Men with your...sales.

I am ridiculously susceptible to sales pitches. Not online, so don't bother here. But in person, it's really hard for me to say no. I'm learning, and for the most part I no longer end up buying things from random kiosks at the mall even IF they manage to corner me.

Though for the most part my strategy is to just not let sales people talk to me. I'm just looking thanks. Nope, just browsing. No, really, I'm okay. Even if I can't find something I need, I will leave without it rather than talk to a sales person. Part of that is just being introverted in general. But part of it is because I'm afraid they'll try to upsell me.

I go through self-checkouts whenever possible to avoid the sales pitches at registers. Because I absolutely hate saying no, and I just want to make people happy and make them feel good and like their job doesn't suck so much. I want to believe they're being honest with me that this sale or that item is worth my hard earned cash.

But half the time, they're lying through their teeth. And my hard earned cash is stretched extremely thin these days. So I try to never go anywhere but the grocery store (which is bad enough).

I worked at a store that sold soap and body products for a while. I won't mention which one. I was there for two long holiday seasons, and in that time I usually spent half my paycheck in the store because I did actually love the product. But I started to slowly realize something from the sales pitches I was giving: the sales weren't actually any good. I was there long enough to start doing the math, start calculating average savings, what you had to spend to get the full value, etc. And I discovered that maybe once a year they had a sale that was actually worth it. I still like that stores products, and I'll go when I have a gift card or to buy presents for family. But I pay attention to the sales more now. I don't fall for it.

Of course, then today I went into a different store that sells the same kind of thing. It's a smaller store in this particular mall, and it's harder to avoid the sales people. But I had a coupon that had to be spent in the store and not online. Before I went in, I did research. I decided what I wanted to buy, I was going to search and destroy, pick up what I wanted and go.

But one of the sales people got me. And I didn't want to be rude, so I talked to her for a few minutes. I mean, the store was mostly empty and she was just chatting, right? Somehow I ended up getting talked into switching to a more expensive gift set, AND I decided to take advantage of the sale going on to get two other things I had been eyeing. And _then_ I even got the store loyalty card.

Now, I want to be clear, this salesperson didn't take advantage of me in any way. Actually, it was because she was knowledgeable and friendly that this worked. She listened to me explain my skin care problems and predicted what products she thought would work, why what I had picked out might be problematic, used examples from her own skin care routine, and her suggestions were good. I even checked with a friend who used to work for the store who said she told me the truth about everything and that those were the products I needed. And the loyalty card pays for itself every year because of the bonuses you automatically get from signing up.

I feel like I've lost my point...but I think what my point would be is that even for somebody like me who already has their guard up and knows every trick in the book (I worked retail for a decade, I know the script) you can still get a big sale out of us. This didn't happen because I'm an easy mark, it happened because the sales person was knowledgeable about the product and what it's used for (skin care), because it is a good product to begin with, because the store itself has a loyalty program that makes sense and pays for itself, and just because she was nice. Not pushy, not like a "sales" pitch, just nice.

So that's it in the end. If you're in sales of any kind, remember those things: make a good product, know what it's good for, and be nice. Then you don't even have to try that hard.

Babylon 5: River of Souls

I've been obsessed with Babylon 5 for many, many years. During the original run of it's third and fourth season, it was my favorite show on television (it's still one of my favorites of all time). Like most people I don't actually like the fifth season of the show very much. It has amazing moments, and the way they wrap up the Narn and Centauri story lines is astonishingly good. There are few moments as poignant as The Fall of Centauri Prime. Of course, there are large swathes of fifth season that I just don't enjoy in any way. One of those significant problems for me is Captain Elizabeth Lochley. I have problems with her on multiple levels, all directed at the writing.

Her character is almost always used as the one that asks the stupid questions so that somebody can remind the audience of things that happened before. She's also usually the one who repeats things back in a slightly different phrasing so that the point is clear. She's frequently the one they use to churn out the expository dialogue. The character is at a huge disadvantage because she's the new one in an established ensemble cast. She's taking the place of a very beloved character. For no reason they give her a plot twist that will set part of the audience against her (her relationship with Sheridan). And the writing didn't do her a single favor.

All of this is my way of explaining why I managed to be so in love with this show and say that I also had never seen River of Souls until we watched it during our rewatch. I knew it was a movie that featured Soul Hunters (not my favorite alien race) and Lochley, a character I find uninteresting.

While part of me was a little happy to have this new and fresh Babylon 5 experience, I also found all my suspicions confirmed. It was nice to have something I didn't know the end to, to be discovering the story as it went along. But Lochley's dialogue was exactly like what I described above. She explained a lot of things, and strategically asked questions so that people could explain things that we already knew so that new viewers wouldn't be lost.

I'm not saying Lochley's not still a better female character than most that you'll find on television. She gets a lot of crap just for not being Ivanova. And obviously she's just not the type of character that I tend to enjoy either.

This isn't supposed to be a review of Lochley, but of the film. But I find talking about Lochley more interesting. I have no idea how Martin Sheen ended up with this part, or what kind of direction he was given to chew the scenery quite this much. He's completely miscast and it gets awkward. Garibaldi is, as always, fun. Seeing Richard Biggs in his cameo was actually a little heartbreaking because of the context and how his life was cut so short only a few years later.

But all in all, it was a story that would fit in with the show, it just didn't feel special enough for it's own movie. It was really more of an episode that got stretched out and repetitive at times.

Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers - To Live and Die in Starlight

Read my review of Babylon 5! As part of my rewatch of Babylon 5, we've been watching the movies to wrap up everything now that we're done with the series. Tomorrow I'll be talking about River of Souls, but for today we've got a tv movie that was actually a pilot to a failed spin-off called Legend of the Rangers. I remember when this first came out, I was super excited for it. I loved Babylon 5, and I really loved the Rangers. So to see more about the order and meet more Rangers? Great fun, sign me up. I even remember liking it when it came on the first time. But I think it was probably largely because of expectations and how much I missed the original show, because there are some serious problems with the movie even though there's a gem of a great idea in there.

The basic plot line was great, and I've seen pilots for great series that were much worse than this one. It had a lot of the hallmarks that made Babylon 5 such a great show although "The Hand" left a little bit to be desired (it had a been there, done that kind of vibe. Felt like leftover Thirdspace ideas really).

The characters were okay to start off with, they needed more dimension. As a stand alone movie that would be a problem, as a pilot that's not that bad.

But the movie completely falls apart when it shows the tech for the ship. They make a huge deal out of this weapons system, you can tell the writers and producers thought that it was fantastic and really going to be a hallmark of the show. UGH. I honestly think that half the reason they didn't pick up a show based on this was because they kept going back to that weapons system.

For people who haven't seen it, the basic idea is that the person who is manning the weapons jumps into a virtual reality area with zero gravity. The VR projects the area around the ship and the ranger in charge PUNCHES AND KICKS to fire the weapons.

No, I am not making this up. And it looks as dumb as it sounds. In super tense moments and the middle of battles we kept going back to this. It breaks up all the tension.

One day, I would love to see somebody go back to The Rangers and create a show or a comic series. I don't know if I want JMS to do it because I think creatively he's on to new tracks and he's doing interesting stuff now. But it's a neat concept, it's a shame it wasn't done well right off the bat and we never got that series.