Confessions of a Serial Interviewer by Steven Ra Ga

High end fitness equipment sales was a dream. It was easy and fun, but it ultimately came crashing down.

For a spell I kept getting employed by business owners who were on the brink of bankruptcy. As though the universe wanted me to be the tipping point in their doom.

This job was easy, all I had to do was sell fitness equipment to people that walked in the door.

All walks of life would come in, I once had a guy who looked like he hadn’t worked in many many years.

I recalled telling him I used to exercise on this machine in prep for kickboxing. that’s not true, but it helped sell the machine so maybe it would encourage him to use it. At the time I was the top guy selling the TSX elliptical.

The owner refused to give me a key to the building to lockup when they left me alone selling so I used to have to lock the front door then hop out the back, it was like when you don’t have a key and have to leap over the laser to prevent the garage door from going back up. It wasn’t ideal but I made it work for a while.

I typically was left alone to sell, I would often get anxiety because on Thursday we would have like 15 people come in and I could only sell and item one at a time because you needed to capture all their data.

The delivery guys were hilarious, one was like a vet of the years of doing deliveries the other was a broken man, he was a rigger who’s wife was cheating on him, got a divorce and had to find new employment. We would often joke with another about their deliveries, and they would often get gifts from people like alcohol.

The warehouse person was the meanest French girl I have ever met, she would often refuse to grab products for use to sell when we needed it. Kinda counter intuitive to doing business.

The owner was into other things, gambling and other companies, this became problematic, as I sold a lot but I didn’t make commission. When I asked for a high pay I got the speech. The same old speech. So I quit, within a year they closed down.