Ever wanted to force-feed somebody a big dose of worming medicine?

 ---Disclosure: Some details have been fuzzified to protect the guilty--- 

Have you ever listened to somebody for ten minutes and thought, "If this guy was my dog, I would give him a whacking-big dose of worming medicine"?

There I was....

There I was in a phone call with the "On-boarding Specialist" for a multi-level marketing organization.  I had emailed him and waited two days with no acknowledgement or response from him. I emailed his boss suggesting that he share his expectations regarding getting back to underlings and I got a text from the on-boarding specialist three minutes later. "Is it OK if I call you tomorrow?"

I emailed him a list of issues I wanted covered in the phone call. Examples:

• What is the suggested attire?
• What are the key competitive points between what I am selling and the major competitors?

Pretty basic information, I thought. 

He started right off rambling. He acknowledge that he had received and reviewed my list of questions but didn't start answering them in the first five minutes of the conversation so I started asking him directly.

"What is the suggested attire?" I asked.

His response, "Well, we just want you to seem like the neighbor-next-door so you can wear whatever you want".

"What are the key competitive advantages that I should be hammering?" I asked.

His response, "It is my opinion that canned responses don't work and you should just wing-it".

In the nine-minutes and nineteen seconds I was on the phone with him (gotta love smartphones) the only thing he offered to do for me was to email a link to a "killer app" and he told me that I was expected to attend sales "pep-rallies" on Saturdays where "inspirational speakers" would energize us.

Every issue I raised where a proper response required that he actually DO SOMETHING/ANYTHING was met with the equivalent of an old, tired, worm-riddled Basset Hound mournfully lifting its eyes (but not its head) and huffing out a sigh. Does anybody want to guess the age of the OBS?

After cutting the phone-call short (hey, I was going to the beach and he had spent more than nine minutes saying nothing useful), I sent a quick email to the On-boarding Specialist's boss informing him that I didn't think I was a good fit with his organization's culture. That was the politest way I could think of to inform him that I have no intention wasting my time.