The Real Hard Sell

This story was published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction , July 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BY WILLIAM W. STUART
Ben Tilman sat down in the easiest of all easy chairs. He picked up a magazine, flipped pages; stood up, snapped fingers; walked to the view wall, walked back; sat down, picked up the magazine.
He was waiting, near the end of the day, after hours, in the lush, plush waiting room—“The customer’s ease is the Sales Manager’s please”—to see the Old Man. He was fidgety, but not about something. About nothing. He was irritated at nobody, at the world; at himself.
He was irritated at himself because there was no clear reason for him to be irritated at anything.
There he sat, Ben Tilman, normally a cheerful, pleasant young man. He was a salesman like any modern man and a far better salesman than most. He had a sweet little wife, blonde and pretty. He had a fine, husky two-year-old boy, smart, a real future National Sales Manager. He loved them both. He had every reason to be contented with his highly desirable, comfortable lot.
With Ancestral Insurance, “Generations of Protection,” he’d made the Billion Dollar Club—and immediately begun to feel dissatisfied with it—just before cute, sexy, blonde Betty had suddenly come from nowhere into his life and he had married her. That had helped, sure. But as soon after that as he had started paying serious attention to his job again, he was fed up with it. “Too much paper work. All those forms. It’s work for a robot, not a man,” he’d told Betty when he quit. A lie. The paper work was, as he looked back on it, not bad at all; pleasant even, in a way. It was just—nothing. Anything.
Indoor-Outdoor Climatizers—sniffles, he said, kept killing his sales presentation even though his record was good enough. Ultra-sonic toothbrushes, then, were a fine product. Only the vibration, with his gold inlay, seemed to give him headaches after every demonstration. He didn’t have a gold inlay. But the headaches were real enough. So he quit.