Tag Archives: Sydney

Some thoughts about San Francisco, California

I’ve been in San Francisco since last Saturday and I leave this today. It’s a short visit and work-related but as my first visit to the USA, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts.

The City

It’s a pleasant place. No one would say that the city itself is particularly beautiful (the towers of the financial district are particularly foul) but its surrounding geography is gorgeous, as are the portals that link the City with the outside: the Bay and the Golden Gate bridges. SF sums up that late 20th century ideal of a business-oriented city with a sporty, arty, best popcorn popper vibe. It’s kind of like Sydney, or at least that’s the place it most reminds me of. The difference is that SF is apparently fed by new technologies while Sydney banks the wealth obtained in vast mines.

Earthquakes

San Franciscans do not enjoy jokes about earthquakes. Or even jokey remarks. Many people here seem to be expecting the Big One which, depending on how big it is, could realistically destroy the whole place. It’s “long overdue” but I hope that it never strikes, at least not while there are people living here.

Food and Beverages

San Francisco considers itself to be something of a ‘foody’ city. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing. I didn’t get to eat at Boulevard, just up the road from my hotel because I couldn’t get anyone to come with me. Likewise, the French Laundry, out in Napa. Most of what I did eat here (a couple of gourmet hamburgers, some Thai curry, a couple of traditional brasserie dinners, Chinese – twice) was very good and quite affordable. The local beer scene is lively and tasty, and even the city’s standard brew – Anchor Steam – is pretty good. I really enjoyed Napa Smith’s Organic IPA, with which the hotel cunningly stocked my room’s minibar. I didn’t get to try much local wine but I enjoyed a Conn Creek cabernet sauvignon (2008, I think), over a couple of nights.

Districts

I stayed at the Harbor Court hotel, on the embarcadero (old port). It’s close to our US office and so was pretty convenient for work. This is quite a touristy area, but it’s at the bottom of the financial district, which is where I found an Apple Store kind enough to sell me an iPad (over €100 cheaper than in Europe). Chinatown is fun, but I suspect it would have been a lot more fun 30 years ago. The Mission is my favorite district. It’s traditionally a latino neighborhood and has also played host to a range of great restaurants, galleries, bars and stores for decades. We ate some pretty good Thai food here and I also had dinner with Chris Barr from Yahoo in a place called Grub. The meal there was good, but I was suffering slightly from the Korean kimchi burrito with hot sauce that I’d eaten for lunch. Also in the Mission is the Pirate Store, 826 Valencia Street. This is also the spiritual home of The Believer, my current favorite periodical (I’m going to keep pushing this until you all subscribe). The Pirate Store has all the supplies any pirate might need, from lard to fathoms and siren silencers. It’s next door to a taxidermy store. These are two of the best shops I’ve ever been to. I didn’t see much of the Castro, though we did drive through it.

Technology

My reason for visiting San Francisco should be evident to anyone with even an inkling of what I do for a living. As the world capital of ‘new technologies’, especially web services and mobile devices, it’s at the center of my work day. Indeed, it was practically absurd that I hadn’t visited before. But there you have it. People here frequently exchange tips and recommendations for apps, and more than in Barcelona or London (that I’ve seen at any rate), all decisions are predicated on the advice of an iPhone or Android device. I had kind of hoped there’d be some city-wide high-speed wireless offering but this wasn’t the case. Facebook had a major event in town while I was here (in fact, I was supposed to be there bit due to a mix up, that didn’t happen). The local newspapers often report corporate stories at Yahoo, Twitter, Apple and Google on their front pages. This is a city imbued with a technological optimism. I shudder to think what could happen to the industry if an earthquake really does strike. I suspect that this may be one factor that encourages some firms to prefer Palo Alto and other cities further away from the faultline. Well, that and taxes.

And now I must put my California-designed notebook away and check out of my hotel. I’m coming back to Catalonia. That’s a great feeling.

There are a few photos from my visit on Google+ here. You don’t need to be a member of Google+ to view them. But you should sign up anyway: it’s a pretty good service. Check my blog to see my best umbrella stroller and my fitness videos that i made in SF parks.

My life as a door to door salesman

Some time back, I spent the best part of a year living in Australia. The majority of this temporary residence was spent living at Gun House, a military residence in Fremantle, Western Australia. I was an exceptionally lazy young man and spent most of this ‘gap year’ spongeing from my father and stepmother, listening to music and chatting with girls rather than finding gainful employment. I like to imagine that this is what most 19 year-olds will do, given half the chance… but I was probably worse than most.

The only job I did during my 8 months in Fremantle was a 3 1/2 month stint working as a door to door salesman for Primus, a company which offered cheaper phone calls in comparison with Telstra, the Australian national phone company. I’d like to state for the record here that we weren’t selling moon dust or snake oil. There was a genuine opportunity for people to save money on their phone bills by opting for another company when phoning interstate or overseas. That said, I probably would have done the job even if it was a scam. It was one of the best, and one of the worst, times of my life. I’ve been thinking about it again recently, so I thought I’d try to collect my memories of the time.

