tellhimfred.com

This is a level 4 Jackhole Alert, being issued to all persons in and around the Berkshire County area.

This past weekend, the fiancee and I took a mini-weekend up to the Berkshires. A “couple friend” of ours, let’s call them Trey and Li Ning, own a timeshare up in the mountains, and asked us if we wanted to do one of those “sit through the sales pitch” deals in exchange for a free couple of days at the resort and a hundred bucks.

Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Seriously, the resort company paid us a hundred bucks, plus gave us two nights in a one-bedroom suite in a beautiful part of the Berkshires in the height of ski season, and all we had to do was attend one teensy “90 minute” sales presentation.

Now, I’ve seen South Park and I’ve heard the stories. I was prepared for it being awful, but I was also prepared to enter Space Robot Mode and give these people the plexiglas wall of No Thank You. I was prepared to be polite and after 90 minutes, ask to be shown the exit with paperwork signed.

We were not prepared for…let’s call him Chris. Because that is his name. We were not prepared for Chris, the Flaming King Jackhole of Monkey Shit Town.

Our “sales representative” Chris wore a red anorak, and had a pretty bad case of balding guy denial; the top of his head looked like a patch of jungle that’d been napalmed six months prior. Just shave that shit, dude. Your sixteen individual hairs are fooling nobody. After about twenty minutes of his mindless small talk banter mixed with passive-aggressive sales pitch, Chris’ South Jersey drawl made me wish that I had a robotic arm with a dremel tool attachment, onto which I could fit a high-speed router tool so I could drill through both my eardrums and never have to listen to him again.

He asked questions like “How much do you make a year?” And asked questions like “What do you do for a living?” So he could tell lies like “Oh my wife’s a teacher too.” We decided later that if I’d told him that I was a horse trader and that my fiancee was a metallurgist, he would have told us that his wife was a Shetland pony.

Of course, multiple trips from the “hospitality center” to the “resort offices” and the resort area are necessary, and of course he drives 20 miles per hour in a 45 zone the whole way, which is, of course, all the better to force you to sit in his stinky-ass Crown Vic that looks like a shitty Boston cab, and force you to answer his banal questions.

The presentation through which we sat, which was given by a matronly woman who resembled Catherine O’Hara if you hooked her up to an air compressor and a car battery, made me want to cut myself. A lot. There were “interactive” portions. Cut. Myself. After it was over, the lady told me I looked like Luke Russert. I wanted to tell her she looked a little like my worst nightmare, but it was hard to tell because maybe she was just a hallucination from the DTs. But I wasn’t in Tucker Max mode, just Space Robot, so I looked through her and said “Okay.”

Finally, we ended up in the big sales room with Jackhole Chris and his boss, who I’ll call Edgar (because I can’t for the life of me remember his name or care about that fact). Edgar played with some numbers, wrote a bunch of stuff on paper, mostly circles and arrows and alphanumeric combinations which might have made sense had I been listening to him instead of trying to remember all the players on the ‘86 Red Sox. Every time he looked at us for a response, I repeated the same phrase: “That’s a very attractive offer, but we’re not prepared to commit to anything today.”

I counted - nine times I said that to him. Finally they released us to a final processing room where a man who sounded like a walking upper-lobe squamous cell tumor signed our release forms which would let us  claim our hard-won $100 Visa gift card. And not get charged 600 bucks for the two-night stay.

I have never in my adult life done a dance of joy. I came, however, the closest I have ever come, at the point where we finally walked out with the envelope and got the “have a nice day” kiss-off from the desk lady. It felt being born. It felt like being born awesome. With the ability to fly.

We immediately found an Irish place, Patrick’s Pub, in Pittsfield, which was surprisingly kickass. The pub, not the town of Pittsfield. Pittsfield is a serious sand pit of why the fuck am I here. We got some cocktails into us and planned the rest of our weekend, which was a great time.

But let this be a lesson to all you Fredders: These “free” weekends are not “free”. Don’t think of them that way. You have to work for your weekend. The work is brooking fools and assholes, and it’s a tough job that not everyone can do. My fiancee doesn’t have Space Robot mode, and she came dangerously close to blowing up at King Jackhole a couple of times. Just make sure that you get into some kind of mental siege mode and you’ll be fine.

But if you see a balding guy with a South Jersey accent coming your way…run. Just run.