My fiancé and I agreed to attend a two-hour timeshare presentation in Honolulu in exchange for a five-night hotel stay on Oahu for $800. We understood the arrangement: enjoy the discounted room, sit through the pitch, decline. Apparently, we had underestimated the available curriculum.
The first woman was pleasant. She asked the usual questions, and we explained our jobs. My fiancé works as a biomedical equipment technician. I’m a blood bank technician during my gap year before physician assistant school. We also made it clear that we didn’t have the money or time for a timeshare.
Then the closer arrived and appeared to identify my fiancé as the entire finance department.
She directed almost all of her pitch toward him. As the pressure continued, he looked increasingly uncomfortable, so I stepped in after her spiel and said we weren’t interested. This was apparently the wrong contribution from the wrong member of the household.
She proceeded to explain that the return on investment from her HGV offer was more worthwhile than what I was putting into my education. I had been considering a career in health care, but fortunately someone was available to explain the superior prospects of vacation ownership.
Next, she asked which of us was paying for the trip and told me to let the people handling the finances talk.
I have more in assets and investments than my fiancé does. I didn’t tell her that. Correcting her assumptions would have required participating in a financial audition I hadn’t signed up for, and we were already spending enough of our vacation in this presentation.
She then suggested my fiancé get a third job to support me and my supposed debts from vacations and student loans. A third job. Her proposed solution to our lack of time and money was to reduce his time further until the money appeared.
We finished the presentation without accepting the offer. I’d expected an aggressive sales pitch; I hadn’t expected my education to become a competing product or my fiancé to receive unsolicited career expansion plans.
The detail I keep enjoying is that he’d told me to simmer down beforehand. I tend to come in hot when someone tries to take advantage of us. He had asked for restraint, and then we met a woman who thought he needed a third job.
