I Positively Agree!

I have been a very positive thinker for years. Also, for years, I have positively thought that I was rather unique, strange, different, or really just sort of OUT THERE, and apparently, most people agree with me. I can't help it really, it's just the way life dealt my cards and I suppose it's the way I have always decided to take those cards and make little houses out of them, maybe paper aeroplanes - rather than to cry over something I can't change.

When I got back to work today from a well deserved lunch, my boss (who I've taken to calling Boy Boss due to the fact that he's almost 1/2 my age, and he's so much like my son in many ways) explained to me on his way out the door that (1) he was behind in his sales quota for life insurance policies this month. (2) that in order for him to make the cut in the district office we needed to sell 3 more policies by tomorrow, and (3) he didn't care how I got them, as long as I got them. I decided, as I always do - to think positively. WHO, I asked myself, can I pounce on this week?

It wasn't long, not long at all before I was able to call the boy, er, man up on his cell to tell him that I had indeed two good prospects and was working on the third. His silence on the other end of the phone was deafening...he was thrilled. How? How did I do this? I simply did what I knew he hadn't done since the day he walked into the office a year or so ago. I canvassed the offices in the building. People work in our building. Real live people, with real live needs, and if everyone in the building is like him - self employed, then they need life insurance. That's what more than 20+ years of selling the stuff was saying to me anyway - two down, one to go. By close of business we had four. Four, not three - four! It helped a little that he had threatened to let me keep my job if I found him the necessary three. I don't really need the job, but working with him makes me think of being that much closer to my real boy. He says some of the boy like, inappropriate things my son would say, and even though he doesn't blow his nose in the trashcan like Reuben would, he burps, farts, and adjusts himself fairly often. (Just like home!)

I have to think that thinking positively helps in other ways too - it just does. We all hate it when we go into a business and hear someone being negative, hurtful, scorning and awful to the clerk at the counter. I hate it when I was being talked down to when I worked in retail, and it's the number one reason I would prefer my girls to work in businesses where they have less chance to deal one on one with irate customers. It just pulls you down to hear all the complaining - but I will say this; working at Avis Rent-A-Car Reservation Center in Tulsa for a year between the hours of 5:30 p.m. and 2:45 a.m. was a blast!!! I was on the complaint line. That was my job. I suppose the people at Avis got a hoot out of listening to me explain the rules and regulations to the multitudes of customers who would call in with the stupidiest of complaints in order to get a credit on their next rental. I was fun....positively fun.

After working the complaints for a while they'd switch me to what the called the "Death" line because they wanted to shake up things for me and not allow me to become depressed from all the complaints, which were constant actually. We had four reservationists devoted to the complaints on a 24/7 basis. The Death line was even more interesting - I'd get calls from Monroe, LA....a sheriff stating that a 1/2 body was found in the trunk of the Avis car. He wasn't sure if the De-Ce-Dant was a customer or a victim of something gone a bit bad. He's say the De-Ce-Dant may be a man, but he wasn't going to pull the britches off to see! We'd go over the necessary paper work, and I'd think to myself - wow, I thought I was having a bad day. Just thinking about the things I heard over the Death line for Avis really pushes me to be more positive in my daily thoughts and conversations - you never know. You could be renting a car one minute, and being described by the local sheriff as a 1/2 body the next...and him not even willing to pull off your pants to try and identify you!

Well, positive thinking has gotten me further in life than being sour-headed, foul-mouthed, or mean. I can be all of those things - but the good life, the sweet life, the really-blessed-in-your-face life has to be a product of being genuinely happy, and if chocolate is simply not available to assist that process, thinking positive can be. Maybe the chocolate will appear just because you were hoping it would! (Making the world a better place to sell insurance)