i was used!

My job has been great, keeps me mentally stimulated, exciting to work on new products, and best of all the people are really friendly.

I am always a great judge of character, I should have known there was something wrong when I first met one of my co-workers. I had originally gone out to lunch with him back when I was "the new guy". He had all sorts of life advice for me; own your own business, make residual income, maybe use my Columbia education to write a book about how I've been "successful" through my life, and he leveraged it with his worry about his own job. It is true that Motorola has laid-off a number of people in the past few years and job security is not what it used to be. I completely felt bad for him, late 40s, wife, kids, what do you do if you lose your job? Can you uproot them to find a new one?

Yesterday he had arranged a lunch meeting with me for this afternoon, I should have noticed when he was trying to be secretive about it, but I thought he just wanted to impart more life advice on me. I went home and I was worried that he was trying to steal company secrets and I would have to report him and I was even paranoid that he was desperate enough to kidnap me. My other co-worker brought up a good point today, who would kidnap me? I couldn't even be sold as some sort of exotic sex worker. You don't kidnap asian males to be sex workers, let's be honest.

So today I was worried. I pushed it out of my head and figured he just wanted to sit down and have lunch and talk about life. That's when all the cards fell. Lunch location: Denny's. The second I stepped in, I met another employee that was recruited for the same purpose as me and I was faced with our recruiter and his business partner. No conflict on interest, it was nonetheless stupid. He had brought me there to have him and his partner give me a presentation on "distributed networking" or you may know it as "multi-level marketing" for a vitamin company. Apparently Forbes named them the #3 small business last year and have been rather successful. However successful, it was obvious that it was just a corporate-ized pyramid scheme.

I'm no idiot and honestly, I felt my intelligence was insulted. I know when people are setting up a story and dropping words and details they want me to hear.

"Hi, good to see you, I just got back from a resort vacation with my kids".

"Be ambitious, do you want to continue working in a traditional linear system where you get paid little for your work or do you want to want to make money on your effort and the effort of your peers"

"This 3rd party analyst who wrote this book so and so said that this industry is poised to make trillions by 2010"

"What are you passionate about? I'm passionate about world health, curing AIDS, affordable healthcare, but i'm also passionate about Maybachs, Cartier, and money".

"You can make $50,000 every week, I'm 42 and retired".

I'm sure, that lucky 2% of people, and those people who got in early are making a lot of money. I'm not so jaded to think that I can come in, with the little time that I do have after work and make a fortune on the side. I told them, "do you see how long it's been and I am unconvinced about your business model, your product, your approach to marketing and your pitch, how exactly do you expect me to make this pitch to my friends?; the money is getting people to believe you."

Usana vitamins and skincare products, not worth my time. I am just angry because not only did he waste my time when I could have been eating lunch (I didn't eat lunch today!@!&^&^%!) when he had told me I was there for a different reason, he tried to get me in on his sob story of life unfulfilled to give him an in to recruiting me for this. To top it off, I told my friends at work what happened and apparently he had done it before, albeit with a different approach. Completely innapropriate for the work environment. Desperation makes people dicks.