To be successful in selling life insurance

Is that Shonceman's car, or did he have a Pacer?:huh:
I had a Pacer when I started on my first debit. But when I was in college I drove a Gremlin that was my grandpa's extra car (he drove an Ambassador). That Gremlin looked a lot like the one in the video, but it was a couple years earlier model.

I remember I was late to school for a class trip and didn't want to miss the bus. We lived out in the country about 20 miles away from school. I knew I'd need to speed, so I stayed off the highway and took the back roads. I had that little car around 90+ when I hit a rise in the road and went completely airborne, coming down into a flock of Canadian geese. Miraculously they all managed to dodge me! I got back on the road and kept it to 70 after that and made it to school just as the bus was about to pull out. That thing was a tank, though! It didn't seem to mess up the suspension or alignment or anything else. (And I never told my grandpa, so it didn't mess me up either!)
 
7E2112E2-8C4A-43FF-AAB7-6AE51A42C3A5.jpeg Here’s the original shonceman machine, “The Great Pumpkin”. (Mine was in better shape than the one in this pic. Of course, since I got rid of it around 25 years ago, who knows? Maybe this is a current picture of my actual car!)
 
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I ran a debit in Baltimore City very early in my career. Often, there was one person, usually a woman, that made the payment for the whole family. Those women held it all together, amidst the drugs and thuggery going on all around them. We had to get off the streets by noon, as the druggies started roaming the streets about that time, we had a lot of money in our pockets and everybody knew it.

It was a lot of fun. The agents met at a Denny's every morning and told tall tales about their adventures. The system had changed on these agents; it was getting a lot harder to make decent money on a debit and they were starting to close the companies down.
 
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Pacer fun facts


That was really interesting! I wish I'd kept my '77. It was ugly as sin, but a really comfortable ride. Unfortunately, it was starting to have weird problems that I thought were going to get expensive.

I got it in 1991 when I was out of work and broke. But I was in a wreck where my previous car was totaled, and I needed something. Somebody knew this guy that was selling his for $600, and loaned me the money to buy it. Low mileage, fantastic condition. I started working a debit in '92, and drove the heck out of it up and down the country roads of southeastern Virginia. Back in the swamp areas, the roads were so narrow, and this car was so wide that if I met anyone coming the other way, I'd pull over to the shoulder as far as I could (without going into the swamp myself!) so they could get by.

There's a couple good lessons for us in this company's history about 1) straying too far from your core focus, and 2) failure to have contingency plans. Another might be about being careful who you align yourself with (in this case, it seems that their alliance with Renault was the final nail in the coffin.) Ironically, I saw a similar chain of events at American General L&A, that eventually led to their demise.
 
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