Part 2 - How I Discovered the True Meaning of Hell at The Learning Annex

When we left off, I had just been trained in the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure and had deeply offended Bill Zanker, president and founder of The Learning Annex, by swearing in front of his kids. PDD continues its exploration of America's newest evil empire and the underpinnings of The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo, coming to a town near you.

I arrived fifteen minutes early for my shift on Saturday morning. The main lobby of the Stephens Convention Center was jammed with people waiting to get into The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo. Most of them had purchased day or weekend passes for $49 and $179. Those who bought $499 VIP passes had front row access to the keynote speakers and free massages in the VIP lounge, where they could get away from the wretched, Avian-flu gestating masses.

Besides Trump, who was speaking on Sunday evening, the other featured keynote speakers included such motivational hotties as Tony Robbins, the No. 1 Peak Performance Coach; "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" Robert Kiyosaki, who would reveal surprising secrets that the rich know about money that the poor and middle-class do not; and former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman, who would inspire others to achieve HUGE successes in in their own lives.

I had to hand it to Bill Zanker. He certainly had his fingertips on the pulse of the paycheck-to-paycheck living middle-class. The fact that the expo was being held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center should have been a clue to those attending that the whole thing was a set-up. For years, Stephens has managed to duck several federal investigations into his alleged ties to organized crime. His self-named convention center was a perfect venue for The Learning Annex.

As if the 50,000 lemmings lined up at the gates weren't enough, the main lobby was quickly filling up with parents pushing 3,000 squalling babies in strollers the size of Buicks for a baby show that was being held in another area of the convention center. I immediately decided to get the hell out of there before I got trampled in a Tony Robbins stampede and high-tailed it to Conference Room 29 to begin my new career as a credit card assistant.

The room manager still hadn't shown up, so I assigned myself the task of standing in a pedway and directing expo attendees to the main lobby. Despite the huge directional signs pointing the way, several people still asked me for directions. Almost immediately, I got into a perky contest with a 19-year-old student from De Paul University, who was a lot more natural at it than I was. There was no way I was going to get duked any extra cash standing next to Miss Merry Sunshine. I moved down a couple hundred feet from her and continued shepherding people to the main lobby.

Eventually the room opened and I met the room manager, an extremely nice guy from The Learning Annex's San Francisco office, who treated our sales team decently the whole weekend. I asked him if he invested in real estate and he told me he had a hard enough time just trying to make his rent. He immeidately put me to work taping off the side sections of chairs, as attendees made their way in for the morning's first seminar, "How To Market, Sell (FOR BIG PROFITS) on Ebay." After I finished taping, I went back to stand outside the conference room and continued to greet people. I was relieved to see that I wouldn't have to compete with anyone else in being perky, and gave my most winning yellow-toothed smile as I welcomed people to the seminar and informed them that plenty of great seats were still available.

The first seminar went well enough. It was hosted by a guy named Lynn Alder who spoke for 90 minutes on how to quickly build wealth selling and buying real estate on Ebay with little or no money down while you sat on your ass. Every time I thought he was going to reveal some insider secrets about navigating the auction proces, he invited the audience to sign up for his seminar. Normally, the seminar cost a couple grand, but as a special favor to The Learning Annex he was offering it at a discounted rate of $795. Considering that most of the information he was dishing out is available in "Ebay for Dummies," which you can buy on Amazon for $8.99, it was an incredible bargain. Our crack team of sales assistants performed like a well-oiled machine, managing the swarm of people rushing to the back of the room to sign up for Alder's class.

My new friend Barb rolled in at 10 a.m., bursting with energy from her two-hour ride on the L. She was wearing the same pre-requisitie black pants and white-collar, button-down shirt that was the weekend's required dress code. There were hundreds of us walking around dressed like this, as if we were extras cast in a disaster flick. The second scheduled speaker was Jay Mitton, "the Father of Asset Protection." Mitton, I would later learn, had received a cease-and-desist order from the Florida attorney general's office to stop hawking his "Legal Tools for RE Investors" bootcamp. Because of "the incident in Florida," Mitton's personal assistant, Robert Bluhm, would be filling in. Barb immediately stationed herself outside the door and started greeting the next group. She had a slight speech impediment but was incredibly perky as she beckoned people to "get up close and personal with Robert Bluhm." Actually, I liked Barb and wouldn't mind running into her again some day. I felt terrible later for teasing her when I told her that everyone was looking for her after she had ducked out for one of her many snacks.

