Prisoners and Olan Mills love me.

Check it out.

My soon to be world famous and pay for my first private jet PhotoTalk series is now spending time on this site as well!

CLICK HERE

How cool is this?

Very.

It is VERY cool.

It really is a great compliment to have a large corporation acknowledge my work this way, and it makes me giddy to see it!

I guess now is a good time to tell you that when they contacted me a few months ago, just the name Olan Mills brought back a flooding of memories.

Sure I took my senior portrait there (who didn’t?) but what I also remembered was the summer I WORKED for them.

The ad said: cold-calling to sell an ‘Annual Portrait Package Plan’. Which was just as retarded as it sounds. I was supposed to call people and convince them to pre-pay for 4 photo sessions over the next year. I was going to get paid hourly- so I figured how bad could it be? I mean even if I don’t sell any I STILL get paid. So I showed up (the guy hired me over the phone. And now I know why. Read on…). It was not the fancy large Olan Mills locations I had been too, it was a crappy strip mall off 17th street in Santa Ana next to a laundromat and a Mexican grocery store. I was then taken to the back room of the place to a ‘phone center’.

A phone center filled with mostly PRISONERS on a WORK RELEASE program. 

And the others? On parole. That was not said as an excessively comedic description….

I am serious.

They lived in a prison and ‘worked’ at Olan Mills.

Happily they were all women but STILL? WEIRD.

And here I was pulling up in my red used Jaguar XJS at age 19.

I didn’t talk much to them, was assigned my cubicle, my script and a list of numbers. And that was my training.

So sat down. And dialed. Ten minutes after explaining the ‘amazing savings’ and the unique skills of Olan Mills photographers I had my first sale.

By the end of the month?

I had the highest sales in the place.

But it didn’t matter because I wasn’t getting commission remember?

All I was getting my $6.75 an hour.

But the ‘girls’, my fellow co-workers?… They were THRILLED for me. They would applaud every time I closed a sale. They were ‘sweet’ in their own I-didn’t-mean-to-steal-that-car kinda way.

So I worked there that summer and I learned all kinds of things…..

I learned I am a kick-ass salesperson (like my dad), I learned people will pretty much buy anything over the phone if you sound sincere, I learned to really respect the Olan Mills company for taking a risk and hiring prisoners who were really TRYING to improve themselves and I learned when you call into your parole officer they really have no idea who is calling so you can pay someone else to call in for you while you are down at the Del Taco getting lunch.

Oh and I learned if someone hires you over the phone?

RUN.

 

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