You See, I Have These 5 Skills...
By Adam Greene
Nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills…all important to anyone with the desire to successfully navigate daily life. I too have a set of highly specialized skills. Skills that are important, hard to come by and completely worthless to me today.
Many times I’ve found myself waxing philosophically about my bygone days of gainful employment…or, rather, sitting straight up in bed with a puddle of my own flop sweat pooling under me, screaming into the night from a nightmare in which I found myself, once again, calculating mortgage rates or cold calling potential vacationers. While I might find myself in my underwear, nude or simply shirtless, the true horror of the dreams remains constant; A real job. Even typing it out right now makes my hands tremble a little.
It occurs to me now looking back at the 18+ years of work history that I have amassed a handful of highly sought after skills. Skills that would be important for a person targeting the various jobs that I accidentally stumbled my way into. Many times, while keeping my computer mine free or secretly surfing the internet, I would think to myself, not only is this job a curse upon me, but by making even the slightest effort to hold onto it, I was actually keeping another person from having it. Someone who might actually enjoy capitalizing on a fellow human’s financial mistakes, misery and poor judgment by tricking them into a high interest personal loan. Being in possession of a soul and a modicum of basic human kindness, I was never going to be that person.
These skills are highly specific and would not necessarily pop immediately to mind. For instance, the ability to successfully work on the roof of a house without falling to my death, though very important to me, is not something I could list on a resume or job application. As I find heights almost as mind-numbingly frightening as sitting astride a running motorcycle, I don’t foresee ever using this skill again. But, the fact that I did have it is not only testament to the varied jobs that I’ve trapped myself in over the years, but my almost incredible ability to survive them.
So this will not be a list of skills I don’t plan on using anymore. The fact is, that there are plenty skills in my possession, as well as a bachelor’s degree and various professional accreditations that, if I ever utilized in any way from this day forward, would represent a monumental failure in achieving my actual life goals.
For instance, I can change the wheel pin on a riding lawnmower. I don’t see this having a positive or negative effect on my future employment. I can also do something as impressive-sounding as administering an AIDS test, but since all that required was cramming a toothbrush-shaped stick into an innocent victim’s mouth and then placing it in a plastic bag, I don’t feel it granted me a specialized ability.
Also, this list will contain no skills amassed in my earliest employment as a cook at Captain D’s or as a laborer on multiple construction sites. Though Captain D’s is not a place I would choose to work at again or visit to eat anything on the menu, the most important skill I learned there was the proper way to deep fry slabs of meat and wads of dough. I think we all know how useful this knowledge has been to me in my adult life, as I’m pretty sure my blood cholesterol could be refined to fuel an F-22 Raptor.
No, these skills must be important. They must be skills that, if I ever had reason to fill out a job application, I would list and highlight. They must be specialized and highly valued in either one particular industry or just a handful that I will never participate in again from now until the day the sun burns out. So here we go:
Skill #1. I can pinpoint the position of multiple satellites in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth’s Equator.
Oh yeah. That’s right. I can totally do that.
Obviously, you think this talent was picked up in my time with the Special Forces. Parachuting into hostile territory, I and my band of brothers would scour the desert or countryside, searching for enemy encampments. Discovering the terrorists’ location with my special satellite-tracking abilities, I would contact a nearby carrier group to launch a sortie of Comanche attack helicopters to reduce everyone inside the camp to a fine red mist.
That would have been an awesome way to learn this skill. Unfortunately, that’s not how I learned to do it.
Nope, my learning technique required a lot more crawling around under mobile homes than it did fighting the War Against Terror. I picked this particular skill up in the final year before I began writing full time installing satellite dishes. Fighting the forces of evil? No, sir. Setting up a satellite dish and receiver in a man named Pickle’s camper trailer so he could sneak and watch the Playboy channel without being caught by his wife? You betcha.
True story: Once, during the end of my satellite installation tenure, I was called out to a community called Mooresburg to do what should have been a quick install. It was a single-room deal that shouldn’t have been much trouble at all. When I arrived at the destination, a mobile home, you’ll be shocked to learn, I found my client, who, for the sake of this article, I’ll call Floho. His real name rhymed with that, but was even more ridiculous. Anyway, Floho met me as I arrived wearing a pair of neon orange short shorts, green flip flops and, well, nothing else.
