Smilin' and Dialin': The Untold Story of Colonial Penn

I decided to start a series here on my blog. While I feel it's important to discuss my feelings about Marion's condition, I also feel it may be wise to go back and look at things that only time can give you clarity on. They say that a man is his job. Well, I can only say that I've had one job in my entire life that I gave 100% for. We'll get to that in another post. For now, I'm going to go back in time and review the jobs I've had. I think it will be an interesting and humorous look back at my accomplishments, failures, and mistakes. Perspective, I believe, is only gained after the fact. I now have full perspective of each of these jobs.

The last job I held was with the nationally known Colonial Penn Insurance company. I worked in telesales. Basically, each day we would get a new list of the people that called the 1-800 # the night before and we would call them and attempt to sell them the life insurance. It was fairly easy because, well, you were dealing with older Americans that basically had no concept of what life insurance was or why they even needed it.

Now, let me direct you behind the curtain and illustrate the dirty dealings of just how Col Penn worked. We would call the person and using a liberal script (you were encouraged to use the script as a guideline, not verbatim, as a way to sound more conversational) give them a sales pitch on the virtues of GBL or Graduated Benefit Life. Basically, GBL is a product aimed at people who are older and may not qualify for another type of life insurance. It is a good policy for those suffering from AIDS, cancer, COPD, or any other number of diseases that would otherwise disqualify from getting life insurance. The issue at hand was that most of the people that we called were doing pretty good health wise. People had a way of telling you the truth, I think. They figure we would catch their bullshit if they did lie, so I guess they didn't bother. Actually, this was one of the selling points we used. We would tell the people that we're not going to send someone out to their home and do a physical. Just pay us the premium, and you're set. Easy peasy, Japanesey.

I was good at selling the policies because I'm pretty good at bullshitting people. Honestly, it would bother me when I knew that some of these people could get better insurance from other companies if only they researched rather than called our number because they recognized Alex Trebeck. People are generally lazy and apathetic, and we offered a pretty easy solution. Just call us, and within 24 hours you can have a policy. But, I knew that it wasn't my job to tell these people they had other options (I did tell a few people). It was my job to offer false sympathy, empathy, guilt, and various other techniques to get them a policy and send back their first payment.

There was a side to all this that did wear down on me. I'm not sure if other people were bothered by it, but it always got to me. I was working here around the time my Mom passed away, and I was a wreck. The last thing you want to think about when you lose someone dear to you is death. However, at my position, death was always in every conversation. Some people would call having just lost a parent or a spouse, and since they were left in a financial bind due to the passing, they wanted to get some type of coverage for themselves and not "be a burden" to their families or loved ones. I put "be a burden" in quotations because on each call we said that phrase numerous times. In an effort to make people "feel comfortable" with their decision, we would coddle them and make them feel good about getting ripped off.

Anyway, getting back to where I was in the story, the people that were still bearing the wounds of grief were the worst for me to deal with. As I said, just losing my Mom just weeks before, my own wounds were fresh. Here I was trying to convince people that our policies were the best thing since sliced bread when I could barely functions some days due to my own grief. There was one woman in particular that lost her husband after a lengthy battle with cancer. She told me the story of Frank's life...how he was a decorated soldier in 'Nam, how he was a great provider, his musical taste, everything. It struck me halfway through the conversation that she just wanted to talk about her husband whom she missed so dearly. I wasn't about to just hurry her along and get on with my pitch. I didn't feel that was the way to deal with people. I would listen. And, dammit, I think that's what most people dealing with a loss want anyway. Too many people, however good intentioned, give advice when confronted with a loss. You know what I mean. People will tell you how long you should grieve, when you should go and pack up belongings, when to seek out additional help, and all that.

The trouble is that grief is a very personal and solitary journey. No one can tell anyone else how they should react to a loss. No one could convince me that you should do anything but listen. Offer words of comfort, but never offer any advice. Frankly, most other people will be all to happy to offer their advice (when they haven't even experienced the same type of loss as the person they are offering advice to). So, the best thing I can say is listen to someone who is suffering and in pain. Or, just sit with them. You'll do a lot more good that way.

My employment ended with Col Penn rather abruptly over some issues I'm really not at liberty to discuss here. Suffice it to say that it was not due to my numbers, as I always did a excellent job on the policies I sent out. It's not that I hated my time at Col Penn. It was that I didn't like the person it was making me become. Slowly, they were ebbing away any compassion you had and replacing it with false sincerity. I met some great people in my short time there, and have no regrets about leaving Comcast to go there. I do wish that things were handled better by everyone involved, but life is a journey that makes little to no sense anyway. John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." I believe that whole heartedly.

Up next, my time with a media giant, Comcast.