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  gaia 05/09/2012 at 14:14 PST

I went to work for Montesquieu but it had another name then...I forgot what that name was but same place and headquarters are in San Diego Ca.

Anyway...i walk into this place in San Diego and it is located in an old grammar school classroom (no longer a school there) and the first thing i notice is that the noise level is like that at a rock concert and i am not kidding...i mean totally deafening and there are a bunch of desks forming a square. No computers just phones and maybe 10 people at the desks. I notice all the desks have about 4 bottles of different wines on them and the reps sitting at the desks are from time to time taking sips from the different bottles. Also there are a few people and you are not going to believe this but there are other reps who are playing a game of "soft ball" with plastic bat and rubber balls and also they are shooting these blow gun platic balls at each other. Well this is totally bizarre...never seen anything like this in my life! I figure this is not serious. Then i go into talk with this guy who interviews me and asks me about my phone sales experience and i tell him i can sell ice to eskimos. lol. Well....he hires me and tells me i will make $250 a week in salary for the first two weeks then...well if i prove myself and i should be able to in two weeks i will be stickly commission but i will make a fortune like $5000 a week. Well. this $250 for the first two weeks in salary sounded good so he hands me some leads and escorts me to a desk which is not one of the desks that is in outer square but an inner desk in the middle. All the leads were total nonsense with Vietnamese names one could not pronounce who were MDs or i got these TX born again Xians. Well i tried but everyone said no. Then the work day ended and the guy who hired me gave me two bottles of wine to take home and it was my "homework" to drink these two bottles of wine!

Another thing...i was very wrong about this place as they had this black board or rather a white board at front of the room and whenever anyone made sales they would put up how much they sold and a bell was rung and everyone applauded.

Now this was so weird because there were these maybe 4 people who kept selling and selling and selling and all of them had been working there for at least 3 years and they seemed to have a lot of repeat clients who just loved their wine and all it took was a quick look at their precious lead pack which btw they kept locked in a safe in wooden boxes each of theise 4 ppl had one of these lead boxes.

As hard as it was to believe these people were making between $250K and $300K a year and i am serious.

The poor slobs like me and a couple others we sat at our desks in the middle of their prestigous outer line of desks so they could look at us struggling and never even getting more than a couple sentences into the script before getting hung up on while they would just sell and sell and sell cases many many cases.

The following monday it got even more hilarious. I got to work at 9 am and we all had coffee then we went into a conference room and we had a sort of "therapy hour" with the reps who made all that loot and us failures and as i said this was sort of "therapy" like they would say "if you were an animal what animal would you be." And i remember one guy who was one of the winners saying how much he enjoyed F%&king with people and everyone laughed.

Ok so therapy hour ended and out we went to the sales floor not to sell no no no but turned up the music full blast and i had a bike and i had brought it into the office and someone was riding my bike between the desks and once again it was soft ball time and blow gun time and drinking lots of wine time and this goes on till lunch time when i guess i had tried to make a few calls and failed but the regular ones the ones who were making all the loot they had not even started working. So one of the bosses hands me and one of my loser workers a bottle of chardonney and tells us there is a nice pizza joint about a block away and that we should go have a pizza and drink the wine for lunch which we did.

Now it is around 1.30 pm and FINALLY the regular sales team who have a QUOTA of about $30K they must make in wine sales that day and cant go home till they hit that number so they are off to the races and by god by 5.30 pm they had done it.

Of course we had sold nothing. Also they would not help us other than it is true occasionally one of them would grab my phone hold it upside down so i could not hear the customer and he would yell me to say things as he could hear but i coundnt even with his so called help i made nothing.

By Thursday i was burning out and most puzzled how they were doing it. I came up with all kinds of theories. I got fired that day told that i just didnt know how to sell and the others were fired too.

I got totally obsessed with this wine firm as it was a lot of fun playing the music and playing soft ball half the day and riding bikes around and making a fortune and they were making this or something very fishy was going on i dont know. So about a year or so later i applied again for this job and now it was called Montesquieu but same people as before and they remembered me and were really nice but no way would they share with me or with the other losers they had chosen for a week or torture how to do it. My plan was to buy my own leads and sadly my cat got sick and i had to pay a big vet bill so i cound not afford the leads so it was deja vu allover and once again fired.

I have told this story to many people never online and some people i have talked to think maybe it is some undercover deal maybe they sell drugs who knows...i am still so intrigued but now live far far from San Diego. Their wine is good not the best but pretty damn good. These people who make this money are not very well educated...i mean when i had my short "training" they could not even properly pronounce the names of their French wines so this is just another most weird thing about these people. All i know is that they have offices not only in SD but elsewhere in the country i think in FL and in Los Angeles. Havent kept up with them recently.

I dont blame you if you dont believe this as if i had not experienced this place i doubt i would believe what i haeve written here. God if i could only figure out how these bozos were making a third of a million bucks a year doing next to nothing i think i would sell my soul!!! LOL

We would really like to hear what you have to say
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