Floho was my constant companion during the entire installation where I learned that he had just been set free from prison after 15 years for killing a man. Now, back home with his elderly father and mother, he drew a monthly, “crazy check” and was using it to get everyone “teevee.” Floho informed me that for extra money, he would participate in backroom barefisted boxing matches. He held his fists up before me and said, “I can make some good money with these.” I nodded, figuring he probably could. He was shorter than me, but looked solid and the innumerable scars on his face, neck and bare chest were enough evidence to make me buy his streetfighting and prison stories.
He then told me that I had a pretty smile.
I was then informed that he wanted to get all the channels, especially the dirty ones, so he could oil himself up and go crazy. I nodded once more, being careful to not smile in his presence again.
Yeah. This all really happened.
Once in the living room of the trailer, I met Floho’s aforementioned mother. As I installed her receiver, she told me of the cancer that had eaten away part of the left side of her face through a halo of cigarette smoke. The cancer was gone now, but as she stubbed out a cigarette butt and immediately reached for a new one, I realized she, evidently, had no desire for it to stay that way.
She sat at the table looking like a combination of Two-Face from Batman and Jonah Hex, telling me that she had experienced a rough year.
Floho’s brother, Bloho, presumably, had recently been shot to death in a barfight. It was not hard to believe, but Floho insisted on backing up her story, if only as a pretext, to talk once again about how pretty my smile was. He had me smile for his mother, Two-Face Hex, who agreed that I did have fetching set of teeth. Damn all 32 of them. Frankly, this was not the first time my smile has gotten me into trouble, but that is a tale for another day.
Finished with the installation, I successfully made my escape. Floho did not kill me after all, to my surprise, nor did he ever once put on a shirt. I was also spared any sighting of oils or “going crazy,” thank the good Lord.
Skill #2. I can read and understand a credit report.
I’m not talking about a credit score (which is all that generally matters in your daily urge to fatten up the albatross of debt around your neck), but your actual credit report. That phone book sized document with all the “Is,” “Rs” and nonsensical numbers with various company names and dates attached that you ordered off the free credit report internet site. I can understand all of it. Yes, even that row of crazy stars and slashes (******/*****). I know what all that stuff means.
I won’t tell you, because it’s as boring to learn as you think it is. I nabbed this talent while working for a high interest loan company mentioned above. The reason this loan company didn’t care about a credit score was that they wanted customers to skip out on the loan. In fact, if you ran your monthly report only loaning money to people who needed it and could afford to pay it back, you would be “retrained.”
I myself was “retrained” three times in my seven months with the company, even winning an all expenses paid trip to picturesque Joplin, Missouri, where I spent the week being told by a tubby blonde girl through a shit-eating grin that, “all of our customers eventually go bad. We just have to keep renewing their accounts as long as we can until then.” She was one of the “best” managers in the company. Hand picked to train managers like “me” in her superior collection, harassment and loan techniques.
When I returned home, I knew what I had to do to be a better manager; sell my soul to Satan. Instead of doing that, I decided to tell the Regional Manager to fire me on the spot so I could sit on my ass and draw unemployment for three months. This particular skill is one I’m proud to have attained. Twice more did I worm my way into free unemployment money after figuratively and literally telling bosses to kiss my backside. At this point, I could teach this one in a dojo and be called “Sensei.”
Skill #3. I can create an entire newspaper section from scratch.
This skill is called “Pagination” and not only do I know how to do it, but the fact that I ever had to learn it makes me incredibly sad.
The dirty little secret of sportswriting is that 90% of the jobs you can get across the country require the writers and editors to paginate their own section. So all that time you spent thinking you’ll be attending private parties with Vince Young, playing 18 holes of golf with Jeff Fisher or being named godfather to Peyton Manning Jr. will instead be spent stuck in a cubicle clicking a mouse (probably on a Mac, God help you) and pulling stories off the AP wire while the production guys hover around you talking about the most effective brand of stinky deer piss or the “kick-assness” of the new Cannibal Corpse album, depending on their age, weight and amount of facial jewelry.
