Transformation Now or Maybe Never

I don’t know what being freed from the parking lot meant to my neighbors, but all it meant for me and Charlene was that we had no more excuses to stay home from work.

Charlene and I were working together for a health juice company (and I use the term “health” loosely) called ‘Transformation Now’. Our job was to promote the juice at supermarkets and educate shoppers as to why Transformation Now was a better choice than Sunny D.

The juice we endorsed was of the superfruit variety: acai, pomegranate, blueberry, and noni. They were high in antioxidants and even higher in sugar content. If your body wasn’t tough enough to absorb 29 grams of sugar per 10 ounce serving, there was also a vegetable juice to choose from. It was low in sugar, contained half the salt content of a V8, and aroused a wonderfully frightening throat closing sensation after every sip.

Most shoppers weren’t interested in trying the juice for fear it would trigger an explosive need to visit a bathroom, which was a reasonable concern inside a supermarket, indeed. Customers were particularly cautious about sampling the acai (pronounced ‘Ah-Sigh-EE’) because it was purple and looked like prune juice. Its resemblance to prune juice was so uncanny that, in our neck of the woods, it became widely referred to as the ‘Ass-EE’ berry juice.

Charlene and I had a lot of fun with our job. After all, we got paid to interact with people and give away free stuff – which is like two of our all-time favorite things to do. Unfortunately for us, however, people weren’t buying the juice. 

Some would argue that it wasn’t selling because it was too expensive (which it was), but one woman we met at Costco put it best when she said, “It’s kind of like the taste you get in the back of your throat after you almost vomit in your mouth.” 

In any event and for whatever reason, Transformation Now decided to cut our sampling program short. So, rather than authenticating the health benefits of their snake oil juice for two more months, we’d only be doing it for two more weeks.

"That's some fucking bullshit!" Charlene uttered when she first heard about our early dismissal from Transformation Now.

In the pre-Willis era, Charlene was a prim and proper little Miss Goodie Two Shoes. The words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ weren’t even in her vocabulary. She struggled a great deal with my free flowing foul mouth at the start of our relationship, but as time went on, she slowly began to love using profanity as much as I do – especially when in the heat of anger. 

“Can you believe this shit?” she added. “We were the best fucking thing that ever happened to Transformation Now.”

“I know. It’s some bullshit,” I sympathized. “I don’t know how they expect to compete against Sunny D with that overpriced, shit tasting, snake oil juice without us.”