I knew ITV was a scam right off the bat. I had some connections on the staff and they promised FREE money with very little effort. They were correct.
My job was customer service. The customers I was servicing were generally irate.
The business was under a mask of "Health Products" but really all they were selling was the opportunity to give away your credit card information.
The genius of the plan was the "Autoship". You could get a cheap deal, or even free products, if you signed up for the Autoship. The majority of their customer base was sly enough to get the discount, but not tenacious enough to actually follow through and cancel the damn thing. They'd get products for months at a time before they realized and cancelled their account, by which time hardly any of the products would be eligible for refund.
There was also a "Home Agent" program which I referred to as the Triple Inverted Scam. But my stomach can't even handle it this morning. ITV still makes my stomach turn.
I learned from ITV that if It seems too good to be true, it Is.
Donald Barrett is a leech and Kevin Trudeau is a snake. Kevin is a drug addict and Donald wears dentures. I never had any problems with either of them personally. I worked for them diligently and honestly for a few months, until even the weight of the raw money couldn't hold my Conscious in check any longer.
In the end, I think every consumer is ultimately as responsible as the scumbag CEOs. Neither Donald nor Kevin "forced" any of their consumers to believe their spewed lies. Anyone with half a brain wouldn't have. They didn't force their consumers to whip out credit cards, or to verbally agree to massive amounts of inventory.
But... they profited mainly off of lonely, elderly people watching television in the wee hours of the morning. I also heard they stole every door knob out of every door, before they left the building they had been evicted from.
*****
VII
Vampfangs.com is an online halloween and alternative-gothic superstore.
fangs, masks, blood, hair dye, clothes, shoes, full costumes, makeup... whatever you need. Quality products at fair prices. September and October are the real heavy cream - nonstop madness - tens of thousands of orders - weeks upon weeks of chaos...
but I was most impressed by the steady stream of orders throughout the year. Who are these people buying acrylic fangs in January? and why?
I learned the importance of the niche market at Vampfangs. I also got to work with top notch video & film equipment. It was a pleasant atmosphere whether we were balls-to-the-wall or on lunch break.
Vampfangs is one guy. It's the guy that started the company over a decade ago. He lives his dream and I was so impressed by this that I realized that Vampfangs was his dream and not mine, and that I had to establish my dream and follow that.
My dream is music. I've been gigging and teaching lessons for three months now and feel at this time that my plan might be crazy enough to just barely work. I hope to take what I learned from all of these jobs and put those pieces together to unlock the puzzle. To create my own business. If I fail, I'll get another job. If I succeed, I'll never have another boss again for the rest of my life. Talk about Motivation.
*one point that I gleaned from all these jobs but neglected to mention was the Importance of Apathy. That is, if you are totally indebted to the success of every little detail, there's no way to feel happy or successful, because nothing ever goes perfect. You have to expect bad things to happen and be O.K. with not "really" caring. That always helped me to focus on the Solution instead of the Problem. A healthy dose of apathy.
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