta.  The trip was atypical for two reasons: first, it was a big city, which travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen tend to avoid.  Second, two crews from the Vancouver office met up there at the same time.  I'm not sure what the thinking was, except maybe to give us a chance to compare notes and pitches and see how other people do their selling. I remember four folks from the other crew in particular.  The crew leader was a short skinny friendly athletic kind of guy with a big laugh.  He kinda reminded me of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas.  Then there was a  girl   woman  die-hard chip-on-the-shoulder angry feminist.  (How do these people end up as travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen?  For that matter, how did I?)  I remember I asked her once what she thought of  Camille Paglia  and she almost had...

Disclaimer: as  before . One time, back in the days when I was a travelling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, we went to Prince George, British Columbia.  Good thing somebody brought weed. Prince George is an old logging town that grew into a small city, and occupied that perfect middle ground where it lacked both the excitement of Vancouver (and other cities) and the charm of all the little towns and villages where we did most of our work.  We were there for a week or so. It was only my second or third road trip, so I was still just getting the hang of it, and I was still basically a pretty innocent kid.  In my two years of University before taking this job, I had smoked weed a total of two times, and had never really gotten stoned ("got stoned" for the British readers of this blog). As luck would have it, a one-tripper that I remember almost nothing about except that she looked like a sitcom lesbian and brought a baggie of twiggy swag.  Betcha didn't kno...

One time back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman, we went to Kamloops, British Columbia.  In fact, many times. Kamloops is about a 4 hour drive from Vancouver on the way to most of the places we would go in Alberta and Saskatchewan, so it was often a convenient place to stop to eat, and more often than not do an evening's worth of door knocking while we were at it.  I remember it as a kind of unexciting working class town, which made it a perfect place for travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen to ply their trade.  Its population of not much less than 100 thousand would generally work against it (cities hate door to door salesmen), but its isolation in fact meant that au contraire, it could simply be worked over and over without killing territory. One of the things I remember best about Kamloops is how many really old cars one would see on the road.  Neither collectible antiques suggesting a wealthy area nor nasty old ju...