Nice Guys Finish Last

The nicest old gentleman came in to see me earlier today. His daughter had a long-standing relationship with my company, buying a lot of merchandise over the years. And thus his business card was placed on my desk, and thus he called me early this morning, and thus I had to let him come in to chat with me. Since we sold to his daughter all these years, he now wants to sell to us.

He is an insurance salesman.

Ugh. Not my favorite species. Particularly so since my company deals with AFLAC – whether they’re great or awful, don’t know, everybody’s got an opinion, but we deal with them for business reasons. Exposure, connections, that sort of thing. And AFLAC is popular with our employees. Over a third of them have policies with the Duck.

What the kindly old man was offering was an exact duplicate of what AFLAC is coming in to our shop in two weeks to present to our employees. “Only better,” he insisted, pointing out price and a myriad of minutiae my glazed-over eyes recorded and my glazed-over mind instantly forgot. How to tell him the whole thing is overkill to my people? How to tell him our employees can’t spend all their time attending insurance seminars otherwise we’d go out of business. You can’t tell these guys no.

Oh, and did I mention his daughter does business with us? He did. Two more times.

So I fell back to my default position: “I’ll bump it up the chain of command. Explain it to the owners. Give me about a week or so.”

Will I? Maybe. Depends how busy I’ll be next week. Depends how bad I feel I need to purchase a CYA policy. But the whole thing is grating, because this kinda thing happens to me a dozen or more times a year, in waves cresting around July, our annual renewal for these types of policies.

Ah the perils of Cubicle Boy ...