Skill #4. I can feature-sell a mobile home.
Hey, they can’t all be harnessing signals from outer space, people.
While this one doesn’t look impressive on paper, trust me, if I ever wanted to sell mobile homes for a national mobile retailer again, and I don’t, this is a talent I would be expected to demonstrate. Here’s the secret…or rather, what the skill actually entails.
The first thing you should realize is that no one walks onto a mobile home lot with even the slightest shred of hope. People with hope buy homes that don’t need 14 inch rims. What feature-selling does is help these hopeless people regain a small amount of their human dignity as you talk up what amounts to basic building materials like fireproof sheetrock, laminate flooring and high-low purple carpet. You must help these poor, despondent folks see that the ceiling fan and “wooden looking” door frames somehow make up for the fact that a pretty non-inventive thief could simply drive their home far, far away.
Part of the “feature sell” is putting the screws to a customer. While a normal home “sells itself” what with its solid foundation, four sturdy exterior walls and ability to appreciate in value, a mobile home needs a little more push. I was actually instructed, via training tape, to refer to each trailer as the customer’s “dream home.” Uh huh. DREAM HOME. In fact, the exact phrase I was supposed to use when trying to convince some poor schlub when he started to sober up from the intoxicating allure of the basic Sears storebrand appliances and cardboard televisions, was to throw this phrase at him, “I understand that, but I’d hate for you to lose the chance to own your DREAM HOME…”
At this point, the guy either woke up, thinking, “Dream home? Dream? What are dreams? What does that word even mean? Could there have once been a time when I knew of such things? Might I have once had a dream?” If this happened, needless to say, any hope of a sale was history.
But, if that customer looked deep inside of himself and found only a cavernous gaping void…a dank, infinity-sized maw with the gravitational pull of a collapsed star, then maybe a sizable sales commission was heading my way.
Skill #5. I’m a master at Phone Pro phone etiquette
“Phone Pro” is a training system teaching customer service representatives the proper way to take complete mental command of a problem caller to assist him with his problem and, failing that, tell him exactly how far he should shove his head up his own ass.
The problem with working phone customer service is, well, the people who call needing customer service. I was hired in by Philips Electronics back in 1996 to support the launch of WebTV. This product is still around, called MSN TV and if you’ve ever received an e-mail from your great aunt, reading “I’M SNEDING YOU AN MAIL MESSAGE FROIM THE TV ENTERWIBS!!!!!!”, I’m one of the people you can thank for that.
While the WebTV was a simple product to use, hooking it up to a 1972 Zenith Chromacolor 2 wooden console television was not easy as you’d think. Additionally, there are evidently a great many TVs and VCRs built in the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, East Timor and the Mediterranean island of Mypos that come only with instructions written in what appears at first glance to be Klingon or some rare form of Elvish.
For some reason, these electronics are marketed specifically to elderly men over the age 117. Couple this with WebTV’s marketing strategy aimed at customers in the 140 to 180 range and this was recipe for some pretty heated phone calls to customer service. Since the only Myposian representative in the United States was running a mail-order Bibby Babka business from his cousin’s living room, we were on our own.
Did this stop us from learning how to program and hook up the WebTV to the Myposian TV? Well, of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.
With Phone Pro, you wouldn’t tell these grouchy old bastards what they NEEDED to do to make their WebTV work. You’d tell them what they WANTED to do. That was the skill. You chose your words in an almost hypnotic fashion, convincing the customer that all this was really his idea. You were just a phonebound Sherpa, guiding the way up the electronic mountain. Eventually, either you would lead the customer to a successful installation of his WebTV to his 1958 Philco Predicta tabletop or help him inform himself that he’s a moron with a big pile of dog shit where his brain should be. Phone Pro is like learning a Jedi mind trick that only works on octogenarians.
So there you have it. A list of valued skills that took me years to acquire and master that are now as useless to me as a third nipple. My wish for all of you reading this is that you can someday look back on your time walking the Earth with a similar list as varied and ridiculous as mine that you will never, ever need.
Read more..!
Nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills…all important to anyone with the desire to successfully navigate daily life. I too have a set of highly specialized skills. Skills that are important, hard to come by and completely worthless to me today.
Many times I’ve found myself waxing philosophically about my bygone days of gainful employment…or, rather, sitting straight up in bed with a puddle of my own flop sweat pooling under me, screaming into the night from a nightmare in which I found myself, once again, calculating mortgage rates or cold calling potential vacationers. While I might find myself in my underwear, nude or simply shirtless, the true horror of the dreams remains constant; A real job. Even typing it out right now makes my hands tremble a little.
It occurs to me now looking back at the 18+ years of work history that I have amassed a handful of highly sought after skills. Skills that would be important for a person targeting the various jobs that I accidentally stumbled my way into. Many times, while keeping my computer mine free or secretly surfing the internet, I would think to myself, not only is this job a curse upon me, but by making even the slightest effort to hold onto it, I was actually keeping another person from having it. Someone who might actually enjoy capitalizing on a fellow human’s financial mistakes, misery and poor judgment by tricking them into a high interest personal loan. Being in possession of a soul and a modicum of basic human kindness, I was never going to be that person.
These skills are highly specific and would not necessarily pop immediately to mind. For instance, the ability to successfully work on the roof of a house without falling to my death, though very important to me, is not something I could list on a resume or job application. As I find heights almost as mind-numbingly frightening as sitting astride a running motorcycle, I don’t foresee ever using this skill again. But, the fact that I did have it is not only testament to the varied jobs that I’ve trapped myself in over the years, but my almost incredible ability to survive them.
So this will not be a list of skills I don’t plan on using anymore. The fact is, that there are plenty skills in my possession, as well as a bachelor’s degree and various professional accreditations that, if I ever utilized in any way from this day forward, would represent a monumental failure in achieving my actual life goals.
For instance, I can change the wheel pin on a riding lawnmower. I don’t see this having a positive or negative effect on my future employment. I can also do something as impressive-sounding as administering an AIDS test, but since all that required was cramming a toothbrush-shaped stick into an innocent victim’s mouth and then placing it in a plastic bag, I don’t feel it granted me a specialized ability.
Also, this list will contain no skills amassed in my earliest employment as a cook at Captain D’s or as a laborer on multiple construction sites. Though Captain D’s is not a place I would choose to work at again or visit to eat anything on the menu, the most important skill I learned there was the proper way to deep fry slabs of meat and wads of dough. I think we all know how useful this knowledge has been to me in my adult life, as I’m pretty sure my blood cholesterol could be refined to fuel an F-22 Raptor.
No, these skills must be important. They must be skills that, if I ever had reason to fill out a job application, I would list and highlight. They must be specialized and highly valued in either one particular industry or just a handful that I will never participate in again from now until the day the sun burns out. So here we go:
Skill #1. I can pinpoint the position of multiple satellites in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth’s Equator.
Oh yeah. That’s right. I can totally do that.
Obviously, you think this talent was picked up in my time with the Special Forces. Parachuting into hostile territory, I and my band of brothers would scour the desert or countryside, searching for enemy encampments. Discovering the terrorists’ location with my special satellite-tracking abilities, I would contact a nearby carrier group to launch a sortie of Comanche attack helicopters to reduce everyone inside the camp to a fine red mist.
That would have been an awesome way to learn this skill. Unfortunately, that’s not how I learned to do it.
Nope, my learning technique required a lot more crawling around under mobile homes than it did fighting the War Against Terror. I picked this particular skill up in the final year before I began writing full time installing satellite dishes. Fighting the forces of evil? No, sir. Setting up a satellite dish and receiver in a man named Pickle’s camper trailer so he could sneak and watch the Playboy channel without being caught by his wife? You betcha.
True story: Once, during the end of my satellite installation tenure, I was called out to a community called Mooresburg to do what should have been a quick install. It was a single-room deal that shouldn’t have been much trouble at all. When I arrived at the destination, a mobile home, you’ll be shocked to learn, I found my client, who, for the sake of this article, I’ll call Floho. His real name rhymed with that, but was even more ridiculous. Anyway, Floho met me as I arrived wearing a pair of neon orange short shorts, green flip flops and, well, nothing else.
