one-time-unsettlement
9 min read
we want to settle, but remain unsettled.
until we figure out the settled in the unsettled.
His Sherlock eyes were overseeing…literally and metaphorically. Ajay had spent the last almost one hour holding his frown.
Looking here. Looking there. And then breathing heavy. From the corner (or self-cornered!) office he occupied, he was constantly looking for someone to walk in.
It was close to 7 pm. And us, the door-to-door executives, were returning to report to the office.
This was 1997. Set up in a small office in Mhatre Pen Complex in Dadar (Mumbai). Named “XYZ Marketing” (name changed), it was one of the few Direct Sales Agency for Standard Chartered Credit Card Lead generation. And I had just joined them. Selling credit cards door-to-door (or may i say experientially deaf-to-deaf).
A friend of mine, Vishal, had helped me set up a kiosk in the canteens of Mahindra & Mahindra factory in Kandivli (Mumbai). I would work in different parts of Mumbai beginning morning, and then around in the afternoon, rush to man the kiosk at the canteen. For every 100+ inquiries, i would manage to get one person interested. But we would submit all the names by evening as part of the process (by going back to the office).
I remember those days people would mock and laugh and stigmatize “loans” or “debt”, and praise “savings” based living ( a point also discussed by Tyler Cowen, Economist-George Mason University & Jason Furman, Chair-Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama Administration, also a Professor at Harvard).
And today, people’s stature is judged by whether the person is credit worthy or not. Of course, there are debates in various economic deep quarters about reimagining “money” and “debt”. But that’s for another day.
Meanwhile, an overdressed-in-identity Prashant breezed in!
The way people would walk into that office door in the evening would pretty much give some iota of what they have accomplished during the day.
Some would make appear very tired and how difficult it was! And almost no leads.
Some would breeze in. Throw open the door. And one would know that the person had cracked 10+ leads.
Some would enter and pre-empt a false smile. And give stories about how many leads are happening tomorrow.
Some would have incomplete forms and make stories about forgetting this or forgetting that.
Some would be honest and were ridiculed for their incompetency.
And many such categories…
The gait, the facial expression, the shoulder posture, opening sentence, or opening tone, and similar things would somehow be a proxy to the day’s performance.
We would often chat about why we have to live this pretentious social performance. Why not just say it as it is? Nothing really came out of these chats except catharsis.
Comin back, Prashant was a star performer. And everyone was clueless as to how he was able to make the things click. When we would ask insights from him, he would give all sorts of stories and could never live up to sharing anything substantial.
Ajay, who was a senior to Prashant, was intuiting something fishy but could not lay his hands on anything. We knew this because Ajay would try to get friendly with us to know more about Prashant and what we perceive of him.
The game-theories we keep playing in inter-personal personal and professional lives is extremely complex. Most times, we do not even know that we have successfully self-deceived our own selves, to the point of seeing them starkly in others and never-ly in self.
That day was different. Prashant brashly submitted his collection of 20+ leads. Over last few days, he had developed a sort of you-can’t-do-a-thing-to-me towards Ajay. While they would exchange reluctant pleasantries, they were sort of squaring up for something messy.
This was the day.
Ajay spotted certain anomalies in the forms. And confronted Prashant. Prashant retorted abusively (almost at the drop of a hat). Before we knew, the direct sales agency turned into direct punching agency … fist fights and blood spills. It became too chaotic. And the founder, Arun, was urgently called for. In some proverbial sense, the accumulated debt of past unfairnesses and emotions was being given a one-time-settlement
We were asked to leave.
The real story came out the next day. Both Ajay and Prashant were gaming the system. They created a few mechanisms to generate leads.
They would wrongly get our forms cancelled internally and inform us of anomalies, only to continue those forms as their own submissions.
They would get some of the people to agree for the card and get them cancelled over time.
They would use mechanisms for using one person’s credit history for another (by forging documents)
They would forge complementary cards without approval from the original applicant
And to do all this, they had contracted some external people. Apparently, their arrangement fell through and the external person started supporting Prashant. And this was squaring up to be messy someday.
This was a great learning point. Ajay would always project to be this nice person and Prashant came across as having rough attitude. The truth was that both were gaming the hard work done by many inside our DSA and overall in other DSAs.
We didn’t stop here. Through proper channels we tried to figure out the source of these behavior. And we were shocked at a strange co-incidence. Both Ajay and Prashant had to make extra bucks in order to support an ailing family member. And the worst is that both of them (of each other’s compulsion) and the entire office was totally unaware of this.
This was my exposure to trying to wrap my head around the famous Heinz Dilemma (which i only learnt later). The tragic thought experiment of a woman on a deathbed in need of a medicine that becomes overnight expensive and the husband’s inaffordability to purchase…what could justify the pharmacist’s increased price and what could justify if the husband were to steal it???
That our actions have values/morals/ethics embedded in it doesn’t become salient from action to action. But they do when we have some dissonances or difficult choices to make. And the long project of many a disciplines have been at the heart of creating better understanding of our choices and actions…with varying appeals to self-interest, obedience, conformity, law and order, social contract, universal ethics and more.
I believe we have reached a paradigmatic stage in humanity. We live in the most complex civilization ever on the planet (complexity here in the sense of researcher Joseph Tainter’s work, where there are growing number of differentiated parts and they have to be dynamically co-ordinated in a growing civilization). However, we use heuristics or biases or experience or fast-thinking to make choices and action. And in so doing, do not realize the unintended consequences thus further compelling us to make more and faster choices with more and faster unintended consequences.
In some sense, we need a one-time-unsettlement of our paradigm…on the lines of one-time-settlement of unserviceable loans. What i mean is that there needs to be a #Reimagining of our Civilization…reimagining through #SearchDialogueAction that attempts at nuancing the myriad findings we stand with. And No! They are certainly not converging. There are divergences. But we shall need good-faith pursuit……………shall share more on this soon…am still in the one-time-unsettlement mode…
