Door-to-Door Indenture
I just got a visit from a kid selling magazines. He's short, skinny, black and has some sort of deformity on his chest, like the pectoral version of a hunchback. I knew immediately that he was one of those kids selling magazines for shady outfits, so I listened to him speak his piece (inviting him in briefly--it's cold outside and he didn't have a jacket) and then said I wasn't interest in books or magazines OR buying a book or a magazine for someone else.
He was working both angles hard--his rhetoric was about hard workers using work to get ahead in the world, plenty of patter about what my first job was, starting at the bottom working up, etc--but when I said I wasn't interested in buying his product, there was plenty of "help a kid out, this is a tough job". I think you can do either of those but not both: Either you're a charity case and I respond as if you're a charity case, or you're a door-to-door salesman and I respond that way. He was trying both, but that's pretty typical.
He was back a few minutes later asking if he could use my bathroom. I had already pondered if maybe I should have used our brief time together to try to give him some advice about how to better his situation and felt bad about not trying to interface, and obviously if you're going door to door all day, you've got to use the bathroom sometime. So I showed him the bathroom, he left his little folio by our front door "to show I'm not gonna take anything", and I went back to what I was doing. When he was done, thinking about the cold outside and how he was probably trapped in the neighborhood until he got picked up, I invited him to stay in the warm for a while. He took a seat next to my computer chair and we chatted about his job.
Here's the story: A couple of his friends brought him in on a job opportunity. They went and interviewed with this guy and he thought they were alright, so he gave them each a greyhound ticket to California (These kids are from FLORIDA). After their four day bus trip, they got trained up and now get shipped around the country to different cities. This kid (he looks 15 or so, he's actually 19) has been doing it for 2 months and it sounds like he isn't making any progress. They have to pay for their own hotel rooms (and travel costs?) out of the profits they make on their magazine sales. It doesn't sound like there's much left at the end of the week.
Their system is to get dropped off in a neighborhood, and then picked up again in 8 hours or so. Their manager gets mad if they don't sell enough. My guy didn't seem to have any warm clothing, food or water. I gave him an apple and one of my extra suit jackets (light button-down shirt, in winter, seems like poor salesperson garb), and a glass of water.
After his numerous complaints that the job was tough, I suggested that he quit and move back to Florida. He said he wanted to, but he was saving up money for an airline ticket. I've got this bad feeling that it's not going to happen anytime soon--the whole situation reminded me of the company stores of yore: "You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt". I can't imagine that he sells enough magazines to pay for living in hotels. So I gave him a brief craigslist rideshare tutorial, showing him how he could get to New Orleans via San Francisco for gas money if he left now, and could presumably get home to Florida for a hundred bucks or so if he played his cards right. Hopefully he'll take my cue and escape, because that's no kind of life.
I'm beginning to think that this sort of indentured servitude via distance from home is quite common. We already know about sex-slavery and illegal domestics. This magazine indenture trap, while horrible, doesn't seem like the sort of thing that merits being illegal. It just seems bad.
So now I'm emotionally tapped out from dealing with this kid's horrible life situation. It's much easier to do charity through an institutional process, for me, anyway--not having to hear about the tragedies of the people I'm helping keeps me from empathetically absorbing their plight, thus making charity less mentally painful and more enticing. So the next indentured magazine salesman who comes by my door may get nothing more than a polite refusal. I can't do this every time.
He was working both angles hard--his rhetoric was about hard workers using work to get ahead in the world, plenty of patter about what my first job was, starting at the bottom working up, etc--but when I said I wasn't interested in buying his product, there was plenty of "help a kid out, this is a tough job". I think you can do either of those but not both: Either you're a charity case and I respond as if you're a charity case, or you're a door-to-door salesman and I respond that way. He was trying both, but that's pretty typical.
He was back a few minutes later asking if he could use my bathroom. I had already pondered if maybe I should have used our brief time together to try to give him some advice about how to better his situation and felt bad about not trying to interface, and obviously if you're going door to door all day, you've got to use the bathroom sometime. So I showed him the bathroom, he left his little folio by our front door "to show I'm not gonna take anything", and I went back to what I was doing. When he was done, thinking about the cold outside and how he was probably trapped in the neighborhood until he got picked up, I invited him to stay in the warm for a while. He took a seat next to my computer chair and we chatted about his job.
Here's the story: A couple of his friends brought him in on a job opportunity. They went and interviewed with this guy and he thought they were alright, so he gave them each a greyhound ticket to California (These kids are from FLORIDA). After their four day bus trip, they got trained up and now get shipped around the country to different cities. This kid (he looks 15 or so, he's actually 19) has been doing it for 2 months and it sounds like he isn't making any progress. They have to pay for their own hotel rooms (and travel costs?) out of the profits they make on their magazine sales. It doesn't sound like there's much left at the end of the week.
Their system is to get dropped off in a neighborhood, and then picked up again in 8 hours or so. Their manager gets mad if they don't sell enough. My guy didn't seem to have any warm clothing, food or water. I gave him an apple and one of my extra suit jackets (light button-down shirt, in winter, seems like poor salesperson garb), and a glass of water.
After his numerous complaints that the job was tough, I suggested that he quit and move back to Florida. He said he wanted to, but he was saving up money for an airline ticket. I've got this bad feeling that it's not going to happen anytime soon--the whole situation reminded me of the company stores of yore: "You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt". I can't imagine that he sells enough magazines to pay for living in hotels. So I gave him a brief craigslist rideshare tutorial, showing him how he could get to New Orleans via San Francisco for gas money if he left now, and could presumably get home to Florida for a hundred bucks or so if he played his cards right. Hopefully he'll take my cue and escape, because that's no kind of life.
I'm beginning to think that this sort of indentured servitude via distance from home is quite common. We already know about sex-slavery and illegal domestics. This magazine indenture trap, while horrible, doesn't seem like the sort of thing that merits being illegal. It just seems bad.
So now I'm emotionally tapped out from dealing with this kid's horrible life situation. It's much easier to do charity through an institutional process, for me, anyway--not having to hear about the tragedies of the people I'm helping keeps me from empathetically absorbing their plight, thus making charity less mentally painful and more enticing. So the next indentured magazine salesman who comes by my door may get nothing more than a polite refusal. I can't do this every time.