The Ryno Pen

If you’ve just joined the ride, you’re coming in on the second instalment of a multi-part story. Earlier, in this post, I started to narrate my journey into (and subsequent disengagement from) charismatic churches.

I passsed through three different churches, and eventually back into the light of day. While this tale is tangential to the church experience, I feel it’s necessary to include it.

My reasons are:
1 – The admixture of multi-level marketing and church business appeared, at leat to my way of thinking, to be a conflict of interest: how dare this God stuff get in the way of Mammon’s great mission!
2 – The relationship-forming tactics of the evangelical process are fairly congruent to those used in MLM.
3 – Some stuff to do with a temple and some angry guy with a whip of cords… it’s probably not relevant now nobody wears sandals any more.

This is revised from an old post inspired by a LiveGerbil friend. Hi there, LAH, if you’re reading.

Characters have been embellished and should be treated as fictional. If you see yourself here, just mend your ways and we’ll both pretend it wasn’t you anyway.

The first “pyramid sales proposal” I got was from my driving instructor, way back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

The product was not *mw*y, but a similar thingy called Sw!pe, which also worked through one of those marketing systems where the org chart resembled Cheops’ grave marker.

Note: I have been told, over and over, by those who love the idea of signing up friends, family et al, that it is “not a pyramid!!!”. Yeah, whatever, people.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was a big rallying session, similar to a pentecostal church crusade show, with LIGHTS, MUSIC, PEPPY TALKERS, and a NOW SIGN UP call at the end.

I was unmoved. I sat there. Mr Driving Instructor could probably see any chance of future income via Yours Truly slipping away (I’d passed my licence test earlier in the month).

I was depreciating in his eyes. Even with Asperger’s, you can see/feel it sometimes, when a person just writes you off. So I walked five miles home, because Mr D.I cut his losses: it may have been a good investment to offer me a lift there, but if I wasn’t part of the food chain, I wasn’t worth the courtesy of a lift home. I have found *mw*y people to be fairly consistent in this characteristic.

============

The more astute reader might have guessed that this would result in my becoming a trifle more wary in future. Yep. From that time on, I have always made sure I carry return cab fare, and (more germane to the current subject), I don’t sit passively when sharkish salespeople are cruising.

So, when the second pitch arrived in 1982, I decided to deliver the cost of that five-mile walk, with interest, and I do mean interest!

The caller was a guy called Rob, who was an acquaintance, not a friend, although he was friends with a friend of mine. Rob “had a business opportunity that would suit a guy just like me”, or words to that effect, phoning me one evening.

Could I pop over to his place (a mere forty kilometres away) on Friday to talk about it?

I tried to beg off politely. Now I had a number of reasons not to want this opportunity. Firstly, in just a week, I was leaving the state…

“Oh, great!” said Rob. “I could really use a branch office in Canberra.”

Was it Sw!pe or *mw*y, because I definitely didn’t want to be involved in any of that business style?

“No, it’s not Sw!pe or *mw*y.”

Well, could Rob tell me a little more about the business, so I could make up my mind?

“No, I can’t tell you much over the phone as it’s a little involved, but just come over for some send-off drinks, seeing you’re leaving town. Don’t worry about the business bit.”

He wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Forgive me, readers, for I was younger and had some silly ideas about honour and obligation. I went down to Rob’s place on the Friday…

Only to discover that twenty more people were there too, and that Rob was wasting no time corralling us together in front of a whiteboard.

Enter the Triple-Palladium-Encrusted Gold-Pressed-Latinum *mw*y Dealer for the Region, the Great Bronze Whaler to whom Rob was but a remora.

Or, to use a better analogy from nature, this guy was the Queen Ant; Rob was a worker-ant, and the twenty attendees were a new batch of aphids, destined to become productive suckers for the Borg Pyramid of *mw*y.

I listened intently, as the Big Cheese told us about the 250,000 dealers in Australia who were happily doing the *mw*y thing, and all the stuff about how a dealer needed to parasitize at least 10 hosts *umm*, recruit more than ten “downline” people, to make the business pay.

I did some math and waited.

The presentation finished, the Grand Nagus did the old “now I will ask for questions from the floor, knowing that I have seeded the audience with a few tame shills, who will ask Very Welcome Questions, as arranged earlier” trick.

Finally, I raised my hand and asked a question.

“Excuse me, but if there are 1/4 million happy dealers of the product already in Australia, and given the number of people in the country (there were about 16 million at the time), even given the perfect world where everybody is willing and able to participate in the business, regardless of whether they are newborns or centenarians, we must face the fact that *mw*y cannot reach deeper than two more levels of the PYRAMID (yes, I said that forbidden word) before we run out of people to sign up.”

“Yes, I know you’re going to tell me about *mw*y not being a pyramid. That doesn’t concern me right now. What really concerns me is that when Rob invited me over here ‘for a send-off drinks and chat’, I specifically asked him if it was *mw*y, and Rob assured me it was NOT.”

“I feel like I have been treated shabbily, dishonestly, and that my time has been stolen. I am leaving now, and I would invite anybody who feels similarly to also leave.”

I got nearly the whole bunch out of the place!

===============================

Fast forward to about 1989. A designer/illustrator chap I’d done some copy-writing work with, called up, out of the blue, to invite me to his place (again, about fifty kms out of town…. I begin to suspect a pattern here!) to discuss “an electronic publishing venture”.

Same old same old… there were about ten people present. By this time the Bait Script had been modified to include the “Where do you see yourself in five/ten/twenty years?” scenario.

I used the “Math Proves Market Saturation” and “Dishonest Premise For Inviting Me” stuff again, and I understand no new Double Diamonds were born that night.