Robert Bluhm got up and began his 90-minute spiel. He actually used phrases like "tell ya what I'm gonna do," as he talked about setting up family limited partnerships and bullet-proofing your business assests against lawsuits, levies and divorces. The "Cutting Edge Strategies for Tax Reduction" bootcamps were going for just $2,599, marked down from the regular cost of $4,995. As an added bonus, those who signed up received a 100-pound suitcase of complimentary home-study materials.

It was time for lunch and my feet were killing me. The only time I had sat down the entire morning was when I went to the toilet. I bought some nachos with glow-in-the-dark cheese, the only food item left after I stood in line for 35 minutes at one of the concession stands, and sat down at a table with 20 strangers. A homeless woman who had obviously found a day pass that someone had discarded in the parking lot, was fascinated with my nachos. She kept asking me if she could have some. I finally told her to get her fucking hand out of my food, but ended up giving her the rest since they tasted like shit anyway. When I finished lunch, I ducked outside for a smoke and ended up talking to this older woman and her son who asked me where they could get a refund to the expo. "It's just an infomercial. I could have stayed home and watched this junk on TV," the woman complained. I promised to relay her comments to Bill Zanker.

The rest of the afternoon was more of the same - late night infomercial "gurus" shrieking about real estate and how we all had to protect ourselves from the Man, scaring people who had lost their jobs and scraped together the last of their money to dump on worthless classes and overproduced DVDs filled with phony testimonials from welfare moms and ministers who became millionaires in 90 days using the gurus' simple wealth-building techniques, all offered at unbelievable, one-time-only, Learning Annex discounts. The sales assistants got on each other's nerves as our asses became gridlocked behind the sales table, listening to people complain about how cold the conference rooms were, which were kept at 55 degrees, so they'd stay awake during the boring double-talk.

The final speaker of the day was Russ Whitney, king of the late night infomercials. Russ Whitney started out working in a slaughter house in upstate New York where made $5 an hour slaughtering pigs before he set out to become the youngest self-made millionaire in the country. Today, he is the founder of "a financial empire comprising many successful companies." Russ brought his own sales team, goons with sinister male balding patterns who watched the audience like hawks. The goon squad unleashed two of its top lady shylocks, Donna and Stephanie, dressed in their best Condoleezza Rice power suits, who called our team of assistants into a huddle. Our mission was to push an 8-day domestic and international land development bootcamp that would take place in Florida and Costa Rica, where no doubt Russ Whitney planned to flee from the feds. The bootcamp was $39,999, but was being offered that day for just $13,990. In addition, those who signed up would receive add-ons that included a DVD of Russ Whitney's first class, "Millionnaire University," three free teleconference calls with transcripts, and phone calls for life with a certified Whitney Education Group instructor - an incredible value of $7,000. In exchange for our help, we were each given a free Russ Whitney promotional DVD of student testimonials, and one of his books, "Millionaire Real Estate Mentor," both of which I gave to the woman minding the coat room.

The room quickly filled up with Russ Whitney groupies before I had a chance to tape it off, the only task I excelled at the entire weekend. Russ seemed to have quite the following, including a mentally retarded couple who were beside themselves with excitement at meeting an actual infomercial celebrity. The goon squad seemed to know them, Stephanie exclaiming, "There's my smiley guy." Smiley Guy was pushing his wife who must have weighed 400 pounds in a wheelchair, who was buried beneath 20 bags of sales brochures they had collected from the exhibitors' booths. I pulled away a couple of folding chairs in the back row to accommodate the woman's wheelchair, which was a big mistake because they didn't stop bugging me for the rest of the afternoon.

Smiley Guy told me they had unsuccessfully applied for subsidized housing, but because of his wife's disabilities, they were discriminated against. "The system's working against us," he said. In addition to being crippled, his wife was legally blind. I couldn't believe these two retards had money to invest in real estate. Maybe Russ Whitney was a genius after all. They showed me an article from the Chicago Tribune about housing for the handicapped. "This is going to knock Russ's socks off," they told me. Smiley Guy kept complaining to me how the crowd was "jostling my wife." I suggested that if she stayed put and quit wheeling around all over the place, people would stop bumping into her.

A few minutes before the seminar began Russ Whitney himself barrelled into the room on a Segue, almost crashing into the retarded woman in the wheelchair. He had one of those hairbrush crewcuts and a mustache that stretched over his lip like a caterpillar. I don't know if it was one of his goons or a Learning Annex executive who yelled at me to start seating the SRO crowd into the few scant seats that were available. All I can say is after listening to Russ Whitney talk for two hours, if you fall for his line of bull you need a mental health examination. I did a Google search on him and at present there are at least 50 class action lawsuits against his companies filed by unhappy consumers who lost their life savings taking one of his get-rich-quick real estate classes.

