A Diamond comes to Town

Once or twice a month a Diamond would come to town to show the plan. Usually an auditorium at a school was booked for this event that was scheduled to begin at 8pm. IBO’s got ripped off $10 each to listen to these cult leaders.

Good IBO’s who are “serious business builders” must show up at least an hour in advance so my husband was usually in a panic to get there by 7pm.

Ambot enjoyed mingling beforehand with the other cult followers. I did not so I’d bring a book (fiction, not on the required reading list) choose a seat and sit down and read while the room filled with IBO’s excited to hear the Diamond say the same old same old.

It pissed off the Platinum sack of shit that I didn’t mingle beforehand. He’d get after Ambot and criticize him because I wasn’t hanging out with his wife and doing what she was doing, sticking close to her if I wanted to be like her.

Um, no, I never said I wanted to be like her or hang out with her. She was an OK person and I’d usually say hi to her at some point in the evening like when we were leaving.

The mingling lasted until 8:30 or so because the Diamond was always delayed somewhere so the Amway meeting never started on time at 8. The Diamond would finally show up and the cult followers would jump to their feet cheering and clapping. I was one of the few who remained seated and silent.

Usually these meetings would last over 2 hours. Each Diamond’s speech was a bit different but most of them spent the first half hour to an hour talking about themselves, pretending to be a comedian, or talking about news events. Then they’d spend an hour to an hour and a half giving the business plan presentation on a Powerpoint presentation on a white screen.

Some of these Diamonds never mentioned Amway. Other times the A word came up towards the end of their presentation. They’d all talk about the training system and the tools must be purchased and to bring people to the functions. They’d all do a bunch of real fast talk when it came to the compensation.

I remember one Diamond said if the IBO finds 6 people, and they find 6 people, and so on and so on, that in 6 to 9 months you’d earn $78,000 a year working only 10 hours a week. Two minutes later he’d upped the ante to $250,000 a year. By now he’s got the cult followers whipped into a frenzy so then he goes for it a couple of minutes later. $750,000 a year in 2 to 5 years working 10 hours a week! The cult followers are shrieking with this good news totally lapping it up.

When the Diamond finally finished, the IBO’s would rush the stage wanting to meet him and he’d have a group of admirers hanging around for 20 or 30 minutes.

Occasionally the Diamond stayed for some worthless “teaching”. You know the kind that involves telling all the IBO’s in attendance to sign up for Communikate, buy a premier monthly membership to World Wide Destructive Bastards, buy CD’s, buy books on the reading list, attend major functions. Buy tools and when you’re done buy even more tools so you can give them away to prospects. That’s the only way to become successful is buying the tools needed to succeed at an Amway business.

Oh wait, they got that wrong. The only way to succeed at making your upline Diamond rich is to buy tools. 

If we were lucky we’d get out of there by 11pm. If not so lucky, midnight. Usually the Diamond couldn’t rattle on into the wee hours because the school was only booked for a set period of time. Probably the janitor was off shift around midnight and had to lock up.