I think used car salesman is the most perfect job a JW could ever have, sell the BS on their job, then again on the weekends when they knock on your door
Elder Is Dodgy Used Car Salesman
by pale.emperor 22 Replies latest jw experiences
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redvip2000
There are plenty of people who have personal businesses that thrive on the JW universe.
There is someone in my JW family (hope i'm not saying too much), that owns a hotel very close to Bet - HELL in upstate NY, and this hotel basically lives off Jdubs who visit Bet-HELL and need a place to stay. If it was not for Jdubs, the hotel would certainly go out of business.
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under the radar
redvip2000: The sad truth is that if word got around that your relative was inactive or (gasp!) an apostate, their business would dry up in a heartbeat. This could happen without any proof or evidence of any kind. The merest rumor can be the poison pill that kills a business or wrecks a career...
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Finkelstein
Beware of people who are reminded they have a personal savior three times a week and that the world is a wicked place, they may just act wicked as well.
I've known some pretty shady JWS who were business people but nevertheless they looked so clean and righteous come Sunday at the Kingdom Hall.
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StephaneLaliberte
My ant raised her 4 kids as a single mother. She bought a modest home and needed help to renovate it. She asked an elder who came in and while doing the work, seemed to always have good reasons to charge her more and more. In the end, he never completed the work. She asked a brother with no privilege. He gave a flat fee and held on to it until everything was done properly.
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StephaneLaliberte
When I was a young adult (19), I had to move out of my parents place (story too long to go into), and moved in with some friends. I needed work. So an elder offered me work at minimum wage doing cleaning at night.
Years later, I had my own cleaning business and realized just how much this guy was making over my head. The guy knew the trouble I had lived in and still experienced at the time, and he basically took advantage of me rather than land a helping hand.
Later on, I ended up working for my mom's cleaning business and very often, we'd help people our by giving them up to 30$ an hour for various cleaning jobs. The point is that if you say you are going to help someone, help that person!
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Tameria2001
When I was a JW, I had an experience that caused me never do business with JWs ever again, well two, but I didn't learn my lesson from the first time.
The first time was when my husband and I were first married. Just before we got married, my husband was living in a cozy little apartment renting from a fairly decent landlord (a worldly woman). But we were convinced into moving into this other apartment, owned by a JW elder. From all appearances, it looked even better than the place we had, but it wasn't as we discovered after moving it. What made thing impossible to live there, besides all the things that were wrong with it was the landlord (a JW elder). He would be constantly popping in, with no notification, and not bothering to knock on the door. There were a couple of times I was in the bath, and guess who would come walking in. After that, my husband and I moved to another location, in a different congeration.
The second time, the one where I did learn my lesson. My husband was involved in a car accident, no one was hurt, but our car needed some major repairs. A fellow JW told us that his friend, also another JW in a different congeration owns a body repair shop. So we went to this "friend", and he said he would do the repairs. At the time we had a $500 deductible and worked out an arrangement for the payment of the deductible. We told him we could pay $75 a week, except for one week, the week we had to pay our rent. But we would pay double the following week, and he agreed to this.
But when the week we were to skip, and something he agreed to, he started calling and harassing us, and even threatened to report us to the elders. We headed him off and talked to our elders about the situation, told them of the agreement, in case he called, which he did report us. The harassment got so bad that we borrowed an answering machine, turned off the ringer, and screened all of our calls. This guy was calling and threatening us quite a few times during the day and night. But being a "good" JW we didn't report his sorry @$$ to the authorities.
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Phizzy
I ran my own businesses (3), for my working life. I was ripped off by JW customers and by JW's working for me.
But I would like to give my experience of one guy, an Elder, who was a used car dealer, and I used to buy my cars off him regularly, never went anywhere else. I always bought nearly new, but once or twice older ones.
He would show me what he had paid for them, and ask me to pay him a bit more than he had paid. Once when he couldn't find a car I liked, he sold me one, and agreed to buy it back at the same price when he had found the one I wanted. Two months later, he did just that.
I never had a bad car from him, most were fantastic, typically covering a total of 250,000 trouble free miles.
He was one super honest J.W Elder, all round good guy. Ah , Honest John, I wish you were still around to buy cars from !
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steve2
Not letting JWs off the hook, but one of the problems in doing business with either family and/or friends is that it becomes harder to complain or take action when the deal goes sour, whereas when you deal with non-family or nonfriends, you'll be more likely to take legal recourse if the other party tries to talk you out of it.
But yes, add the element of the other party being a JW elder and if you're a JW, your ability and/or preparedness to complain and/or take action is very constricted.
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blondie
Church elders held a hearing which resulted in Robert's disfellowshipping from a congregation that included his parents and siblings, Roe said.
While not officially disfellowshipped, Janet Bryant eventually opted to join her husband in staying away. She, too, experienced shunning, her sister said.
Janet was devastated when longtime friends refused to greet her at the grocery store, Roe said.
Meanwhile, Robert's landscaping business suffered as family members quit working with him and he lost Jehovah's Witness clients. In January of 2000, he filed for bankruptcy. Both Bryants developed stress-related health problems, Roe said