=====================

1990… So, you’d think that life in the sticks would mean a rest from the hustle, bustle and general hurly-burly of city life. Things like jaywalking, traffic jams and street panhandlers are far from one’s mind out among the huge uncluttered horizons. The tentacles of *mw*y, however, are soapy little blighters, and slip in anywhere.

Aggie was the wife of the chap on the next farm. When one’s next-door neighbours are a couple of miles away, one doesn’t see much of them, and I rather like that. Problem is, I had a day job with an company in the nearest small town, to keep the bucks flowing in the way that farming so often doesn’t.

Occasional meetings while getting groceries checked at the store: that is a coincidence. Aggie coming all the way up our dead-end road to ask if I’d be at work some time next week so she could come and ask about the possibility of buying a computer for her son… and just casually mentioning that she had (oh dear, here we go again!) a business opportunity…

A small town’s people know all about each other. Dammit, they knew I was fond of nude sunbaking over in the back acres, a mile (and two VERY steep ridges) from anybody’s house and way inside our fenceline! Aggie’s *mw*y dealings were not unknown.

She kept asking me to “go up to Canberra with her and some friends” for a couple of months. I kept refusing. Somewhere along the line, I must have run out of thesaurus alternatives and used a “maybe”, a “we’ll see” or something similar.

She pounced. I had come home from work at five, and she’d seen my truck on the main road. I was scarcely into post-work-unwind mode when her car arrived at the door.

“Hurry up, we’re going to Canberra.”

(Oh great! after a complete day of work, just what I want: a hundred miles of road trip to get bludgeoned about buying into a pyramid scheme, and possibly dumped in the city to find my way home.)

“Look, Aggie, it’s been a long week…”

“You promised! Get a shower, change and make sure to wear a tie.”

(Great Merciful Motherboard Of Intel, it’s a TIE she wants now!)

I muttered a string of various buts. She wasn’t having any of it. I resolved not to announce my refusal till I was safe home.

The car journey up was a bit of an ordeal, to say the least. While I didn’t know about my Asperger’s at the time, I’ve always been fairly good at social avoidance. Anything in the way of small talk got derailed into plant-cloning, sayings of the Buddha, Einsteinian physics and other terminal conversation dampers.

So it was that, simultaneously bored and apprehensive, I arrived at the *mw*y Evangelical Crusade District Meeting.

There were talks. There was film. There was a meet ‘n’ greet with Mister Once Was A Great TV Actor, who by this time hadn’t played any regular big roles for almost twenty years.

The Bad Fairy saw fit to reward Yours Truly with a really horrible experience: if there was one person I didn’t really want to see again, it was…

The Buck-Toothed Nerd, irritating prat from my government computing days, who suddenly recognised me and latched on in some eldritch combination of leech-feeding and hand-shake.

Of course, he was into the business, and had used his effusive-but-repulsive grin-and-smarm to sign up a harem of suckers….[blahblahblah as my mind switched off and whatever consciousness I had left devoted itself to ways of escaping, first him, then the meeting itself...].

Finally, on the way home, and again in the company of a couple of her *mw*y Acolytes, Aggie pops The Question.

“No. I never really wanted to go, and I could have told you a lot earlier, but you did insist. I thought that I would at least show you that I was refusing from an informed viewpoint.”

And from that moment until I left the district two years later, never a word was exchanged.

It’s great to find out why the Pyramid People value your acquaintance.

================

So, you’re still with me. I could bore for the World All-Stars Boring Team, couldn’t I? Tough. There’s another tale a little down-line from here.

Okay, much to my resounding shame, I was once a student minister. I will try and live a good life from this point on, to atone for that. To make it worse, I was a student minister at a happy-clapper, all-fall-down, everybody-catch-the-latest-fad church.

I accepted an invite from a friend who was of reasonably senior standing with another church in our area, to attend a “Businessmen’s Breakfast”, where Mister Big Mover And Shaker From A Church In Sydney would be key speaker.

The Big Kahuna from Sydney started his spiel, not with a prayer, but with a racial joke. He followed though with a political joke and a sexist joke, as if to say, “Hey guys, we’re all men here, and we are all good right-wing men who put down women and furriners here, right? Can I hear you say RIGHT?!?!?!”

I wanted to tear out his trachea and hang him from the function-room ceiling with it then and there. I should listen to my good instincts now and then.

================

Time moved on. The Sydney guy had done his Big Revival Sweep, and (as is generally the case) things had gone back to what passes for normal round these parts. It turned out that the Big Guy or somebody in his entourage had started a massive *mw*y recruitment drive among the members of the host church in my city.

I was at my church at a music practice session. Mrs Minister was there, along with Minister, Music Leader and his wife, and one or two others. I was chatting with Minister in a break, and sort of mentioned the Soap Incursion, and how it was a Bad Thing, since it subverted the Church’s goals (evangelism) and all the methods used in said evangelical recruitment process, and interposed exploitation and fiscal gain.

What a blithe and innocent state is is, to be an Aspernaut among the Funny Earth-people! Little did I know that Mrs Church Treasurer (present at music practice) and Mrs Church Secretary (likewise present at music practice) were already deeply into the Scam, and were currently engaged in a silent, hissy turf war over which would have the privilege of signing up Mrs Minister!

And so it was, my friends, that *mw*y helped pave the way to Free-dom, my brothers, Say Honolulu! and was the first tiny step toward liberating me from the oppression that is Student Ministership.

My Driving Instructor, Rob, Aggie, The Buck-Toothed Nerd and
A Certain Big Sydney Preacher will now pass among you with a soap-bucket.
Give generously, because I get 10% off the top.