Russ had people eating out of his hand. He could have been selling road-kill and people would have happily paid $13,990 for it. One woman even brought him beer on the stage as he talked about his unhappy childhood, his wicked stepmother, and his time in prison serving an armed robbery sentence, interspersed with his simple, borderline legal techniques for generating wealth quickly. People literally ran to the back of the room when it was over to sign up for the 8-day domestic and international land development bootcamp. Even Bill Zanker showed up and started screaming at us when the credit card machines went down and we had to take imprints of people's credit and debit cards by rubbing pencils over the numbers on the sales forms. It was a fucking madhouse. Russ still had his mike on and you could hear him cajoling the little people who were lined up to get his autograph.

Sunday morning I considered not showing up for the second day. Our room manager told us we didn't have to be in the room until 9 a.m., so I blew off the first two hours of my shift. I figured I was in it this far, so I might as well go all the way. Russ Whitney was giving his seminar again, although this time, the audience was a little more skeptical than the day before. Russ was decked out in an Armani suit because it was "the Lord's Day." He kept cajoling Jesus to "strike me down if I'm lying." If ever there was a moment for a freak, baptismal electrocution accident, it was then. Toward the end of his spiel, Russ ordered us to shut the doors and not let anyone out of the room. He started screaming at the audience that he gave them two hours of his precious time, so they could give him two minutes of theirs. He told people that sooner or later they would have to take a shot at wealth and to spread a downpayment for the bootcamp over several credit cards or "take a loan out from mom and dad." He led the audience to the back of the room and started shoving sales forms in their faces as he ripped their credit cards out of their hands.

Finally it was all over at 5 p.m. and we packed up the room. I still had two hours left on my shift so we took all the cleaning supplies back to the exhibit room behind the main keynote hall where Trump was appearing. For the next two hours, I counted paper clips and clipboards with Barb, and untangled power cords from the credit card processors that the other room managers had thrown into boxes. None of the other workers I talked to had gotten duked any extra cash. It was just another one of the weekend's many lies.

By 7 p.m. I had enough. I told my room manager that I had to get home to my fictitious children. I decided to stick around and watch The Donald, who was running late. Some other scheister named Scott Scheel had been speaking on the main stage for three hours and people were starting to boo him. Thanks to my work pass, I was able to get all the way to the front of the hall behind the VIP seats. Signs for The Donald were being passed out among the audience, "You're fired," "Trump for President" and "We love you, Donald." Bill Zanker climbed up on the main stage screaming, "Thank-you, Chicago." He was creaming in his pants because he made at least $20 million off this crowd of gullible fools. Then Robert Kiyosaki got up and began his introduction of The Donald.

Everyone in the hall was on their feet. I was standing about 50 feet from the stage and have to admit, it was pretty damn exciting. All of a sudden the ceiling exploded with fake Monopoly money that rained down on the audience with pictures of The Donald's face. The FUN girls poured out on to the stage as Trump made his rock star entrance. "The Apprentice" theme, the O'Jays "For the Love of Money," blasted through the convention center. The scariest part was seing Trump's comb-over up close. It looked like the tail fin on a '57 Chevy. There was no telling where The Donald's comb-over started or ended.

I can see why The Donald is so popular. He is very funny and charismatic, although he really didn't say anything substantial. He made some cracks about the FUN girls and told them to "get out of here" and made everyone sit back down. He'll probably end up being president some day. I decided to leave before the room manager caught me and made me stay and count Learning Annex pens. As I walked out of the convention center, Trump began his talk saying how "New York is an even worse jungle than the jungles on 'Survivor' produced by the brilliant Mark Burnett, who is also producer of 'The Apprentice.'" He told the audience to "think big, really big" and advised everyone to get a pre-nup.

I learned quite a bit from my weekend with The Learning Annex. I always considered myself a hard worker, but sitting on my ass in corporate America and writing news stories for community newspapers is easy compared to how hard most people in this country have to work at low paying jobs. For example, I never even bothered asking the room manager if it was all right to take a break. I just took one. I talked to many people working at the expo who stood in the same spot for 16 hours without a break. I have a much greater appreciation now for people who work in fast food, retail, hotels and the millions of other service jobs out there. I had forgotten how easy it is to become demoralized working one of these jobs, and developing a shitty attitude.

I also learned that a majority of the real estate "gurus" who spoke at the real estate wealth expo are currently under indictment for defrauding consumers. (Gee, do you think Bill Zanker knew anything about this?) Somebody ought to look into it. Anyway, I'd rather have Russ Whitney's first job, slaughtering pigs, than work at any future events sponsored by The Learning Annex.