The word on the street

I've made an editorial decision to keep this a light hearted non political blog, I really don't want to preach all the stuff I'm learning at the moment about the darker side of the world. I feel however it is OK to discuss my reactions to it, without changing the direction of the blog.


Firstly to save the charity money I'm starting my own business so they are not obliged to pay any National Insurance or any benefits. I'm working on a 100% commission so I only get payed when the charity makes money. On my first day, my training day I was shown a video of some of the things that are happening in the developing world.

I normally never really paid attention to those kind of charity videos on TV before and having to study it really changed how I feel. Never before had I actually put myself in their position and tried to imagine what its actually like. I'm guessing the video was designed to get us caring and impassioned about the cause, it worked very well.

The rest of the sales training was very basic and in a lot of places actually wrong, I made a decision not to use any of my NLP/Hypnosis skills to start with. I would play it by the book first then gradually introduce things so I could see what worked. I think Ideally I would be best used training the other collectors, but first I would have to prove myself on the streets.

I'm actually trying to sign up myself on the grounds that if I want someone else to do its dangerously hypocritical if I'm not donating myself. Unfortunately I'm actually not allowed to as I'm not staying in the country for 2 years and have an English credit card, we're trying to work out a way around this at the moment.


The people I work with are great, well to be more accurate the campaigners I work with are great, the people on the street vary some what. They say works only as good as the people you work with, I'm not quite sure how to apply that to this job. Also there was a small matter of that I didn't know how much I was getting paid yet, the pub interview was very fun but in all the excitement we missed a lot of things normally discussed in an interview. I had been working there for a few days now and it would kind of be embarrassing to ask now. What kind of idiot starts a job without knowing how much they are getting paid? I've been spending a lot of money since I arrived here and I might be living beyond my means, or under them I have no way of knowing.


Several interesting trends I've noticed from people that donate, the poorer they seem the more likely they are to stop and talk to you and give, they also give more when they do donate. Kind of the opposite to what I was expecting. The second trend was that Melbourne winter had degenerated into something very similar to English winter. Working inside on a computer all day had really taught me the value of being outside, this job was definitely teaching me the value of being inside! I'm strongly considering migrating north for the winter.