Complaint Review: Kirby Dyro Productions Daniel Blalock - Houston Texas

I responded to a craigslist ad on Monday (4-19-10) that looked exactly like this:

"Need to fill positions this week. Involves but is not limited to filling/refilling supply orders, greeting clients, and basic csr help. Must be 18 yrs or older, neat in appearance, and able to start immediately. No experience required. Paid Training available. Hire based on personal interviews. $2200 month

Call now to schedule an interview."

I called and was interviewed the same day by a nice, attractive girl named Rachel (think Barbie). It was not much of an interview, but that's not her fault. It was evident she'd been trained to keep it very, very simple. I like to be asked a lot of difficult questions in interviews. That way I get the sense that the company that might hire me is thoughtful about who they are hiring. Even a 15-minute interview can give an interviewer a fairly good picture of your personality. I can't understand why I keep running into companies who have people like this interviewing. Anyways, I digress.

I was in there for 2 minutes, mostly being cute and exchanging smiles with her, because I felt that was really all that was required of me. There was a portion of the interview where she attempted to describe what the company does. It was a vague, convoluted mess, that didn't give me any better of a picture of what the company does than before I walked in the door. In fact, I made sure to listen very intently to her description and still found it quite confusing. I imagine that it is the intention of their company to do this. She told me to call Vanessa later on in the day to ask about my application status. I did, and was told "Congratulations!" and that there is an orientation Wednesday for "placement" in their company. Let's make this clear. When I think placement, I think, hey, great, you're going to spend some time to ask me a lot more questions to decide what my strength and weaknesses are so that you can find out what position within your company I am best suited for. Wrong.

I showed up yesterday for orientation, with about 20-30 other individuals in the room waiting for orientation too. When we walked into the orientation room, there were Kirby products on a table and Kirby signs on the wall. This was the very first moment I confirmed these guys are actually pushing Kirby vacuums and their products. Important to note here is that this is deceptive advertising. Had the advertisement mentioned that I would mostly be involved in selling Kirbys, I could have just looked at another ad instead of responding to this one, wasting my gas money going to the interview, and getting my hopes up that I'd just gotten hired at a company that would pay me $2200 a month (oh yeah, and I told people about it in excitement, which is also now embarassing). I hope they realize how horribly inconsiderate this is. Congratulations on making a very smart person despise you, Dyro.

Also, to those that might think that this job really is "customer service" because of what they try to tell you, all I have to say is you really have to play with and torture the term to make it fit like this. In my experience, companies that start their business relationship with you on the basis of deception tend to continue that behavior of deception throughout the relationship. It really could be the case that everything said in the orientation is true. They really could be a great company because Warren Buffet thinks so. It really could be that you don't have to do any selling or door-to-door knocking to make your $2200 per month salary (yeah, says salary on the application, comically). It really could be that you'll get to go on a vacation 4 times a year, that you'll sell enough Kirbys to get your very own (wow, my very own overpriced vacuum!), and that you could even own your own Kirby store some day. I have my doubts about this. The reality is, these kinds of places have a high rate of turnover for a reason, and it's not because they actually deliver on the promises that they give you tons of leads to work with, that you don't have to do any selling, and that you just have to pretty much stand there and look pretty and smile to get someone to want to buy a vacuum (and yes, this is actually as easy as he tried to make the job seem).

Oddly enough, I was going to be willing to stay there and give it a try if I observed behavior from Daniel that I found to be respectful and honest (honesty entails not misleading anyone about anything). In the time I listened to his presentation, I found him to be neither. As for honesty, the power point presentation, along with his comments on it, are neatly doctored to make believers out of the skeptical by creating the illusion that everyone in the room would be given more than enough demos to do, as there are a "surplus of leads right now". A lot of the time spent on the presentation is on how much money you'll be making. It's just not practical to think that 20-30 people are going to be making that amount. As for respect, Daniel would oftentimes ask various questions that tend to illicit responses and guesses from audiences, like "Who knows who the second richest person in the world is?" At one point, I guess, he decided that a girl in front of me was guessing too often at these questions or something, and he very rudely told her "Maybe you shouldn't try to guess anymore" or something similar. Can't remember precisely how he said it, but I don't think she was too flattered by it. Later on, he started throwing out the word retard, discussing his past use of the word retard in previous orientations and how it got him in trouble one time because someone had a loved one with Downs Syndrome, then proceeded to make another joke following this implying that if we don't do well selling at their company, he'll have us ride a short bus of some sort. Yeah, stay classy bro.

I don't even need to get into how unprofessional this was and how turned off I was by it. The guy said enough funny stuff throughout the presentation that that just wasn't needed. He also went in depth about how one of his current employees had an embarassing drunken experience at one of their vacations in Vegas. Cool story bro.

My view on this company is that they owe me and everyone else (time is money and gas costs money) in that orientation who would have otherwise forgone calling them the moment they saw the name Kirby in the ad. But I imagine since they have a reputation for sacrificing ethics for profit, that they'd certainly not oblige. I don't want companies like this in my city, whoring up the "customer service" section on craigslist. I could have been spending my efforts looking elsewhere. I want to wake up, drive to work for a legitimate business that works on good principles and practices, work my a*s off, and then take my a*s home. It's as simple as that. I can't stress enough how tired everyone is of this kind of bullshit where a company feels it's necessary to deceive me, then try to spend 2-3 hours rebuilding the image in my head that I have of them, so that I'll stay. No, you start with honesty, then we'll talk.