Erin The Great

I received a knock at my door the other day. As usual I yelled at the person to enter not wanting to get off my lazy butt, and like usual there was no reply. Usually when this happens it is either one of three types of people. There are the people that I kind of know that don’t feel comfortable walking into my apartment, the serial killers (which I have yet to encounter *knock on wood) and the panhandlers… or solicitors if you will.

Around here in Provo just blocks from BYU campus there are a lot of students who have taken the desperate job of going door to door selling what ever they can trying to make ends meat. I commend these people but I feel sorry for them because most of the time they run into extremely poor starving college students who can barely scrape enough money for tuition, food and bills. I love the life of college bliss, but I feel really bad when there is a knock on the door and it’s a little kid trying to sell things like cookies, newspapers or magazine subscriptions. Being one of those kids many many moons ago, I feel obligated to at least try to purchase what ever these kids are selling.

With this in mind and proceeding to the end of my story, I wasn’t surprised to find a couple of pre-pubescent teenagers selling newspaper subscription when I went to the door. Unfortunately I was in the middle of paydays so I was strapped for cash. To make matters worse the little extortionists started to send a carefully placed guilt trip as I tried to explain why I couldn’t buy their newspaper and how bad I felt about that fact. I went several rounds with these boys before I finally stopped caring about sparing their feelings and started into a diatribe that went something like ‘are you pulling a guilt trip on me? Listen you little punk, I am a college student that just got done paying my bills and tuition. I know you’re trying to raise money for college and I commend you for that, but before I waste money on something that I’m never going to use, might I tell you that I still need food and I have a very angry cockroach I’ve named Maurice whose been giving me the finger for a week because there is nothing for him to feed on! So thank you for the offer but I’m going to have to decline buthaveagreatday’.

I at least had reminded myself that I probably shouldn’t slam the door in their now very stunned faces because that would be rude, so I gently closed the door hoping my hair was working for me that day so they wouldn’t feel compelled to egg my door. Luckily they didn’t which I was very happy about, but I remember going around door to door with my sales pitch and big brown eyes and not once did I slap someone with a guilt trip. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing something like that. There is a right and a wrong way to do things and pulling a guilt trip like you’re a mother from Brooklyn just isn’t one of them.