Floho was my constant companion during the entire installation where I learned that he had just been set free from prison after 15 years for killing a man. Now, back home with his elderly father and mother, he drew a monthly, “crazy check” and was using it to get everyone “teevee.” Floho informed me that for extra money, he would participate in backroom barefisted boxing matches. He held his fists up before me and said, “I can make some good money with these.” I nodded, figuring he probably could. He was shorter than me, but looked solid and the innumerable scars on his face, neck and bare chest were enough evidence to make me buy his streetfighting and prison stories.
He then told me that I had a pretty smile.
I was then informed that he wanted to get all the channels, especially the dirty ones, so he could oil himself up and go crazy. I nodded once more, being careful to not smile in his presence again.
Yeah. This all really happened.
Once in the living room of the trailer, I met Floho’s aforementioned mother. As I installed her receiver, she told me of the cancer that had eaten away part of the left side of her face through a halo of cigarette smoke. The cancer was gone now, but as she stubbed out a cigarette butt and immediately reached for a new one, I realized she, evidently, had no desire for it to stay that way.
She sat at the table looking like a combination of Two-Face from Batman and Jonah Hex, telling me that she had experienced a rough year.
Floho’s brother, Bloho, presumably, had recently been shot to death in a barfight. It was not hard to believe, but Floho insisted on backing up her story, if only as a pretext, to talk once again about how pretty my smile was. He had me smile for his mother, Two-Face Hex, who agreed that I did have fetching set of teeth. Damn all 32 of them. Frankly, this was not the first time my smile has gotten me into trouble, but that is a tale for another day.
Finished with the installation, I successfully made my escape. Floho did not kill me after all, to my surprise, nor did he ever once put on a shirt. I was also spared any sighting of oils or “going crazy,” thank the good Lord.
Skill #2. I can read and understand a credit report.
I’m not talking about a credit score (which is all that generally matters in your daily urge to fatten up the albatross of debt around your neck), but your actual credit report. That phone book sized document with all the “Is,” “Rs” and nonsensical numbers with various company names and dates attached that you ordered off the free credit report internet site. I can understand all of it. Yes, even that row of crazy stars and slashes (******/*****). I know what all that stuff means.
I won’t tell you, because it’s as boring to learn as you think it is. I nabbed this talent while working for a high interest loan company mentioned above. The reason this loan company didn’t care about a credit score was that they wanted customers to skip out on the loan. In fact, if you ran your monthly report only loaning money to people who needed it and could afford to pay it back, you would be “retrained.”
I myself was “retrained” three times in my seven months with the company, even winning an all expenses paid trip to picturesque Joplin, Missouri, where I spent the week being told by a tubby blonde girl through a shit-eating grin that, “all of our customers eventually go bad. We just have to keep renewing their accounts as long as we can until then.” She was one of the “best” managers in the company. Hand picked to train managers like “me” in her superior collection, harassment and loan techniques.
When I returned home, I knew what I had to do to be a better manager; sell my soul to Satan. Instead of doing that, I decided to tell the Regional Manager to fire me on the spot so I could sit on my ass and draw unemployment for three months. This particular skill is one I’m proud to have attained. Twice more did I worm my way into free unemployment money after figuratively and literally telling bosses to kiss my backside. At this point, I could teach this one in a dojo and be called “Sensei.”
Skill #3. I can create an entire newspaper section from scratch.
This skill is called “Pagination” and not only do I know how to do it, but the fact that I ever had to learn it makes me incredibly sad.
The dirty little secret of sportswriting is that 90% of the jobs you can get across the country require the writers and editors to paginate their own section. So all that time you spent thinking you’ll be attending private parties with Vince Young, playing 18 holes of golf with Jeff Fisher or being named godfather to Peyton Manning Jr. will instead be spent stuck in a cubicle clicking a mouse (probably on a Mac, God help you) and pulling stories off the AP wire while the production guys hover around you talking about the most effective brand of stinky deer piss or the “kick-assness” of the new Cannibal Corpse album, depending on their age, weight and amount of facial jewelry.
