Part 1 - How I Discovered the True Meaning of Hell at The Learning Annex

You can learn a lot at The Learning Annex: how to talk to your cat, reversing the aging process through Chinese medicine, designing fabulous floral arrangements for money, or writing and pitching a screenplay. Anything your heart desires can found in one of those ubiquitous boxes stuffed with free, urine-smelling catalogs on any street corner in America. In many instances, changing your stagnant life only costs $29.99 for a two-and-a-half hour personal growth seminar. But I never thought I would discover the true meaning of hell at The Learning Annex, and get paid $11 an hour while doing it. Following is Part 1 of PDD’s exploration of America’s newest evil empire – The Learning Annex.

It is 6:45 on a dismal, gray Saturday morning in Rosemont. Already the lines of disenfranchised dreamers are snaking through the main lobby of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center when I show up to clock in for my weekend gig as a credit card assistant at The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo, an event which promises attendees “One Weekend Can Make You A Millionaire.” Before the weekend is over, we will all be slathered in snake oil, as if partaking in some giant orgy for the desperate middle-class, presided over by the king deal-maker himself, Donald Trump.

I’d been dreading the expo for weeks ever since the group interview I attended a month earlier with the event hiring manager, whose Eminem "Ass Like That" ringtone kept going off on her cell phone every two seconds. There were several job assignments to choose from: greeter, usher, registrar, sales assistant, credit card assistant, card processor and roustabout. I checked any box on the application that might assure me of some ass-sitting time so I wouldn’t have to stand on my feet for 14 hours, even if I wasn’t qualified for it. Having not worked in the low-wage job industry for over 30 years, any useful skills I may have acquired from working fast food, retail or as a Ground Round clown were quashed by the equal amount of time I had spent in corporate America getting the life-blood sucked out of me, up until which 18 months ago I was unhappily, but gainfully employed.

I indicated that I had skills in using a credit card processing machine, even though the last time I had processed any consumer’s credit card was during the 1970s as a cashier for Venture Discount using a manual card imprinter. Even then I had a hard time sliding the plate over the credit slip without ripping the carbons to shreds. After the interview, I began praying that I wouldn’t get an e-mail notifying me that I’d been hired as one of 500 expo workers so I could attend the Hollywood Collectibles Show at the Purple Hotel in Lincolnwood, which was being held the same weekend. Unfortunately, I received an e-mail a few weeks later informing me that I had been selected for an “elite work crew” and to show up for a mandatory training session the Thursday evening before the show. I was faced with an important career decision: meet Edd “Kookie” Byrnes or make $11 an hour working two 14-hour shifts so I could get the brakes fixed on my car.

When I showed up for training at the Stephens Convention Center, half of the folding chairs in the back rows of one of the expo halls had been cordoned off with masking tape. I would soon learn how important masking tape was at The Learning Annex, since I would spend most of the weekend taping off the side sections of chairs in Conference Room 29, so that the front and center rows would get filled up first for a series of seminars with catchy names like “$9K A Month Cash Flow,” “Earn $3,000 to $10,000 a Month,” “Free Money From the Government,” “Make Huge Profits With Other People’s Money,” “Effortless Wealth,” and “How To Think Like A Millionaire.” Interestingly enough, there was not one seminar being offered on ethics, but then who needed honesty or integrity when the goal was to get filthy rich with as little effort as possible.

During the training session, I began to have second thoughts about lying on the application about my prowess using a computerized credit card processor, since I have no other discernable survival skills, let alone not knowing how to add or subtract. I definitely felt on the wrong side of 40 sitting amidst a group of nubile young hotties who’d been hired to wear fishnets and tank tops with the word “FUN” emblazoned across their breast implants to rile up the mostly male crowd of horny, wannabe millionaires attending the expo.

After yelling “great” a few times, we were informed that The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo was the Most Ambitious Event of its Kind in the Entire World. Our mission was to create an Energetic, Friendly and Professional Environment. Every Learning Annex staff member was Extremely Important and we were promised the Most Exciting Weekend of Our Lives. It was going to be Hard Work, but damn it all, we were going to have FUN.

Most of the doors were locked on our tour of the Stephens Convention Center, a maze of pedways, corridors and hard concrete floors. We were directed back into the expo hall for our training on the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure. My job was to grab people’s credit cards while they were signing up for grossly overpriced home-study materials and wealth-building “bootcamps” and hand them over to the card processor before they had a chance to think about how they were being ripped off. After the card was processed, I was to hand it to the product fulfillment assistant who would check the order forms to see if they had been completed properly, and then fork over a 50-pound bag of product.

After completing our training on the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure, we were treated to a pep talk by the big man himself, Bill Zanker, president and founder of The Learning Annex, who started his personal growth empire after seeing a man with dirty hands giving back rubs in a San Francisco park while attending film school. Zanker, who’s all about incentives we were told, promised that we’d all walk out with a few extra hundred dollars in our pockets since there would be anonymous Learning Annex executives walking around duking us if we were spotted not slouching or being unfriendly to expo attendees. “If you don’t, it means you weren’t doing a good job,” Zanker said. “It’s up to you if you want to declare it.”

When Zanker finished his motivational speech, we were invited to stay and watch the evening’s episode of “The Apprentice” that was featuring a segment on The Learning Annex, which was paying $1.5 million to Donald Trump to be the expo’s keynote speaker. There was a huge television screen at the front of the room and people cheered and booed as various contestants schemed and brown nosed and accused each other of being “tight ass Jews.” I never really watched “The Apprentice” so I had no idea what was going on, my tastes in reality television running more along such sophisticated lines as “Dog Bounty Hunter” and “Growing Up Gotti.” I was sitting next to a woman named Barb, who’d I be working with on the same sales team. Barb lived way the hell out by Midway Airport and was shaped like Frosty the Snowman. She took three trains to get to the convention center. Barb was totally into “The Apprentice” and kept heckling this one contestant named Markus, to whom The Donald would utter his famous catch phrase, “You’re fired.”

Barb asked me if we should “clock out” since the training session was over and we were just sitting around watching television. I told her rather loudly, “Hell no, I was promised a two-hour training session, and I’m going to bank every fucking hour that I can working this crappy gig.” Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that Zanker was sitting right in front of us with his young children, who turned around and shot me a stare of death for swearing in front of his kids and maligning his personal growth empire.

Like the many low-end jobs I had worked in high school and college, I had already screwed up by being insubordinate, and the expo hadn’t even started yet. I was determined right then and there to make it up to Mr. Zanker. I was going to get duked some extra cash by being perky, even if it fucking killed me.