Once in a lifetime—twice if you’re lucky—you get to witness a miracle. Maybe it’s not fire from heaven or bodies rising from the dead, but you never forget how special that moment feels.

I got my miracle right after I graduated from high school. I had just walked out of Applebee’s, where I was eating delicious half-price wings and worrying about my desperate summer job situation. As I unlocked my car, I noticed something white tucked under my windshield wiper. It was a note from my guardian angel.

“Need a summer job? $12-$20/hour! Flexible schedule! Call today!”

It was the most beautiful miracle I had ever seen.

The next morning, I called the number and learned that the company was doing group interviews that very afternoon! The receptionist didn’t tell me much except the name of the company: Vector Marketing. It sounded futuristic. Maybe they were with NASA?

That afternoon, I showed up to Vector Marketing in my ill-fitting suit. The office turned out to be not super futuristic, since it was in the basement of a sad, gray office building and the door was propped open by a paint can.

I presented the receptionist with my wordy resume (my only job experience was putting books on the shelf at the library or “sorting over 1,000 units of reading and audio-visual units a day by alpha-numeric order and replenishing them for public consumption.”) She was not interested in resumes. All she wanted me to do was fill out an application that included zero questions about my sorting abilities.

As I was filling out the paperwork, more applicants began to arrive. The room quickly filled with flip-flops, ripped jeans and the weird perfume you smell whenever you get within 50 yards of an Abercrombie & Fitch (This was 2004, a year that history will remember as the height of the era that the sun never set on the Abercrombie Stench). Finally, the interviewer showed up. He looked like he’d just finished a shift as an Abercrombie model and decided to throw on his deepest V t-shirt. I may have been the only one in the room who owned a tie.

Abercrombie welcomed us and told us that this would be a group interview where he’d give a presentation and judge us based on our reaction and participation. I sat a little straighter. He was just going to use the next few minutes to tell us a little bit about the company.

“The next few minutes,” in this case, was about two hours.

Abercrombie told us that, if selected, we would be selling Cutco knives, the finest blades in all the land. Cutco knives can cut through anything. Did we believe him?! We all tried to outnod each other. He apparently didn’t believe us that we believed him, because he took out a pair of Cutco scissors and cut a penny in half. Someone scored an interview point by clapping. The rest of us quickly followed suit.

Cutco knives, Abercrombie explained, were not sold in stores because that would make them wayyyyy too expensive. By using Vector Marketing representatives to demonstrate their knives, they could keep them to a reasonable $300-$400 a set.

He went on to explain that we would be able to make as much money as we wanted (Some representatives—Vector doesn’t like him telling us this because they don’t want to set unreasonable expectations—anyways SOME representatives make well over $100,000 a year!). All we had to do was go into a few homes, cut some pennies and start raking in the cash.

All we had to do was go into a few homes, cut some pennies and start raking in the cash.

Where would we get our customers? We’d come up with an initial list of contacts ourselves (maybe family members to practice?) and after those contacts saw the demonstration, they would be so excited about the knives that they’d buy all of them and recommend five of their friends for demonstrations. Those friends would recommend five more friends and pretty soon, we’d be making $100 grand a…oops…we COULD be making LOTS of money!

About ninety minutes after most of us had given up trying to remember anything, Abercrombie hit us with a few quick facts. We’d buy a heavily discounted demonstration knife set for $200, attend three days of unpaid training, then work on pure commission. OK WHO WANTS TO SELL SOME KNIVES?!!!

We all did. Very, very much.

Fantastic! He would tell us if we got the job in the one-on-one interview.

As you may have guessed, we all got the job.

I went home and told my parents about my new miracle career. After listening with squinted eyes, my dad asked, “So the idea is to sell expensive junk to our family?”

“No!” I went through the whole thing again, doing my best to highlight the quality of the knives and the possibility of $100,000.

“So the idea is to sell expensive junk to our family.”

“You don’t understand.”

My dad did his best to explain that he did understand a few things: legitimate companies don’t base their entire business model on grandmothers buying things out of pity, real employees get paid for three full days of training and maybe a 2-hour presentation is brainwashing session, not a group interview.

Maybe a 2-hour presentation is brainwashing session, not a group interview.

I could not hear him, because I was too busy figuring out what my next car would be.

Still my dad did not give up. The training session was in a week, and every day, he would find time to corner me and try to dissuade me from following my new dream. It was very annoying.

Two days before training started, I was finishing breakfast, when I saw him walk upstairs. I tried to hurry up and put my cereal bowl away, but he stopped me.

“I’m not going to argue anymore. You can read this if you want.” He plopped 50 pages onto the table and walked away.

I rolled my eyes and acted like I wasn’t going to read them, but of course I read them right when he left because I can’t not read something.

They were printouts of stories from people who had sold Cutco knives. The first one was titled something like, “Scam, Scam, Scammy Scam SCAM!” and they went downhill from there. I kept going for pages and pages. Sometime after “Vector Ruined My Summer and My Life,” I sighed and picked up the phone.

“Hi, this is Dustin Brady. I don’t think I’m going to be able to work for your company.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, can I ask why not?”

“Well, I was reading some stories from people on the Internet who…”

“OK, bye!”

I hung up the phone, sulked and tried to figure out a way to explain my decision in a way that wouldn’t give my dad the satisfaction of hearing me admit that he was right.

Two weeks later I got a job at a call center running credit checks for door-to-door Kirby vacuum cleaner salesmen. Kirby vacuum cleaners, if you are not aware, are expensive products that do the vacuum cleaner equivalent of cutting a penny in half.

Anyways, this exact scenario would play out 100 times a day: a young salesman would call with nervous hope in his voice, I’d run the numbers, then respond with a much-too-low credit score. He’d sigh, thank me and hang up.

The salesman would go back to his customer to inform them that they weren’t eligible to buy a $2,000 vacuum cleaner on credit, and I’d go back to doodling on my notepad. Sometimes I’d smile at my desk, pleased with myself for getting a steady $9.25/hour job and for never giving my dad the satisfaction of admitting I was wrong.

LIFE LESSON #66

Parents don’t get enough credit for being dream crushers and miracle ruiners.