Chapter Seven
The course of Herbaline on sales proficiency 'feeling affinity with our sales work' involved notions normally not associated with sales work, things like shedding the word emotion or emotional or e-motion, or words coming from the word emotion, and replacing them, with a better sense of logic or thinking. Clarity entered the 'Sales Truth' business room of the Midland civic center. Coleman Cartmel, the motivational guru of the company, was handling loose leaf index cards, corresponding to the presentation someone else had prepared for him. The conference room was filled with former salespeople who held positions at prominent companies, positions pertaining to promotion, publicity, digital marketing, sales, and distribution, avenues of bringing the dollar to the bottom line of any company once the product or service was ready to be sold.
Clarity followed the usher of the business room, a man dressed in the uniform of a bottled water delivery man, who ushered attendants to the talk painstakingly slowly, ensuring each attendant remained in the room and received a small ten ounce bottle of 'Herbafina' mineral water, a bottled water claiming to have been drunk by one of the heads of the earlier manifestations of the company, when it produced pecans, nuts and pistachios instead of herbs, out of Tulsa County in Oklahoma, back when the company was called Howell Pecan & Nut Treeline instead of Herbaline.
"Now, when it says manifestations of this company, what do they mean?"
"It means the company went bankrupt earlier, and the company reappeared in its new, renewed version, its current way of existing, as Herbaline." Cartmel lifted his eyes, glancing towards Clarity, while he adjusted the range of colors in a software built by the company, called Drawmeadow, a landmark discovery of the in-house programmers of Herbaline, which was made available to those employees who were familiar with the importance and origin of color for mankind and for marketing herbal tea. Color was relevant for Clarity, because over the course of her brief stint at studying in a two year college program in L.A. County, she waived a course in web design that involved working with Illustrator, a software which included a sophisticated color palette, in order to attend a brief course on communication, at the Learning Annex, which allowed her to get hired as teleoperator, at Stevenson, by Brock Cheevers, the head of human resources there.
Clarity sat down with Lanai on row nine of the conference room. Cartmel turned on the projector, and began speaking in front of roughly two or three hundred people. He began his speech by giving out slides to everyone seated in the first five rows, the 'department aisle', as it was internally called, which headed sales at Herbaline, the sales hierarchy group, which was supervised by Stive. A large projected-on-screen live video, showed a television set branded with the name Zooropa showing the face of Stive, calmly observing a black and white television monitor to his right. A camera was filming Stive, and another camera hooked or linked to the television set Stive was watching, showing some room in the Civic Center or distributor in California. Stive was sitting at the front entrance security cabin of the Center, performing the duties of a security guard at Herbaline, to show that he was able to do any job at the company himself and that distributors were closely monitored by the company.
Ivy appeared from the right hand side of the conference room, and she sat calmly in the seat next to Clarity, holding a small device known at Herbaline as the docket. Clarity glossed over the docket screen, and noticed that Ivy was completing, or translating, the name of the conference Center, which was an expression. Ivy pressed a key on the device, which returned a definition, or translation of the conference center room name, 'Sales Truth'. The docket spat out an explanation for the name of the room: 'As lies stop being told, truth emanates from words spoken'. The following expression was more illustrative of its meaning. 'When some genuine aspect of a person is uncovered, the real person shows openly, without a social mask conditioning his or her personality.' A further explanatory note added a more subtle line of meaning. 'When the lack of truth shows subtly in the face of the person across you, you can easily invoke or bring forth the truth hiding beneath that lie, in order to close a sale or lead the person to it.' Some of the people specialists at Herbaline were very good at understanding personality, and at applying that to sales. Ivy turned to Clarity, noticing she was looking at the docket and the text showing.
"You know, you're not a bad employee, you can be a good supervisor of the sales group here."
"I'm not exactly an employee, my agreement with the company is not standard, I was hired to work on the chart of emotion." Ivy wanted to educate Clarity in 'areas of sales' that had not been explored by the Topanga Canyon teleoperator or by the course work itself. The hostess was overtly assuming the role of mentor of Clarity, a role assigned to her by Manglove, whose complete title was health doctor, emotician and arousal physician of Herbaline. Ivy showed Clarity a full color palette from Drawmeadow, linked to her smartphone.
