There’s a new reason why I walk with fear on the street.
It’s not the street people. It’s not the annoying people with cellphones. It’s not even the people on scooters.
It’s the Mary Kay Women.
This is the second time in two months I’ve been ambushed, while innocently minding my own business, by A Representative from Mary Kay. That’s how they describe themselves to me, of course. Then, before I can run away screaming, they ladle on some compliment such as, “You look like a model.” “You look so pulled-together.”
It is unclear what they want from me, these friendly, yet strangely aggressive, women. What they seem to want to get across is that they want to offer me a job. Yes, that’s right!
They know nothing about me--except that I have blonde hair and a camel coat on and was standing alone at a cross walk. They have no idea of my qualifications, police record, or whether or not I speak English. But they want to offer me a job.
Quite a good job too, not a sales job, they are at pains to say, more of a “director” job. It’s tricky, too; they keep throwing around the words “six-figure salary” although it’s never quite spelled out WHO will be making the six figure salary.
“We’re looking for people…not to sell makeup! Ahahaha,” chuckled the woman this morning. This mystified me even more. Why is the assumption that Mary Kay employees sell makeup funny? Conversely, why do Mary Kay representatives want to DISABUSE me of the notion that the majority of their employees do, indeed, sell makeup?
The complexities baffle me. I'm also fighting back a whiff of class snobbery at the mention of the word "Mary Kay." Somewhere along the line, at the knee of my department-store-saleslady grandma, I picked up that it was somehow declasse to have a makeup salesperson come to your house. Real women of substance buy their lipstick as god intended, at the makeup counter.
And then there's those parties you have to have.
And that pink packaging.
Oh, my.
Anyway, the woman on the corner is still nattering. She wants to know where I work. She also wants my business card, if I have one. She wants…she wants…who ARE these people?
I have learned to keep a chilly, yet polite reserve during these conversations. I am not sure, however, that I have learned to completely conceal my dismay when I am swooped down upon by some total stranger who seems bent on talking to me in the street. And all the while I am resisting, with all my might, the urge to question the lack of logic the whole encounter entails.
To me, any job that you have to recruit unsuspecting strangers off the street to do, without any concern at all for qualification or ability, must be the worst job in the world.
Unless, of course, your job is to ambush unsuspecting strangers in the street. Like that woman. Poor thing.
Posted at April 04, 2002 09:14 AM