Death of a Salesman: Or, Why Some Bad Reputations Are Deserved

So last night, I had a great, romantic dinner. Candlelight; mood lighting; music in the background; great food; stimulating conversation. I even got to test my reflexes by narrowly missing charring my hand off when I tried to make myself tea.

.... Yeah, you caught me. The electricity was totally out. But I got a fascinating slice of how Russian history-- particularly in the Soviet Era-- is still totally valid and reverberating today.

FLASH TO THE PAST:

SALESMEN DURING THE SOVIET ERA

During the Soviet Era, the way that people would buy things was by rolling up some form of paper (newspaper, etc.) and forming a cone that would hold whatever it was they were buying. Salt, sugar, flour-- it didn't matter. Everything went into that cone.

Just like in the US, in order to pay for your groceries, you would go up to the store clerk and hand them your groceries (in this case, in a paper cone). The sales clerk would put the cone on a scale, weigh it, and then tell you the price.

However, sales clerks had very low salaries, and in order to supplement their wages, clerks were known to overcharge for groceries, usually by placing a magnet under the scale and thus making the grocery weigh more. People would normally go home and reweigh whatever it was that they bought, in order to ensure that they paid for the right amount and weren't ripped off.

Because of this, if a boy was interested in a girl but he was a sales clerk, most women would tell them to hit the highway and never speak to them again.

But it wasn't just sales clerks.

Waiters were hated in Soviet Russia because they would rip you off; whatever you bought, they would eat half of it before the food even reached you, and you'd still have to pay full price. They'd take a glass of vodka, drink half of it, and then dilute the rest with water; take a glass of Cognac, and dilute it with vodka (since vodka was cheaper); sell "fine wine", and then give you poor wine diluted with water.

Any kind of salesman in Russia was rejected by the rest of society; and thus, all the salesmen intermarried, and created their own social code, with different rules and norms than the rest of society. The lying salesman was so endemic to Russia that they had a saying which, if I recall correctly, means that they have spaghetti behind their ears. (No, I don't entirely understand why.)

In fact, when the Soviet Union fell, and Russia switched to privatization, stores realized that they needed new sales clerks. So they put out a call for all sales clerks-- except, if you had any experience as a sales clerk during the Soviet Era, you were automatically excluded from applying for the job.

Old School: The Salesman in Popular Culture Today

Today, (a couple of hours ago, in fact,) I went to a play put on by a really great theater troupe called Theater Licedei. It's a group consisting mostly of young actors from the Saint Petersburg Theater Academy (the biggest, best, and basically only acting academy in Saint Petersburg), and put on plays with their faces painted like clowns. (Sounds strange, but oddly enough, it works.)

The show that I saw today was actually a dress rehearsal for their newest show, Old School, and as such, it was totally free. It was a ton of fun; however, beyond the fact that they actually showed tanks plowing across a bridge while two lovers gazed at the sunset (only in Russia, seriously), the biggest thing that jumped out at me was one of the characters who, as luck would have it, sells fruit.

This fruit salesman (the character, not the actor, obviously) is a drunk, lazy thief, who uses a totally broken scale and then rips off his customers by using his hand to either hold down the side with their fruit, or push up the side with the counterweight, so that every customer ends up paying max price (settled by his random futzing around with an abacus) while getting minimum fruit (usually one apple). This shtick goes on and on for the entire show, until the school teacher (one of the other characters in the play) pulls out her portable scale, sees the actual weight, and bursts into a hysterical screaming fit.

Sound familiar?

Not only that, but every time the salesman did this act in the theater, the entire audience (which, excluding me, was Russian, as proved by the fact that I was literally THE only person in the theater laughing hysterically when they played context-inappropriate songs in English) burst into hysterics. Not chuckles, not a couple of guffaws. Every person in the audience, young and old, was laughing uproariously. 

Why would this gag be so incredibly funny? And why would the theater troupe go out of their way to have one character whose basic function was to mimic that class of people?

And Now Things Get Personal

Yesterday, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the power went out. At 8:30, there was power; at 9:00, there was nothing. All day, my host family tried to contact the electric company, but the line kept being busy, or they would give my host parents the wrong phone number. Time kept on ticking by; my laptop died; the sun set; dinner came and went with no power to the fridge, microwave, or toaster over; we pulled out candles, and lit the stove by hand. (Now THAT was a truly terrifying experience; my reflexes could apparently use some work.) We all sat, gathered in the kitchen, listening to my host mom talk about the Soviet times and drinking tea.

Finally, at 9 o'clock or so at night, the workers from the electric company came. They took an extremely long time, and half of the time they sounded like they had no idea what was going on. The explanation they ended up providing at the end made absolutely no sense: apparently, they were saying that somehow the front door, which had been there for 25 years, had magically cut the wires for the electricity between 8:30 and 9:00, an even more wondrous occurrence since nobody had actually gone in or out between the time that the power was on and the power was out.

The workers wanted a ton of money-- 10,000 rubles, or $300 USD-- and once they had brought back the power, they left. Completely unaware of the money they wanted, and ecstatic to have electricity again, I bounded into my room, hopped on my now-charging computer, and didn't think a single thought more about it.

Flash forward to today.

When I arrived back home from Nevsky Prospect (I had walked all the way down to the Nevsky Prospect metro station, and then took the metro all the way home), my host father was meeting with a lady who I had never seen before. Turns out that lady was an inspector, and when she looked at the wiring, it was so bad that she thought my host dad had tried to fix it and make things worse. She couldn't believe that someone from her company could have done such a terrible job with the wiring; and furthermore, the money that the men had wanted, and the work that they wanted to do, was totally unnecessary. (My host family had gotten their electricity redone only two years ago, and once those men said they wanted that much money, they were simply aghast.)

Turns out that the men had not given my host family a paper stating that the electric work was theirs; and once my host family found out about how terrible a job they had done, at first, the workers refused to give the note. Finally, with the inspector's visit and my host mother threatening to call the company to tell them about the terrible job and almost embezzlement, suddenly the workers went from denying responsibility to calling my host family seven times within half an hour, asking if they could come back and redo the work they did last night.

So, it turns out that, in some cases, the reputation is entirely deserved. I wouldn't have believed it myself, if this hadn't happened, and if I hadn't seen the concrete references to this kind of thing in massive quantity. If this isn't a lesson in Russian history and culture, I don't know what is.