Aparna, my stepmum’s cousin helped me get to the interview which was somewhere near the Northbridge district of Perth. I know that as part of her task to help me settle in in Perth, she had also to try and get me employed. I turned up at the interview in baggy jeans and t-shirt and although the interview was full of warnings about hard work, commitment and so on it was pretty obvious from the start that if I could write, recite the pitch and above all, walk, then I had a job. They asked me to start immediately and so the next day, I was there in cheap trousers, cheap shirt, cheap tie and trainers. My training consisted of half an hour’s orientation and then we were in the car. There was myself, Will, an ambitious Cambodian-born Australian and a couple of other guys who were just starting out.

Will was my mentor for a few days, taking me along with him as he convinced the citizens of one district after another to sign up for cheaper interstate calls. As we started our beat, he immediately criticised my tie, letting me know that it looked cheap. He was wearing a $100 suit, with a nice tie and probably some cufflinks. His shoes (every door to door salesman needs strong, easily polished, durable shoes), were sturdy but showed signs of wear. He signed about eight households up to the service, using the same pitch each time, “Good afternoon, my name’s Will and we’re just in the neighbourhood checking that everyone’s signed up with Primus for cheaper phone calls. Oh you haven’t? Well I’ll tell you about the service and then we’ll get the paperwork sorted”. The pitch was cunningly engineered to make people think it was something that they’d almost forgotten about. Something they’d meant to do, even if they didn’t realise or remember.

I can’t be sure but I suppose we visited a hundred houses or so each day, of which we were expected to sign up about 12-18. Each sign-up was worth around $12 to us, on which we paid no taxes or social security (‘self-employed contractors’ as we were). We used the same pitch on each house, giving the person who’d answered the door little chance to speak or even think. We launched straight from the pitch into the sign-up process as an attempt to get the hapless customer to believe that they’d already agreed to the deal. Sometimes that worked and other times, we’d have to answer their questions about how much it would cost to call Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, England, China, India, New Zealand or Vietnam.

It wasn’t hard to pick up the pitch, or the attitude you needed to use with it. Grinning, chuckling, smarmy comments and winks were, perhaps surprisingly, as useful as they are in the movies. I guess that having grown up in Devon, where very few (if any) salesmen came to the door, I was more surprised by the way the stereotype really applied than I would have been had I grown up in a big town.

Every day at about 11am, we’d leave our office near Northbridge in Perth and set off for the suburbs. We worked from Rockingham to Two Rocks, and covered much territory in between. Some areas we covered were well-to-do districts (not great for doorstep sales), some were fairly built-up (lots of flats equals lots of sales) and some were low-income outer suburbs (redback spiders above the doors). I saw it all, from swarms of bees to bored housewives, from kangaroos to gold miners (a trio of whom once insisted on giving me a bong before they signd up… I was so stoned for the rest of the day that I didn’t make any more sales in the remaining two hours). I stopped at Aboriginal houses which were empty, as all life went on in the garden, and plush beach villas, most of which were empty just because it wasn’t the holidays. But most of our targets were in the low-income white suburbs… these were the people who really wanted to save money, after all.

Abuse was a fairly common thing. This ranged from the odd, simple “Fuck off!” to a man threatening that he’d “have [my] balls for breakfast”, to an Asian colleague being chased down the street by a gentleman with a metal bar. Some triad boys once threatened me with knives. But I also experienced a lot of kindness. The kindness of strangers is, to misquote, oddly reliable. I was treated for sunstroke by a kindly widow, I was given a bellyful of beer by a couple of proper ockers who asked me what I thought of their wives; I was given a cuppa and a chip butty by some Yorkshire expats. In fact, kindness definitely outweighed abuse. But abuse gets to you.

What really ended up pissing me off about the job was my colleagues. Some of them were lovely: Simon, a fellow Englishman who became a good friend, for example. But then there were the wide boys, like Miguel and Jermaine. These two wanted to be gangsters (one of them probably is now, if he’s not dead), and pushed my patience to superhuman levels. And my boss, Alex. This guy was getting about $16 for every sale I made. For every sale I got $12 and he got $16. A good business for him but utterly demoralising for me.

All we did with our pay was drink, party and eat fast food. We went to a karaoke bar called Seoul Karaoke and nicked bottles from the storage area by the loos. Everyone took speed and ecstasy at the weekend and many of us would start work hungover… it was a highly unhealthy lifestyle. And that’s without mentioning my unpleasant experience with Rohypnol.

I’m not sure why I’ve written this, other than to relive an experience I’ll hopefully never have to go through again. If any prospective door-to-door salesmen read this, I have one piece of advice: if you must do it, do it. But get out as soon as you can. Doorstep sales is a depressing, dehumanising job.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?