Skill #4. I can feature-sell a mobile home.
Hey, they can’t all be harnessing signals from outer space, people.
While this one doesn’t look impressive on paper, trust me, if I ever wanted to sell mobile homes for a national mobile retailer again, and I don’t, this is a talent I would be expected to demonstrate. Here’s the secret…or rather, what the skill actually entails.
The first thing you should realize is that no one walks onto a mobile home lot with even the slightest shred of hope. People with hope buy homes that don’t need 14 inch rims. What feature-selling does is help these hopeless people regain a small amount of their human dignity as you talk up what amounts to basic building materials like fireproof sheetrock, laminate flooring and high-low purple carpet. You must help these poor, despondent folks see that the ceiling fan and “wooden looking” door frames somehow make up for the fact that a pretty non-inventive thief could simply drive their home far, far away.
Part of the “feature sell” is putting the screws to a customer. While a normal home “sells itself” what with its solid foundation, four sturdy exterior walls and ability to appreciate in value, a mobile home needs a little more push. I was actually instructed, via training tape, to refer to each trailer as the customer’s “dream home.” Uh huh. DREAM HOME. In fact, the exact phrase I was supposed to use when trying to convince some poor schlub when he started to sober up from the intoxicating allure of the basic Sears storebrand appliances and cardboard televisions, was to throw this phrase at him, “I understand that, but I’d hate for you to lose the chance to own your DREAM HOME…”
At this point, the guy either woke up, thinking, “Dream home? Dream? What are dreams? What does that word even mean? Could there have once been a time when I knew of such things? Might I have once had a dream?” If this happened, needless to say, any hope of a sale was history.
But, if that customer looked deep inside of himself and found only a cavernous gaping void…a dank, infinity-sized maw with the gravitational pull of a collapsed star, then maybe a sizable sales commission was heading my way.
Skill #5. I’m a master at Phone Pro phone etiquette
“Phone Pro” is a training system teaching customer service representatives the proper way to take complete mental command of a problem caller to assist him with his problem and, failing that, tell him exactly how far he should shove his head up his own ass.
The problem with working phone customer service is, well, the people who call needing customer service. I was hired in by Philips Electronics back in 1996 to support the launch of WebTV. This product is still around, called MSN TV and if you’ve ever received an e-mail from your great aunt, reading “I’M SNEDING YOU AN MAIL MESSAGE FROIM THE TV ENTERWIBS!!!!!!”, I’m one of the people you can thank for that.
While the WebTV was a simple product to use, hooking it up to a 1972 Zenith Chromacolor 2 wooden console television was not easy as you’d think. Additionally, there are evidently a great many TVs and VCRs built in the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, East Timor and the Mediterranean island of Mypos that come only with instructions written in what appears at first glance to be Klingon or some rare form of Elvish.
For some reason, these electronics are marketed specifically to elderly men over the age 117. Couple this with WebTV’s marketing strategy aimed at customers in the 140 to 180 range and this was recipe for some pretty heated phone calls to customer service. Since the only Myposian representative in the United States was running a mail-order Bibby Babka business from his cousin’s living room, we were on our own.
Did this stop us from learning how to program and hook up the WebTV to the Myposian TV? Well, of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.
With Phone Pro, you wouldn’t tell these grouchy old bastards what they NEEDED to do to make their WebTV work. You’d tell them what they WANTED to do. That was the skill. You chose your words in an almost hypnotic fashion, convincing the customer that all this was really his idea. You were just a phonebound Sherpa, guiding the way up the electronic mountain. Eventually, either you would lead the customer to a successful installation of his WebTV to his 1958 Philco Predicta tabletop or help him inform himself that he’s a moron with a big pile of dog shit where his brain should be. Phone Pro is like learning a Jedi mind trick that only works on octogenarians.
So there you have it. A list of valued skills that took me years to acquire and master that are now as useless to me as a third nipple. My wish for all of you reading this is that you can someday look back on your time walking the Earth with a similar list as varied and ridiculous as mine that you will never, ever need.
Read more..!
posted by Adam Greene at
6:05 PM
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