And now for something completely out of left field...

We went to Williamsburg today to listen to a time-share spiel. We received a card in the mail about it and decided wth... we hadn't been to W'burg in about a year and we had nothing else planned so why not. We didn't know anything about it but figured our chances of getting timeshares from the inlaws were coming to a close.

Well, I was completely unimpressed immediately upon arrival. There was the main building and a "model" building that was being remodelled already. The salesman reeked. I was getting nauseated sitting next to him. He smelled like an ashtray full of old butts....wet butts. Gak. His hands were grubby. Nothing wrong with that...mine get grubby as hell when I'm pulling weeds in the garden but I seriously doubt this guy had ever bent down to pull a weed, even if he were physically able to, which I doubt. Something told me that his grungy, ragged fingernails held the contents of his breakfast burrito.

So, he starts his thing and is completely disorganized. He's flipping his pages back and forth trying to find this or that to show us. Really bad. I wander off to check on the kid. He still hasn't got his shit together when I get back. Finally we go off to see the models. I'm unimpressed. They are painted the most ungodly purple I've ever seen. The dining room walls are deep maroon, sage green, AND gold. Holy shit... it was fugly! The interior doors were those cheap ass pressed fiberglass jobs. Maybe even fisher-price plastic. The rooms were small. The guy said when the other buildings are built the rooms will be bigger and the interior fixtures would be better...bigger tvs, nicer doors, bigger tubs. Whatever dude.

Then off to have a "virtual tour" of the timeshare. There was a flat screen tv in the hallway upstairs...we had to take the elevator since the guy would never have made the stairs. Apparently this particular timeshare was going to be a themed water park. I'm not sure how people dressed in colonial era costumes are supposed to fit in with a water park but hey...I've got an open mind. The thing was supposed to be a big domed building where you enter on the second floor into a cave opening and there will be smoke coming from the doors where you enter. (I've got a chill already.) After that it just gets bizarre but he did mention Starbucks half a dozen times.

After the "virtual tour" we looked at a miniature model. The salesman is gabbing away about all the newspaper articles, blahblah, when I interrupt him to ask why the tabletop model didn't look anything like the "virtual" model. He said that was there first plan and it had changed and they hadn't gotten the new model made yet. Ok.

Back to the table to start negotiations. Now it gets really weird. He calls the second string over. (The third string is sitting against the far wall just waiting to coerce someone into signing away their child's college fund). The second string guy starts writing down numbers and dh is saying, nope, no good. Can't swing it. I detect a hint of snottiness about the guy. So I cut to the chase, decide to end it there and say, "You know, I'm a kind of hand's on person and just don't feel comfortable investing in something that I can't see." I thought it was a fairly reasonable excuse. They wanted $15K for a small 2 bedroom unit that we could only use in certain times of the year. The guy says, "didn't you see the model?" I replied, "Yes, I did, but that isn't the domed building." He countered with, "Well, you saw the virtual tour." (His tone was getting snarky, iykwim.) I said, "Yes, but the final outcome may be quite a bit different than the "virtual" model." We had seen absolutely no floor plans of the proposed buildings, just an illustrator's rendition of what the place would look like. Plus, the first salesman had only said that the rooms would be "bigger". He made some comment, can't remember what it was, but I said "We had an addition built onto our house last year. The photo (our virtual model) that we showed the contractor was beautiful and we said we wanted it to look like that. We ended up with something so bad we had to pay another contractor to redo it which put us way over budget. That's why I'm cautious." This is where the guy starts antagonizing me. Dh said he was afraid we were going to start shouting at each other.

He said "This is a multimillion dollar project. We're not going to hire just anybody off the street." I said, "I don't care how much you pay them, there is always the chance that the builders may take shortcuts in order to make more money." The building that we were in, and that they were remodelling was only four years old. Why a four year old building needs to be remodelled is beyond me. Then the guy really gets in my face. Remember, he's trying to sell me a timeshare. He starts mouthing off, "are you trying to group us in with all the corrupt contractors now?" I said, "no, I'm not saying that. But it happens." He continues, "Well, we research the contractors we hire." And then they got up and left. Right in the middle of my saying "we researched ours as well..." The second string guy just left in a snit. The first guy said "someone will be over to finish your paperwork." No handshake. No 'have a nice day'. No 'thanks for coming out'. I was like "WTF???"

Then dh told me I was too aggressive. That I could have been nicer. I replayed it over and over and damn it to hell, the other guy started it. I just finished it. I'm not going to give someone $15K based on a freaking drawing of something they hadn't even broken ground on yet. Get real. That had to be the most unusual sales ploy anyone has ever used on me before. The old "antagonize the punter into buying the timeshare" routine.