Every year, as Catholic school students, we were sent out into the neighborhood on fundraising expeditions, wearing our uniforms and carrying cardboard suitcases filled with overpriced chocolate bars. It was my first sales job, and I was terrible at it. I’m pretty sure my Aunt Josephine bought the entire box every time, not because the candy was so great, but because I was her brother’s son and she didn’t want to see me wandering down the road to failure, ending up in prison, or worse, working at the post office.

If, as a child, I had any skill at selling, it involved nothing more than getting a kind relative to feel sorry for me. And now, even that questionable talent has vanished, converted somewhere along the way into an unnatural sense of empathy for the customers’ troubles. I doubt I’d last more than a day even as a toll collector…