"The discovery of printed color has been a landmark of humanity and marketing for Herbaline, since the new headquarters of the company was established in Orange County and our training center opened in Cayman. The new Drawmeadow software we own is so versatile, offering thousands of color variations, that it is being offered to prominent car making companies for the development of car paint."
Cartmel walked slowly up the ramp of the amphitheater, with words echoing those of an evangelist, which he unabashedly was. One of the positions he held at Herbaline was chief evangelist and motivational guru of the sales hierarchy group, a dotted position mirroring his other position, that of being a distributor of herbal products at the company in Los Angeles. He stopped in front of Lanai, microphone held in hand, and turned to her, while the projector showed an infographic, depicting growth at Herbaline.
"The lady here on row nine, we'd like to know how you work really, and how your mind works when you shop or purchase any item or service, please show everyone how you do, if you would. In terms of understanding what drives your thinking, your motivational avenues of shopping, working, engaging in consumption, satisfying your uttermost gut desires, how do you do it?"
Lanai was taken by surprise by the comment. She was not used to those mundane, everyday questions.
"I simply do what I tend to think, what I hear from my friends, or I just get some ideas to buy a few things, depending on whether I need them or not, for me, it is that simple."
"Yeah, but what lies beneath the idea to get something?" Ivy was thinking the same about Clarity's pants, reaching beneath the fabric to check the teleoperator's panties. Lanai turned to Clarity, who was feeling wet while Ivy's soft hands made their way to her pants, unzipping them, and reaching the soft area of her mound. Clarity whispered in Lanai's ear.
"Say your family, they're the ones who told you first about what things to buy, your ideas come from them." Lanai turned to Cartmel and looked at him.
"My family, my deepest consumption desire is a muffin, and my mother made good muffins, not as good as Starbucks muffins, but nonetheless, they were good muffins."
"Well, certainly illustrative of our current well-to-do standard of living. But no, no, no, your purchase habits are driven by your motivational feminine engine, which is driven by your values, and your values are derived from the way you associate pleasure with cumming, and relate that pleasure to your values and the tasks you have to do, later on, at home, at work, or in a social context, with friends and family."
Cartmel paused. He added. "In fact, what do you do for a living, lady, and do you consider yourself competent at what you do at work?" Lanai was not ready for such probing questions on her intrinsic professional value, turning to Clarity.
"That is so scary that I feel wet, Clarity, what do I say?" Clarity turned away, looking at Ivy, who was writing her name on a docket jotting page labeled 'relational girlfriends'. The agenda that Ivy was using was known as the 'docket' within the company. The name docket came from the Orange County legal court system. It referred to the calendar of a court, listing the cases pending, and showed the
summary of a court's activities. Stive had decided to adopt the name docket, to show everyone at the company that the agenda of Herbaline had to be followed strictly every day. At a loss for words, Lanai opted for the alternative to her own answer, when she did not know the answer to a topic, the expression known as a question.
"I'm a librarian, in a well-to-do place called Malibu, in Southern Cal, but I don't understand your question in some ways. How can I do what you say, understand the values I use at work and with friends when I shop or at work?" Cartmel pressed on the slide button and showed the next slide, a sleek one page leaflet depicting Herbaline course material.
"You can read our communications workbook closely." Clarity glanced at the right most area of the slide, noticing the soft curves of Ivy depicted as unabashed, casual maid, a role the Herbaline employee cherished and liked without any type of qualms. Her role included wearing white panties every day, for white was the mystical color of balance and harmony to Herbaline. Ivy loved to wear white panties and show them to other employees at the company every day, and in particular during 'casual panty-wearing day', usually Friday.
Cartmel stopped talking and the presentation continued with Stive filling the screen. Stive began to talk about the topic that Cartmel was not allowed to explain or study in too much depth, the relational policy of Herbaline employees, which included relational agreements, and pre-nuptials, involving several people in a polyamorous group, preferably one man, and several good looking women. Herbaline considered emotional stability important and Polyamory the way to preserve it. Stive announced openly that his own relational group was still in the making, and that only his first significant other was defined as such. The face of his partner appeared onscreen. It was Manglove, she was his sexual and work mate at Herbaline, and he was looking for one or two additional women, young women, in their relational group, women also working at Herbaline.