My meeting with Becky and trip up to Republic was the beginning of the end for me. She was going to go with me up to Republic, Washington in an attempt to expand our territory to right near the Canada border. It was Becky, Raj, and myself in the car. Becky began the 2 hour drive by telling me about her kids.

Becky was a single mother of three children. They all lived with her mother. Immediately, I questioned this. Becky was a leader, she was supposed to be making pretty good money. This is when I learned all about the illusion. See, leaders do make good money, Becky says, but they in turn have to pay the new recruits out of their own pockets.

Becky goes on and on about how hard she is working for her kids. She puts in 12-15 hours every day, six days a week so one day she can be an owner. Having grown up with a single mom myself, I question if it wouldn’t be better to spend that time with her children rather than working so hard and missing their childhood.

And here, good readers, is where I saw what happens when you question the approved verbiage. Becky turned on me. She accused me of being “toast,” or burned out. She said I clearly didn’t have what it takes and that there were so many others who would take my place in a minute if I didn’t understand why what she was doing was the right thing. Immediately, my mind went into panic. No! I wanted this, she couldn’t take it away from me.

But something was always there, nagging at me that her reaction was overblown.

We arrived in Republic and that is when Raj told me not to tell anyone there what company we worked with. I remember wondering why (it would not be long before I found out) but I was too petrified to question him after Becky’s blow up. We wandered the quiet streets selling down mainstreet and stopped at a cute Mexican restaurant about as far from the Mexican border as you can get on the West Coast. And that is when things turned bad.

Before we could even step in, Raj was pulling me back. And police were coming out of the restaurant calling after us to stop. My instinct to obey authority kicked in and I stopped which caused Becky and Raj to rush to my side and assure the police we were going. They refused to allow me to ask any questions and just kept telling the cops we were leaving, we promised.

On the ride back I asked what had happened. You see, Raj says, some folks had been to Republic before and Republic was “so full of cows” that their city council actually banned us from doing business there. Raj told me they didn’t understand our methods and it was really the competition’s fault – not very American, you know?

When I got home that night I started doing some research and what I found was confusing and complex. It seems I wasn’t the only one with questions about this employer of mine. The federal authorities and the authorities in several countries did too. Not only that but whenever a former employee spoke out, in any way, against the company people who still worked there attacked the individual viciously, sometimes even threatening them.

I would find out the next week just how far the company would go to keep me from asking too many questions.