This is part 3 in a series about my time working for the Combined Insurance Company. If you want to catch up, please check out Part 1: PMA Day and Part 2: Johnny B.

“Wow, this view is unreal,” I said as I sat my beer down and wiped my lip with my sleeve. I couldn’t believe such a bar existed. Here I was in the middle of Avery County, North Carolina, drinking a porter with a new friend at a dinky, dingy little bar that had an enormous window overlooking a gorgeous mountain valley. 

Ross, a young man just a little older than me, sat beside me in a suit and tie. He was clean-shaven, with a fair complexion and fire-engine red hair cut in an expert fade. He looked over the edge of his glass as he took another sip and agreed. 

“It really is. Want to come back here tomorrow?”

I did. And we would. It was 10:45 in the morning.

Aside from John, Ross was the agent on the team with the most experience. He was good with people, was always presentable and polite, and knew the product front-to-back. He was not, however, a self-starter and for every skill he possessed as a salesman, he lacked in motivation.

Because of his tenure with the company, I was allowed to ride with Ross when my time with John was over. The idea was for me to see how it’s done from a different perspective, but the vantage point I shared with Ross was usually of a cute bartender in the middle of the day.

Like me, Ross hated cold calls. He informed me that you could get by just fine with your commission on renewals, so he would set out to renew what he could in the morning, break for lunch, then find a place to have a beer or five until the end of the work day.

On this particular day in Avery County, many of our renewals hadn’t been home when we visited early on so there wasn’t much we could do since neither of us wanted to make any cold calls. Ross needed to find a place to use the bathroom and we found this shithole dive bar with a perfect view – it would be disrespectful to not take it in with a brew.

I shared many a beer with Ross over the next two months. We talked about how we ended up with Combined, how we had both more-or-less failed at achieving the dreams we’d set for ourselves, but how we each knew the other was going to brush themselves off and make it one day. We’d make fun of John behind his back and do just about anything else we could to make the day go by faster.

This sometimes included creating elaborate backstories or assuming obviously incorrect pronunciations of our clients’ names. One couple I remember most vividly were Horst Fisterer and his wife Lore. To have a name like Horst Fisterer was a barrel of laughs on its own, but we then began pronouncing Lore (actually pronounced Lor-ee) as “Lohhrrrrrrrrrre” with a fierce, powerful, Bruce Dickenson-style hand gesture.

When we finally met Lore, we learned that her husband had passed away a few months prior, forcing us to cancel his policy. Once we got back in the truck, we began making Anchorman references by saying that Horst was in “dead place.” Bad taste for sure, but we sat in the truck and laughed about it for a half hour.

Sorry, Mr. Fisterer.

We made jokes at the expense of new employees (once I wasn’t new anymore), drank beer before noon more times than I could count, performed more impressions of John than were absolutely necessary and just generally had a ball together.

At one point, we made up a game to see how long we could dance at people’s doors before they answered (long before the days of the Ring Doorbell). Our song of choice was “2 Much Booty (In the Pants)” by Soundmaster T.

In one of the last conversations I ever had with him, John Bishop told me that he felt bad about Ross – that he had lost his old job and was sleeping in his mom’s basement until he got his finances back in order. He thought that he had the potential to make a lot of money with the company because he was genuinely good at it when he tried, he just rarely did.

By three months in with the company, I had lost my desire to try, too, so I couldn’t blame him. Since our entire relationship revolved around potty humor and pints of ale, I have to believe we both knew we weren’t meant long for this world anyway.

I think we both realized that spending $30 on beer at the bar every afternoon when we’d only made $20 in commission for the day wasn’t an effective way to accumulate wealth in the insurance business.

I never got to say goodbye to Ross, but I hope he did eventually get out, whatever that may have meant to him. I also hope he still remembers booty dancing on the front porches of countless doorsteps across Western North Carolina, because I know I sure do.

More tomorrow.

-jtf

This is post 7 of 30 in my most recent attempt at tackling NaBloPoMo. Funsies and such.