We worked from routes. Each potential enrollee had a six-digit numerical I.D. that was included with the address. Brief but adequate instructions were included on how to get from one stop to the next. By and large, once you found the first stop, it wasn't too difficult to locate the rest. After each stop, we used a numerical code for the results. For instance, "1" stood for a sale, "2" stood for a non-sale, "4" stood for a bad address, and "6" stood for not home. Theoretically, when we completed a route and handed it in at the evening meeting, they would be updated and re-issued containing only strong leads. Despite some management miscues and doubtful strategy, things went smoothly in the beginning as we picked the low-hanging fruit. If you were diligent and strong at the point of sale, only time limited the amount of enrollments you could sell. More or less, it was all smiles at the evening meeting.
When the season begins, the parents are overwhelmed by offers. At one house, after listening to my spiel, a nice lady asked me to wait a moment. She returned with a fistful of brochures (including ours). For weeks, somebody had knocked on her door at least once everyday. In addition, she volunteered, "The phone never stopped ringing." In some other places, this assault may have provoked some anger. But not in San Antonio. We both had a good laugh.
The first thing that threatened to upset the applecart was competition. Our training had forgotten to mention that we weren't the only company on a mission. Immediately, we began to run into students who were already signed up by companies that had stolen a march on us. While our company relied primarily on a large work force going door to door, others made the sale using the mail or the telephone as well as hitting the bricks. The idea that we were not alone on our "mission" came as quite a shock to our crew (there were as many as 60 other companies operating in the same district with us). One way management restored our psychological equilibrium was by portraying the competition as bad guys. They didn't play fair, they didn't follow the rules. At one morning meeting, we were told that our supervisors would be very happy if we could come up with proof that other SES providers were cheating. On my next shift, I began to ask students who had already enrolled with another company about the circumstances of those enrollments. Sure enough, other companies were cheating. After just a couple of hours of making inquiries along these lines, I got four students to detail to me how they had been, against all the rules, signed up by teachers or counselors right in the classroom. These kids were happy to provide this information. Both they and their parents were perfectly aware that their right to choose had been stolen from them. Although my supervisors were happy to get this confirmation about the "bad guys," as far as I know, they did nothing with it. I stopped soliciting evidence of corruption, but I am certain that if I had continued to search, I would have uncovered more. What I took away from this episode was not only that some SES providers were corrupting educators, but that it was more important to my supervisors to maintain the sense of righteousness that drove sales than it was to make a stink about the cheating.
As you may know, South Texas is known for its heat. The summer of 2011 was the hottest summer ever. We started at three o'clock when the temperature was invariably over 100 degrees F and walked through this oven for five or six hours. For a Yank, this was quite an experience. In South Texas, only crazy people walk around in the summer sun. On several occasions, I swooned with what I later came to understand was some degree of sun stroke. I'm sure I got some enrollments purely out of pity. The company was not completely insensitive. On one occasion, we were issued a small bottle of water along with the usual advice regarding the dangers of working in a broiler. Behind the concern and limited largesse, the inference was clear: Carry the water with you, do not leave your route for refreshment. I have no guilt whatsoever in admitting that I never for a minute followed this rule.
On every shift when the heat was oppressive, I made time for a quick trip to the local fast-food outlet. In fact, I didn't feel comfortable in a territory until I knew exactly where the nearest McDonald's was. There, along with others seeking relief more than a meal, I could soak up the air conditioning, use the clean rest rooms, and get as much soda or ice water as I wanted for only a buck. At the time, I considered this the greatest bargain on Earth. Unless you have worked outdoors in the heat, you can't imagine how urgently you need relief. Even though I rarely spent more than the dollar necessary to get my refillable cup, the staff was, from top to bottom, always polite. On any given shift, I might spend as much as 45 minutes on these furtive escapes, and I never felt the least twinge of regret about cheating the company. In the process, I learned something about the institution of fast food restaurants and what they can mean to a low-income community. They are a lot more than just a place to eat for people seeking an oasis. While I do not genuflect when I pass one now, I will never, despite other thoughts about the fast food industry, forget what a godsend Mickey Dee's was for me.
Although San Antonio is pock-marked with Section 8 housing projects offering the convenience of concentrated sales leads, most of the eligible families I called on did not live in these projects. The majority of eligible students I dealt with lived in private, detached homes. While some were subdivided, most were not. I have never been in real estate and don't know the precise word for these houses -- I would call them cottages or bungalows. They are built on narrow, deep lots with little room on either side. Back east, they would call the arrangement of rooms as "railroad." "Shotgun" might also be a good description. While modest, they are generally well maintained. These make up the typical San Antonio neighborhood. They go on for miles and miles in every direction. Because burglary and theft are San Antonio's trademark crimes, these homes can be like fortresses and present the door-to-door salesman with certain problems. Most are fenced or gated with heavy padlocks on both the front gate and the driveway. In the small front yards, there are dogs -- packs of them. They also run loose in the streets. If you are trying to save on gas or trying to do more walking than driving, you can expect to be accompanied by at least one of these canine patrols -- and usually by a few of their pals as well. These, in turn, set off the private packs in the yard. The constant yapping, barking and snarling can amount to a roar. It may take me years before I stop hearing it. The dogs in the yards included purebreds and facsimiles of large breeds such as Rotties, mastiffs, shepherds, and, of course, pits. These larger breeds, quite ferocious, were generally on a chain, although occasionally I did find myself face to face with a loose one. The bigger problem was the small dogs. They were loose and came at you in packs. They included most of the toy breeds, but the most common by far was the nasty little Chihuahua. At first, I was not as concerned with them as I was with the chained-up pits snarling and straining to break free. I am pretty familiar with dogs. Most people who know me would say I was a "dog person." I was confident I could get the little ones to back off. I was right! They always ran away when I threatened them. It was when you were walking away and turned your back that they got you! I was bitten on and around my ankles three times. I don't mention this to elicit any sympathy for being bitten -- it was, after all, my own fault for being overconfident. What I do wish the reader to note, however, is the extent of difficulty a door-to-door salesperson encounters before they can even get close enough to the door to knock (most of these homes had no bells).
