Rendezvoused with my Area Manager his car on the rain-soaked Caledon main street at about 06h30 on Thursday morning, since he was passing through on his way to the next territory, centred around George.
Farouk is a man who has spent most of his life in Sales and sales management and thrived upon it. Although one might expect him to be hard-bitten and ruthless, he is a gentleman, large, quietly-spoken, and very observant. I was aware of him watching me carefully while we checked the paperwork, so when he asked “So, how’re you doing?” in a way which suggested he knew the answer, there was no point in beating about the bush. I replied that I was not enjoying myself at all and didn’t expect things to get better. I had signed up for a technical job for three or four days a week, and the fault was probably mine for not bailing out as soon as it became evident that the bulk of the job involved selling, seven days a week! He told me that this has been a problem for others too, told me to back off for the day and consider the situation seriously. There was no point in stressing myself out for a company’s sake if I was not able to achieve my personal goals. Even the youngsters are struggling and the situation would get worse, since we would be expected to continue meeting sales targets while doing installations.
For me that was the clincher, so I verbally confirmed my intention to resign and we parted on good terms, agreeing to meet some time on Saturday on his way back to Cape Town.
Since none of the clients in Hermanus were ready to complete their documentation and the Caledon client was not returning my messages, I took a calm ride back on the awful road to Tesselaarsdal and was able to complete a remote linking of auditions just uploaded from Cape Town.
On Friday I started mopping up operations in Caledon and then moved on to Hermanus. A very frustrating day, since none of the clients had all the required documentation, which meant that I was also chasing photocopying facilities on their behalf, and even had to pay a visit to someone’s landlady in the next suburb of the sprawling Hermanus area. One client had simply decided to take a long week-end, and had left town altogether! This reduced my potential for “sign-ups”, but ironically, although it took all day, I reported in my best daily quota since embarking on this ill-advised misadventure.
Not exactly “Going out on a high,” but a relief nevertheless.