Every once in a while I’ll see a pink Caddy, but not closely enough to see if it’s Mary Kay.
I used to work at a tech support center where Mary Kay was one of our clients. They had a couple of good policies that I heard about (FWIW) from the people on that help desk. One was that any meeting scheduled for more than 30 minutes’ duration had to be pre-approved by a VP. Another was that when addressing another employee, one (e.g. a male employee) had to look at them (e.g. a female employee) from the neck up.
Speaking of MLM, that same workplace had one client after another that was some kind of scheme. I guess this was about 17 years ago, before broadband took off and most people still had dial-up. We did tech support for the ISP portion of Excel Communications. I developed and ran the Remedy system*, so I was not on the front lines**, but that help desk had to be a nightmare – the callers would’ve had every possible home computer configuration, whether it had been correctly set up or not.
Anyway, someone must’ve thought Excel worked out pretty well for us, because in the space of a few months, I was getting a request every week or so to build a new Remedy application because the help desk had yet another ISP contract, and they were invariably some sort of MLM outfit. And they always needed it today. (I guess they were easy sales.) After two or three of those “emergencies,” I finally made a boilerplate file (the closest that one would come to actual “code” in Remedy; I’ve gone on about this before). When the latest emergency came up. I’d just tweak the boilerplate and have a new app in less than a day. One of these other companies was BWW, but as often as not, the MLM ISP contracts never went live, and I’d never hear about them again.
Coincidentally it was the only place I’ve worked where co-workers approached me about getting in on some MLM scheme or another. I can remember at least 4: one of them, who fit the Utahn demographic (or stereotype) mentioned earlier, pitched more than once (and regarding more than one company)***, while another fellow called me at home around 10:30 pm to go into his spiel.
(Off-topic but our other client worth mentioning was Netpliance. Man, were they an arrogant lot, even a little while after the hack that coincided with their IPO (which tanked).)
*Which I still do, but elsewhere.
**I started on the help desk, but (thankfully) worked on different contracts from the ISPs.
***He also gave me a copy of Ayn Rand’s Anthem which I still haven’t read. I’ve since heard that Anthem is actually the one worthwhile Rand book, but I have a stack of other unread books I’ll probably tackle first.
