The Salesman

Andrew tears up when a Quantum salesman tells his story for the first time

When the salesmen approach, I am laying on the floor of my outdoor office—the deck. My head rests against the wooden deck post, my ankles are crossed in front of me, and my laptop is perched just below my chest, its screen strategically centered in the shade from the post.

Perhaps my supine position makes me an easy mark.

The primary salesman—let’s call him Quantum Sam—is a twentysomething with a four-letter name tattooed in tiny block letters along his right jawline. Alia or Tara or Desi. He is standing about seven feet away. His trainee, I’m calling him Gentle Bill, waits at the edge of the deck. Gentle Bill mostly smiles and nods and pretends that everything is going according to plan.

I sit up, and Quantum Sam launches into his pitch.

He has me pull up a generic speed test of our current download and upload speeds and then promises to at least double our existing megabytes per second. The installation and hardware will be free, he says. The policy with his company, Quantum, can be canceled at any time. He understands needing to wait until I can talk with my wife, but she will love saving money. Leaving Comcast Xfinity is a no-brainer.

I ask some questions about the service, but I tell him I’m unwilling to commit to change.

Quantum Sam takes a personal swing at the sale pitch. “You work at home? You should have 500 mps upload speed to avoid dropping Zoom calls. Or how many kids do you have?”

This is the simple question that slays me. So many people ask this, but I don’t know how to do the math, how to answer truthfully without saying too much.

“I have two kids at home,” I try.

“You have other kids at college?”

“No. Kinda. One’s at a technical school, and the other’s sorta in high school.”

He looks at me funny.

I return the look.

“We adopted our older kids from foster care,” I finally say. “And they’ve moved back in with their biological family.”

Quantum Sam and Gentle Bill are still here in their company polos, still carrying their clipboard of quotas, but for a moment—fifteen of them, actually—something has changed. When he next speaks, Quantum Sam is just one human talking to another human. He sheds the sales pitch, the rehearsed tone of persuasion, and becomes Foster Kid Sam from California.

I learn that Foster Kid Sam from California was adopted at age twelve. He became close with his adoptive father, but that man is now dead, and his adoptive mother can’t remember his name. She has dementia.

He tells me that his biological sister got adopted by another family because his adoptive parents already had two daughers and didn’t want a third. Those daughters won’t talk to Sam, and his biological sister still feels like a stranger.

Gentle Bill gestures to our couch, and I nod. He sits, and Foster Kid Sam joins me on the floor of our deck. He crosses his legs.

I ask more questions.

Sam tells me that the only time he hears from his biological mother is when she texts him to ask for money. She gets angry if he asks her about their past, about how he came to be in foster care, or why she gave him up. He came to Seattle for a fresh start, to find a family of friends, of people like Gentle Bill who will see him working hard and will love him as he is. He hopes to move up in the company, buy a place like ours—how does that work, by the way?—move his adoptive mother into a retirement community.

Then, at some point, Quantum Sam stands up and refreshes his sales pitch.

At some point, I wipe a tear from my eye and thank him for sharing with me.

Later, I send the Sams a text asking about the cancelation policy and affirming him in his story. And I get the saddest, most wonderful reply.

“Thanks for understanding,” he writes. “I appreciate that. Genuinely. I’ve never opened up, so I’m glad I got to finally open up.”

What do you make of that? It’s a series of letters and words from a kid who wants me to buy a product. But the words feel, as he says, genuine, and if they’re genuine, that seems huge. What an extraordinary thing to happen during an ordinary capitalist transaction.

“I’m convinced,” I tell the Quantum salesman, “that sharing your story—especially when you’re able to do it on your own terms—can be healing.”

It’s the same thing I might tell you, the same thing I’d tell my teenagers if I knew they could hear me through the noise.

Because sharing stories, I think, can be like forgiveness. The truth, as Jesus says, can set us free. When we share our stories, it can set us free together.