About businesspeople

For barely a week I had the absolute displeasure of working at a company about selling electricity and gas contracts for a local distributor to people, and I want to take note of everything that’s happened.

For obvious reasons, I won’t mention the company or its employees by name. It’s not them specifically, it’s pretty much everyone that operates like this.

The beginnings

The start was already bad enough: my first contact was via phone, and I couldn’t understand the name of the company. That’s already a red flag.

They said they were looking for someone to do some backoffice work (which I didn’t even remember ever applying for, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt - that’s another red flag).

They told me they were a company that did some sort of “moving shit around” type thing - they were very fuzzy about it (another red flag).

We set up an appointment for the following monday to meet with the boss to see if I could be useful for the company.

The e-mail I got was from a generically named GMail account, with no specifics about the name of the company, and it was just signed “The HR Team”. That’s another red flag, are you keeping count?

When I turned up, they said they “had a lot of clients lately”, so I had to enter a different gate on the opposite side of the road (so basically, they lied about their own address. I have no words).

The interview went well, the boss was very upfront and kept the “backoffice work” lie. He said to come back in the afternoon so they could show me what they did on the workplace.

The castle of lies

It turned out that they were a company that sold power contracts door to door, so they were not a transportation company. Ugh. They also lied about their name, again.

We came back at 7:30 pm, despite me being told that the whole thing would last “about two hours” (I got there at 3pm), and the boss told me to come back the next day to finalize the contract.

I finally understood the actual name of the company, which was what we call here a “individual company”.

Since I’m an idiot, I basically got coerced into signing it the next day; I signed as a collaborator, with a lot of freedoms, a lot of bonuses… and a pay based on your performance. Red flag!

Entering hell

In the days after this was the routine:

Scream like crazy to train yourself to speak loudly at the phone while practicing the script to call the clients to take appointments
Listen to some dumb fucking encouraging story from the manager
Calling people at the phone (following a script of course), which was the absolute worst part of the day (also your pay is based on your performance so you really gotta call hundreds of people a week)
Pretend you are there to help them (because we were told CONSTANTLY that “we are not a call center”)
Go to their houses and basically coerce them into changing their providers through emotional manipulation (“don’t you wanna save on your power bill?” “c’mon, if you need help call me up, this is my number, don’t answer to call centers” “don’t worry, I will take care of you and I will make you save money” “sign this so I can stop spam calls” and stuff like this)
Go to sleep because you are mentally and (especially) physically demolished and can’t think of anything but “god this is worse than hell I hope it’s over soon”

The environment

They asked of me to be very elegant and to buy a tie and moccasins. Fuck these guys to hell. They said like I had a million euros in my bank account already. Absolutely zero respect.

They made us use our real everyday phones to call clients, giving us only a phone proxy to fool people into thinking it was a local number for their area and making them more likely to answer the phone.

Once it happened that my manager/boss/employer/whatever brought me and the guy that was training me at client’s houses to show us how to conduct business; that was 100% a flex for his expensive car and his fancy (?) music tastes. (garbage funky music.)

They put A LOT of pressure to perform at all times, to call as many people and to sign as many contracts as you possibly could, every day. It was suffocating.

Everyone in the company was visibly jacked up on something (mostly coffee or other stimulants, but I would not have been surprised to hear that someone was on drugs). That was very irritating. Also that made them look like they were part of the cult, which it kind of was.

The company was seen as this benefactor that made people save on their energy contracts. Absolutely toxic hellscape.

I resigned at the end of the week. Me and the boss just shook hands and I just left. He didn’t give a shit. (thank god)

The (very likely) illegal things they did

Client data was very likely bought from data brokers and/or other energy providers, therefore making that data possibly illegal for the company to operate on. Of course, there was zero respect for privacy laws.
Despite it being several times illegal, some contracts were completed (= adding the client’s data on the contract) by making the client send us (that “us” makes me feel yucky) their power bills and IDs via WhatsApp so we could gather their data.
Despite it being probably illegal, most contracts were marked as signed and done despite the fact that the only thing written on the contract was the client’s signature and name, so we could write their data on the piece of paper while going from client to client.
We sent over the client’s data over WhatsApp and e-mails (our personal e-mail accounts and personal WhatsApp accounts, mind you) - which probably is in violation of the GDPR.

Conclusions

Businesspeople are cultpeople, they develop a cult with their company paraphrased as this mighty entity that is there to help the customer, which is at the absolute bottom of the scale.

Paradoxically, the client is always viewed as this insufferable subhuman that doesn’t deserve anything but contempt, while the company was its saviour, and you, the businessman, was its prophet, incapable of mistake and harbinger of the power of the mighty mothership company. It’s literally how a cult works.

Never EVER work as a businessman. It ruins your humanity.