By far, the worst problem I encountered was poor management. Predicated on using routes that were constantly updated by feedback from the field, the system quickly broke down. Routes were re-issued without being correctly updated, and we found ourselves returning to places we had already been and where we had already signed up students. This company, touting the use of technology -- especially computers -- to "save" students, was unable to use that technology to sustain an intelligent enrollment campaign. The "view from bottom" does not allow me to understand why this was. Perhaps the cost of contracting techies to update our routes was prohibitive. For whatever reason, from a point relatively early in the campaign, we worked without routes. The company referred to this cold calling as "canvassing." This meant that we were sent into a territory without any direction from our supervisors. The only instruction was "go anywhere you want." No effort was made to keep track of what blocks had already been canvassed. If 20 of us went out, it was possible we would all land in the same neighborhood, bumping into one another and duplicating our work. Since nobody shared this information and supervisors made no effort to keep track of things, I found myself hitting streets where our crew had been a day or even an hour before. Once again, the wonderful good nature of San Antonians was on display.
On one occasion, I came across a lady who had been solicited by our company a half dozen times. To my embarrassment, I myself had signed her up weeks earlier and had forgotten! Not only that, her child had already received his "learning tools." The funny thing was that the company had shown up twice with the phone and vocabulary book. Mom and I just shook our heads and laughed. I spent a lot of time apologizing to people.
Because I am not from San Antonio, I had no idea where the boundaries of the school districts were. On more than one occasion, I wasted the better part of a shift in a neighborhood where there were no eligible schools. Eventually, after I realized that no guidance would be forthcoming from management, I took it upon myself to find maps showing the boundaries of schools and school districts. I gave these to my supervisors who then printed them up and distributed them to the rest of the crew.
As you might imagine, enrollments were hard to come by under these circumstances. Some days you got lucky and picked a block that had not been done before, but usually even the best efforts only brought to the door students who had already been enrolled. Gone were the smiles of the first weeks -- meetings were grim, pressure grew, and the crew became demoralized. Bad management had arrived at its predictable, pathetic destination -- they blamed the crew for their own incompetence. Other crews were brought in from hundreds of miles away to show us the right way to do things. Threats of dismissal were common. We were told repeatedly that new people were being trained to take our places. The "2-hour" rule was put into place even though few people are home before 5 p.m. If we hadn't signed up at least one student by then, we were to go home. Eventually, the 2-hour rule was replaced by a 1-hour rule. Supervisors were desperate to control costs. People began to disappear from the crew. One day they were there, the next day they were gone. Goodbye missionary, hello menial! Some began to cheat. Desperate to satisfy the 2-hour rule and be able to earn a full shift's pay, they had figured out how to file duplicate enrollments (now, we were the "bad guys").
The company never realized that if they had devoted more resources to intelligent canvassing, they would have wasted less money on fruitless shifts by enrollment reps.
Despite all these problems, the crew overcame them all and succeeded in signing up the majority of students from any eligible school. The company maintained its desired position as the largest SES provider in Texas.
Whether you are "the other half," and each year become intimate with SES providers, or if you are like me and had never heard of SES providers before, I hope that by sharing these narrow insights, you can better comprehend the scope and intensity of America's latest seasonal activity.
Or, you might very well say "so what?" Or, "who cares?"
Well, for one thing, you should care because you are paying for all this. At my company, enrollment reps were expected to make one sale per hour. If in the course of the enrollment "season" you might work a few hundred hours, and if each enrollment earned a fee of at least $1,000 per student, you can begin to get an idea of the revenue generated. In the first year or so after "No Child Left Behind," SES providers were servicing less than 50,000 students nationwide. A few years after that, the number had grown more than 10-fold to over 500,000. Today, I have no doubt that the number is 1 million and still quickly growing. At $1,000 a pop (this may be conservative). you can see that this program has crossed the billion dollar threshold. Even inside the D.C. beltway, this is real money.
I was happy to be able to earn a couple of bucks. I was also very happy to meet so many nice people, especially the kids. Once we got the sales rigmarole out of the way, I often took the opportunity to chat them up. These are good people. They have an earnest and sincere wish to succeed in school and life. When I asked the kids who had been previously enrolled what they thought about our "tutoring," about 10 percent said they thought it was a complete waste of time, but they were eager to get new gifts. The other 90 percent shyly offered the belief that it had helped. When I dug a little deeper, though, not one of them thought that it had helped a lot. They shrugged their shoulders and said that it had helped "a little."
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