Chapter Twelve
For a few days, Cartmel did not let Clarity or Lanai out of their rooms. Clarity and Lanai filled out surveys related to the sales potential booklet, but no progress was made, the results inevitably came short of the eighty eight percent needed to pass level one of the Herbaline salesperson test. In addition to the surveys, the motivational guru handed Clarity an agreement. Cartmel wanted Clarity to read carefully a relational agreement offered by him on behalf of Herbaline. After a few days reflecting, Clarity accepted the relational affinity pairing offered by Coleman Cartmel and she received a device called the relational compass.
To be paired with Cartmel as a sales associate, also accepting to engage in a personal relationship with him, was clearly a safe avenue to leave the Herbaline facility. After accepting the agreement, Clarity and Lanai walked with Cartmel into a large conference center, where forty or fifty Herbaline delegates selected for multilevel five promotion, were gathering for a personal review by Stive. All those company salespeople had sold more than one million dollars worth of Herbaline products during a single year. The face of Stive appeared on a large Lucky Goldstar television screen displaying in a lower panel the conference room filled with delegates, sending out the vibe to Clarity that they were being watched. Cartmel placed his hand on Clarity's thigh.
"I need three ladies with me in my plural relationship, who do you want in addition to you, in our sales and Polyamory group?" Said Cartmel.
"Lanai and Ambi." The motivational expert stared at Clarity a few seconds.
"Fine," he said.
After the review, which lasted a short hour, they left the conference area and followed Cartmel to pick up Ambi. They exited the room using a door in the back of the antisale room, where an 'exit the no sales language by thinking yes to the sales booklet' sign showed off at the security clearance entrance backdoor. After taking an elevator, they entered a garage area of the facility and kept Cartmel at a distance, noticing he was giving orders to take his official company car, a dark green Mercedes C class sedan with a personalized car plate which said 'Show Off Assertiveness' out of the garage. The car plate indicated that the company favored those employees who were assertive and confident, but not aggressive.
"Have the relational compass with you at all times. It allows me to know where you are. I've told Ivy to get your things ready and bring them here, we're leaving this place today," said Cartmel.
"Where are we going?" Asked Clarity.
Cartmel ignored her and walked past his car, reaching an area that Clarity had not seen before, known as the meditation and thinking area, a place open to very wealthy customers of Herbaline who got in and out through the facility garage. They entered the wave inducer room, the place, where the wave inducer, a device which looked like a sophisticated pair of music earphones, fed sounds of various types, alpha waves to a person laid out horizontally on a couch for hours.
The sound device slowed the person's thinking through sound, and it prompted various words, to engage free association of thought, where thought meant words and sensations, leading to those sales-related words that Herbaline used to move the mind and behavior of salesperson and customer, including communication drills, duplicating the understanding of a product from the sales person to the customer, and answer hunger, which happened to the salesperson when the customer did not answer the sales query and purchase the herbal product. The device had an audio sales channel tuned to the sales audio booklets which involved motivational sales work, guru and evangelist speak, or behavioral change of customer-reactive answers, modifying the habit or habits of a customer or Herbaline salesperson, into herbaspeak language. The inducer was very expensive, several thousand dollars, and the use of it was forbidden to anyone ranked lower than multilevel four inside the company. It was one of the drivers of other people's work official Herbaline policy and guidelines, and it was recommended to people like Cartmel, who spent hours listening to the device.
A lady named Bertha Myers was in the room, guarding the place, ensuring the recruited ladies like Ambi who showed or displayed reticent linguistic conduct, had a proper experience with the inducer, before being sent to the antisale room.
"It'll be a minute Bertha, I'm taking these ladies to the ranch and the portable inducer with me."
Bertha nodded, and pulled Clarity, Lanai and Ambi aside. The housekeeper was in her fifties and had been an employee of Herbaline for nearly two years, recruited for her diligent work carried out for a prominent household of the East Coast. She wasn't very comfortable with working at the company, ever since a group of inspectors from the Federal Trade Commission had stormed the Orange County office a few months earlier. Through skillful befriending by Clarity, Bertha explained that Stive began studying relational affinity after his marriage collapsed and ended in divorce. Stive attributed the collapse to a wrong configuration of the work environment which made him consider polyamorous relational avenues with other women. According to him, there was space for several women in his life, a physical, emotional, and conversation space, nourishing, supportive, sweet, and professional, that no single woman could meet given the savagery of the work environment.
Stive and Manglove considered Ambi part of their potential polyrelational group, but Manglove was not pleased by her lack of progress in the antisale room. On the other hand, Manglove was clearly pleased by having found Clarity, watching her on television camera in her room with Lanai, like someone watching big brother would. She did that two or three days a week from a large screen television set anchored to a metal pole twelve inches in diameter made of polished, stainless steel, which was part of her language facility office in Palm Springs.
On another level of his own unabashed deviant thinking, Stive manipulated the emotion and the thinking of people, to make them react in certain ways, to make them feel apprehensive, or slightly afraid, or nonconforming. This allowed him to have prospecting recruits spend money on Herbaline services or as distributors, in order to sell Herbaline herbal produce to lower level distributors, peers or customers. Profit trickled upwards from the customer to the chain of distributors, leaving the bulk of it to higher ranked sales executives, but enough to low-level salespersons to get the feeling that they were making more money than any sales job paid out.
"What kind of training does Stive follow? At Herbaline, I mean," said Clarity.
"He has gone through the wave inducer, washing out any negative emotion from his thinking, using Neuro Linguistic Programming."
"What does that mean?" Asked Clarity.
"Neuro, as in brain physiological neural networks, linguistic, as in everyday language, and programming, as in word related behavior, thought, setting of the habit of a person."
"What makes him special?"
"He has a dual way of thinking, he can think yes no, good and bad, in very refined ways, and he can also think non dual, not judging whether something is good or bad. He is working with Manglove to reach multilevel six, a way to join high ranking executives and board of director members of the company, people who have sold more than ten million dollars of Herbaline products or services and are accomplished at linguistic configurations. Multilevel six people can apply for the privilege club."
Multilevel six was both a hierarchical level of accomplishment and a sales milestone at the company. It marked a definite point of procedural loyalty for the Herbaline employee and executive, and led to further avenues of networking, within the company and outside of it, including knowing more about the way it was built and being engaged with the lower hemisphere hierarchical group, a group located outside the company. Clarity pulled out the pen drive from Manglove's office, showing the employee database of Herbaline and the unethical practices of assigning an emotion label to an employee in order to value the professional competence of that worker, all of it, in order to decide their promotion or 'marketing aptitude'. The pen drive included the documents showing that Ambi was kept as language refusal recluse at the company, inside the antisale roo
m.
"Would you be willing to send this pen drive to the Federal Trade Commission?"
"Why would I do that?" Asked Bertha.
"I have connections that can get you a good job with the U.S. government at the Bellagio hotel in Vegas, right under the hotel." Bertha negotiated a U.S. government-sponsored one hundred thousand dollar retirement plan with Clarity, and agreed to send the pen drive.
"Where is Stive now?" Asked Clarity.
"In his office here at the language facility, he came in yesterday, he is working on the chart of emotion, it's what drives the promotions engine at Herbaline, in addition to driving sales aptitude and poly-relational couples."