Free Stays, page 1

Vacations are a lot of fun, and they are even more fun when your hotel stay is free.

One way to get a free hotel stay is to agree to attend a high-pressure sales presentation, often involving timeshares.

As someone who previously worked as a telemarketer at a RV resort, booking 90-minute high-pressure sales presentations, I was familiar with the practice, and felt that I could be the "rock" that would get my girlfriend and I through them, so that we could take advantage of the free stays without commitment.

Each time we agreed beforehand that we wouldn't buy anything, yet after each presentation I had to take my girlfriend outside and talk sense into her. The second time we did this, the salespeople changed their offers so much that we must have told them no at least half a dozen times, after which, they seemed impressed by our fortitude and offered us jobs selling timeshares with them. I specifically remember bottles of champagne being popped with every sale at that one.

This story is about our third and final high-pressure sales presentation...

The presentation began with the attendees being brought into a darkened room and seated in front of a projection screen. We were told that we were to watch this short video before the actual presentation. Being aware of tactics like subliminal messaging, and suspect of them in this case, I decided to look down the entire time, only glancing up for brief moments to get the jest of the film.

The video was an animated film about a family and their very aged grandmother. The idea behind it was that we spend most of our lives working and not enough time enjoying life by doing things like taking vacations. I'm pretty sure that the grandmother dies at the end, because when the lights came on and I looked up at my girlfriend, she was sobbing.

Needless to say, after having to calm her down, then sit through a sales presentation, I once again had to take her outside and convince her that a timeshare wasn't right for us.

The End