Chapter 1: Our new home in Calgary, AB

So here we are in lovely Calgary. We've been informed by locals that we live in the ghetto. Really? It's a pretty nice neighborhood, so if that's ghetto Calgary I'm pretty excited for the sales this year. We live in a townhouse among hundreds of other townhouses, and it's pretty cool. We even get two bedrooms without paying for it since the other one is for "equipment" which is actually in the basement. We didn't bring anything with us, though, so we didn't use the second bedroom anyway.

First things first: This townhouse has been rented by Pinnacle for over a year and 3 or 4 different people have lived there. The last couple that dwelt therein left half of their earthly belongings in the living room when they moved up to Edmonton. So right when we moved in we were bombarded with strollers, garbage cans, and cleaning supplies that we weren't all that interested in. Kind of made it hard to move in. The other thing that made it hard was the guy that hadn't moved out yet. When he left he managed to take one of our towels with him as well, but we won't hold that against him.

Once we got all the stuff that wasn't ours sorted and thrown in the backyard to await pickup, we began the adventure of unpacking and inspecting our new place. The couches are disgusting but very comfortable, especially the one that people had jumped on until it broke. There are black marks on all the walls and soda stains on the living room carpet. Basically I'm embarrassed when people come over because they think I designed this travesty. Gross. We wanted to move the couches up to the landing upstairs so the living room could just be for tech meetings, but the broken one was too long. So I had my living room upstairs where I could watch dvds on my small dvd player that sat next to the big tv that didn't work without a remote that we didn't have. It was really nice: Richard would have his meeting at 1 every day and I could just go upstairs and be away from it all. Wasn't a bad setup at all.

Our first adventure was that first Sunday when we wanted dinner and all we had was beans and rice. We didn't realize we didn't have a garborator (Canadian for garbage disposal) until after we dumped the leftovers down the sink, so when I ran the dishwasher later that night the rice expanded in the pipes and we had a swimming pool in the kitchen. So then we had no towels.

Richard's first meeting was pretty interesting. He hadn't even met a lot of the techs he'd be working with since Burt hired them, and Burt also sent over a bunch of his techs to help out for the first week since it was going to be huge and Richard needed to be able to train all his new guys. He had some pretty weird techs, but after a week or so they all pretty much quit. Except camo pants, but that's another story for another day.

This brings us to selling day one: Tuesday, April 28, 2009. Richard was running around as usual getting techs organized and equipment and answering the phone etc while I was unpacking and making lunch and taking care of the baby etc. We passed each other at one point and I casually asked if Kristy had arrived and if Caleb had hired a scheduler yet. Richard kind of sighed and said "Actually, Caleb asked if you could do it just for today. Kristy will be here tomorrow. He said he'd pay you out of pocket." I said cool, but he didn't have to pay me. I don't mind doing everyone a favor like that. I rounded up a scratch piece of paper and a pen and got ready for the day.

Day one wasn't that bad. Rachel was only a month and a half old, so she was still sleeping most of the day and didn't squak too much when I was on the phone. I kept track of everything on a little paper I found and it wasn't organized very well, but I figured it was okay because it was just for one day.

Day two was really annoying. Kristy and Jesse rolled in that afternoon and needed the day off to unpack and get settled. That's not annoying, and I didn't mind helping Kristy out for an extra day. What was annoying was that Caleb hadn't even started the hiring process yet. No ads or anything. Oh well, I can manage for another day.

I was free for the rest of the week once Kristy started scheduling. I was very hopeful that she would do a good job and that Caleb would find someone by the end of the week like he promised.

Richard's life never slowed down, however. He was up and out the door by 8 am every morning to help techs finish jobs, move reps into their apartments, work with the managers of three different properties to make sure everyone had a home and furniture, talk to corporate about any border problems that arose, and do general training of his techs. He'd come back at 1 for his meeting, then be gone again before 4 to help on jobs for the rest of the night. He got home every night for the first two weeks between 1 and 2 am, and he was on the phone for hours at a time answering rep and tech questions and working things out with Caleb.

Here's the thing. Pinnacle offices are always pretty much the same: Rep makes sale. Rep calls scheduler to get a tech. Rep leaves house to go knock on more doors. Tech arrives within an hour to complete install, then informs scheduler so she can give him the next job. Every office operates like this. Every office. Not some, not a few, but every office. What we didn't know was that Caleb's office does not operate like this. Caleb's officd: Rep makes half a sale. Rep calls scheduler to "give an address". Rep continues to close the sale while the tech scoots over to the install. Good techs will call the customer on the way to let them know they're coming, but that is unacceptable in Caleb's office as it turns out. Caleb would like the techs to call the rep to tell him he's coming. Okay....whatever floats your boat. Anyway if the tech doesn't get there within 20 minutes he's basically a tard. The rep waits in the home until the tech gets there, and if he's not there ASAP he's keeping the rep off the doors. Making a rep wait more than 20 minutes is just not even an option.

All summer long if a tech was ever more than 20 minutes (and that means anywhere from 22 to 35 minutes) getting to a job the rep would call Caleb to complain. Caleb would then call Richard to complain. Richard would then call the tech to find out what took him so long to get to his job and find out he got stuck in traffic. Richard would then call Caleb back and explain that, and Caleb would tell Richard he needs techs there before the sales are made so they don't get stuck in traffic. Did you count the phone calls? I'll go over our cell phone bill for the month of May in a later chapter. This became pretty stressful for Richard and he had several conversations with Caleb about maybe not being so particular with the timing of the techs, but Caleb always won. Which meant more phone calls for Richard.

Alright back to week one. Kristy scheduled up through that first Saturday. Jesse came over to get some equipment that day and called Kristy to ask about me maybe going over and helping her get situated, since I've done her job two years running and had a pretty good system. When he called she had a breakdown because of how stressed she was doing both jobs; the paperwork and the scheduling. Did I mention Kristy has a 1 year old? At that point I figured since Caleb hadn't hired anyone else I could probably help her out a little bit and do the scheduling until she caught up or until Caleb hired someone else, which he promised to do by the end of the week. And so it began...