Right from the very first day of our lives until this present moment, we've all met thousands of people and will still meet much more before we draw our last breath. Among those people come friends, family, loved ones, colleagues, and the like who come into our lives at one point in time or another, and we have memories together. Along the line, not all of the people we come across or interact with do we end up having a long-lasting relationship with, and that's because sometimes we personally decide to cut tides with them, and today I'll be sharing one of my ordeals regarding the subject matter.
A few days ago, when I got my first job as a sales representative, I was supposed to be handling the gas dispenser to sell gas as well as cooking cylinder-related items such as burners, cylinders, hoses, and the like. Being a novice to the trade and how to operate the machine, I was asked to go learn under a particular colleague who has more experience to put me through before I'm given my own shop to work, and for the next 2 weeks I was resuming at the colleague's place to learn.
While learning under his tutelage, there were several things I noticed about him and how I handled the sales of customer orders that I didn't like, and even though I was disgusted by his act, I didn't tell him to stop or condemn him, probably because I didn't want him to say something bad about me to the boss, which would hinder me from getting the job, so instead I just kept on learning and knew within myself that I wouldn't be replicating some of the things he was teaching me when I started working on my own.
If you're wondering what it's that he does, well, I'm sure many of us here in Nigeria or probably Ghana too would be used to going to fill their cooking gas cylinder at a point of sale and then you noticed that your gas doesn't seem to last longer like it used to when you fill it in other places, but even though you monitor how it was filled and were certain you saw it was well filled, yet something is odd and you can't pinpoint it. I'll tell you what some of these sellers do today.
What he does is put the cylinder on the scale before your eyes so you'll see the weight and could easily calculate where it would be when they've filled the amount of kilograms of gas you want to fill. For instance, if you want to fill a cylinder that has a weight of 6.8 kg with 6 kg of gas, you can easily estimate that at the end of the filling, the cylinders should weigh 12.8, but rather than sell to that level, this guy does something tricky to fool the customers.
He might sell up to 12 kg of gas, and while you're not watching, he'll put a metallic object that weighs 0.8 on the scale, and that would sum up the total on the screen of the scale to 12.8, making the customers think the sale was accurate. It's unknown to them that something is fishy, and when he's removing the cylinder to give the customers, he also speedily removes the metal so they won't see it.
This continues for a long time, making many customers complain because he's doing it so he'll have several kg of gas left to sell and have his own interests, different from what he'll pay the boss. When I realized what he does and how he was advising me to do the same or else I wouldn't have anything tangible to show for working there, I just nodded. But immediately after I completed my training under him, I tried as much as possible to distance myself from him because I don't want him to influence me with this, which hurts people all in the name of my wanting to earn more.
Talk about: if I were to meet him today, would I try to mend the relationship or not? I actually did meet him three weeks ago and discovered he now has his own gas filling plant, which means he has left my former boss's place to set up his own business. When I saw him, I went to greet him, but I didn't talk about what made me cut him off then. But a thought came to my mind when I saw him, and that's: if he also employs someone and that person does the same thing he did then, and it leads to customers ditching his store, how will he react?
All photos taken and edited on canva.
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