Posts Tagged ‘Fear’

Hands up if you like wasps? Anyone? I thought as much…

I hate them. I mean I don’t purposely go out of my way to hurt them, but I hate the way they buzz around your head, they way they buzz around your food, and why they insist on hanging around the same place – which is invariably where you need to stand/sit/walk/run/whatever.

The place I work has a wasp problem. A massive one. They never seem too stop coming out of the walls, and they always go for me. They should be dying by now, but they continue to haunt me. I read somewhere once that wasps are more likely to sting you when they are close to death…comforting.

I’m not really afraid of the creatures themselves, they just upset my chi. It’s the fear of the unknown – I’ve never been stung by a wasp/bee/hornet or any other bug. Now I’m not afraid of needles, I’ve got a ton of tattoos, but I have this insane irrational fear of what might happen if one of the little critters gets me.

This got me thinking about what exactly I am scared off. Well I’ll tell you. Sharks. Sharks suck. I really don’t enjoy the fact they have a lot more teeth than the majority of creatures. Ever since I saw Jaws when I was a kid, I was literally afraid to go in to any water, which included swimming, having a bath, and at one point mildly freaking out about putting my hands in a sink full of soapy water.

Have I ever swam near a shark? Have I hell – you won’t get me in the sea. It just won’t happen. I’ve got over the having a bath, and swimming thing, but I still have a check, and can easily freak myself out, and panic. It’s bizarre. I know that Jaws was fake, but I still can’t get it out of my head. It’s a stupid fear. But it’s shared by many people, and it even has a name: galeophobia.

I think fear is with you forever. Many scientists and psychologists believe that if you face your fears, you can conquer them, but I’m afraid to say I ever came face to face with a shark, I would die of fright before it had a chance to bite me. I hate pictures of sharks, movies with sharks – hell even the astonishing Plant Earth series by the BBC had me hiding behind my couch.

Apart from that scary fish, I’m not really scared of much else. Sure I’ll jump out my skin when a spider falls on to my lap, or jump out my skin when I hear a loud bang, but that’s a different type of fear, it’s not the kind of fear that creeps under your flesh and eats away at your courage.

So what scares you?

Back in the old days I used to work in telesales where I sold time-share deals to random folk out of the phone book. Now it’s fair to say that this was one of the most sole destroying jobs I’ve ever done, next to door-to-door selling, which I did for 3 months before walking home one day refusing point blank to ever be involved in hard-selling ever again.

I don’t have a problem with selling a good product to someone. If its useful, and the person need it then its fair enough, but if its something that they have no need for or just plain don’t know what it is, then my guilt chip goes on overdrive and I sulk for the rest of the day.

You develop a pretty thick skin when you cold-call customers – you have too, otherwise you’d burst in to tears every time someone hangs up on you, which believe me, was about 9 out of every ten calls.

I struggled some days because my job was to convince people to go to a hotel nearby and sit through a 5 hour lecture about Spain, where if they stayed to the end the got £50 of vouchers and I got a commission of £12. Naturally the aim was to get around 3 an hour, which on a good day did happen (my all time best was 26) but generally, you’d get maybe 8 or 9 a day – still it wasn’t bad money-wise, but your soul was well and truly sold to the devil.

In a way, it’s far easier to sell over the phone, because if they swear at you and hang-up then you just brush it off and call the next number. When you do door-to-door selling in the pouring rain, and some jumped up scum-bag tells you to F#ck off before slamming the door in your face, it can be pretty horrible.

You have to try take yourself into an imaginary world that you step into the moment the last person swears at you, and close it the moment the next guy opens the door. It helps keep your chin up in hard times.

My team that I worked with had some good stories, like the guy who was lured in to an older women’s house and turned up back at the office with her underwear as a “prize”, or the lad who had the seat of his trousers ripped off by a extremely terrifying Springer Spaniel (deadliest dog around…honest).

I had a few funny/scary moments too. One time in the middle of a city suburb I rang the doorbell of a normal looking house in a normal looking council estate, where an old guy answered the door looking like John Wayne – Stetson, chaps, checked shirt and all.

It was mid afternoon on a drizzly day, and I hadn’t made a sale yet so I believed the guys explanation that he was heading to a line-dancing contest at the old folks home. I wandered through to the living room, and started running through my memorised 4 page script, not really looking at anything, just thankful to be warm. The guy asked if I wanted a cup of tea, and as he seemed like a sale I agreed, so off he went…now around this point I started scanning around the room.

God, that couch is a big ratty, I said to myself, I looked in to a cabinet next to an old style fireplace noticing a selection of creepy porcelain dolls, a couple of photos, a pistol, a few more dolls…

I had a genuinely double-take moment as I looked back at an actual real pistol – the kind a cowboy would use. I looked above the fireplace, and saw two smith & Western style rifles hanging on the wall, and they looked very real. Fear started to creep in, as I could here the old codger creaking his way down the hall back towards the living room, without the tea.

He saw me looking at the guns and said ‘noticed my guns huh?’ I nodded, and asked a stupid question… ‘Are they real?’ The guy’s eyes lit up, it was as if I’d walked into his trap and there was no way out. He creeped over to the wall and lifted one of the guns off, at this point I thought I was dead, but then the kettle whistled in the other room, and after a look that said: ‘don’t leave’, he shuffled back through to the kitchen.

Just like they say in any horror movie, you should never look back, and as I legged it out of his front door, I honestly thought I was going to get shot in the back, so I ran like Forest Gump for about a mile before stopping.

I lasted two more hours on that job, but I was so nervous about going into a random persons home that I quit, and believe me when I’ll say, I won’t do it again.