Mercury Energy - Do You Have the WORST (or No?) Training for Your Frontline Salespeople

This afternoon I was subjected to the WORST door-to-door salesmanship I've ever experienced.

A very polite and softly-spoken 30-something man came to my door, and - while I could barely understand a thing he said because of the thickness of his accent and the incredible speed at which he spoke - I perceived (from his livery) that he was endeavoring to get me to switch power companies.

Now, I have a soft spot for salespeople who carve out their living by selling on commission. Probably because I detest laziness in all its forms - and I can barely comprehend the degree of courage, tenacity, energy and sheer hard yakka it must take to perform such a role, let alone to succeed at it.

But the problem with door-to-door selling is this:

Good salesmanship starts at identifying the objective of the buyer. Even if they don't yet know they're a buyer, and they don't yet know, therefore, that they even have an objective.

BUT . . . with door-to-door selling, the visiting salesperson essentially has to push a narrow, pre-determined offering on the buyer - at best, convincing the buyer that the salesperson's objective should also be the buyer's objective.

Thus, it makes the process of handling objections (a Sales 101 process) extra challenging, because - generally - the offering can't be customised or even tweaked to suit any specifics relating to the customer's own circumstances.

However, the fact remains that buyer objections will always - naturally - exist in almost any situation in which the buyer is approached in a cold-call manner with an offer. Maybe they can be surmounted within the narrow, pre-determined mass-market offer . . . or maybe they can't.

BUT . . . the one thing NO salesperson should EVER do is refuse to listen to, completely disregard, cut off, or have a customer feel silly, unreasonable, or unintelligent, for their objection/s.

The only circumstances in which a salesperson will be successful with a potential customer, if he or she does that, are those in which the target is:

(a) just a total pushover;

(b) just wants rid of the salesperson and for the sake of achieving that, will buy, and/or

(c) through completely coincidental timing, is experiencing a motivating moment of dissatisfaction with their current supplier or service provider.

Of course, there is a (d), and that's where the company that the roving salesperson is representing, is dropping their pants on price. Really dropping their pants on price. But householders are increasingly waking up to the fact that the dropped-pants-pricing will escalate significantly at some point after they've got you stitched up and transferred (and that they'll get you somehow, even if the sales pitch includes promising that you'll "lock in this special pricing" for two years . . . or whatever).

Anyway. Back to the story.

So I'm giving this door-to-door salesman for Mercury Energy the time of day for two reasons:

The first, as mentioned, is my soft-heartedness (believe it or not) - and his uber-politeness certainly helped in that regard.

Secondly, because when he started rolling a phone service into his breakneck-speed verbal data download, he did get me at a potentially opportune moment.

In terms of the power supplier part of whatever his deal was, I have a distinct loyalty to Nova Energy. That is because they are the only company that didn't treat me like an infected wart when I was trying to get a "smart" meter changed out for something that wouldn't irradiate me when I bought a new property that had one of these radiation devices strapped to the porch.

And I did (past tense) have a totally unjustified loyalty to the small, Hastings-based landline and broadband provider, Now Broadband. But after more than a year of attempting to draw the attention of anyone there who cares, to the incredible contempt to which I've been increasingly subjected regarding a completely bullshit critical supplementary subscription service that was actually the sole reason I switched from Spark . . . well, I'm ripe for the discussion.

But again, back to the story.

So, I needed to convey to the Mercury Energy salesperson, certain aspects of the above reasons that I'm currently with those two service providers.

But he didn't want to know. I mean, he was not in the least impolite . . . he continued his soft-spoken pitch in his unbroken smile, but here were the problems. . . . and they were numerous:

1) I absolutely couldn't understand him. His accent was simply too thick and his rate of speech way too rapid. And I couldn't get this across to him.

2) I also couldn't understand the content of his attempted communication. He was firing bits, bytes, data, fibre somethings, plans, and all manner of even more techie terms at me. I tried to get him to understand that I couldn't understand, but he seemed not to want to understand that I didn't understand.

3) Some way into the download, I interrupted him to tell him that I was having real difficulty trying to absorb such an unrelenting torrent of information. Let alone such a lot of technical information. And let alone delivered at such speed. But it didn't change anything. It's like he thought if he started all over again, I'd somehow get it.

4) Notwithstanding that I couldn't understand a thing he was saying and that I couldn't get him to understand that I couldn't understand a thing he was saying, I decided to try to tell him the reasons I didn't really want to replace my current supplier situation.

In doing so (or attempting to do so), I wasn't actually closing off the possibility that I would do business with him. (I even followed his request to supply him with my current electricity bill and went inside, printed it out, and brought it back to him. I also gave him my Chief Reviewer card for The Customer NZ.)

Thus, if he'd have recognised it, we had just entered into the "objection" part of the sales process. (Which is sort of, if it's not a 'No', it's a 'Yes' . . . but you've still got to work out what the customer needs to have happen for you to turn the 'still no at this point' into an 'almost yes' and then - finally - into an actual "yes". Of course, you can experience drop out all the way along this transmission line - but that's just sales.)

But this guy hadn't been schooled in handling objections. So he decided - yet again - to take his presentation from the top. He began, all over again, downloading his data at me, maintaining his breakneck verbal speed.

At that point, my patience finally did run out.

Here is what I told him:

"I cannot do business with you. You are not in the least interested in what I, as the customer, want.

"Yet that is what a good and professional salesperson does: they LISTEN to the CUSTOMER'S objective, and then they see if they, as the salesperson, can marry THEIR objective, with the CUSTOMER'S objective.

"But you don't give a STUFF about my objective. You just want to push YOUR objective on me.

"So we can't do business." (Which is a shame, because I actually would have liked the thought of him adding another commission to his day's tally, because of me.)

And I went inside - marveling at how professionally NEGLIGENT and IRRESPONSIBLE Mercury Energy's sales management is, to have let this polite but completely cloth-eared, unseasoned "salesman" loose on householders.

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MASSEY VETS FALSIFY RECORDS: POLICE REPORT FILED

by Jordan Kelly • 27 February 2026

Readers following the coverage of my attempts to get to the bottom of what happened to my beloved little papillon, Harry, with whom I was extraordinarily closely bonded, will know that: (A) The rot in Massey University’s Companion Animal “Hospital” (CAH) runs deep. (B) Honesty and transparency is not their policy. Denial, dismissal, stonewalling, legal threats and intimidation are. (C) Animals aren’t safe there, with cruelty embedded in “care”, and your property (as your pet legally is) not considered your property at all, as far as Massey, its CAH staff and management are concerned. Your pet is theirs ; to do with as they please, according to their mindset and their modus operandi. And if that involves catastrophic levels of unauthorised, contraindicated, convenience sedation to facilitate their use of your pet in monetised student video collections (including on private cell phones, and to which you will be given no access), this too, according to Massey, is its own God-given right and “best practice” Standard Operating Procedure. (D) “Informed Consent” has a very different meaning in the Massey playbook to that which is generally deemed its accepted definition. (E) “Accountability” is a foreign concept and not one with which they have any intention of becoming acquainted. (F) Laws – including those governing animal welfare, property conversion and more – are not only optional, in Massey’s case, they simply don’t apply. In fact, they appear blissfully ignorant of them according to my (and Harry's) experience. You know all that. You’ve read about it here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here and in most of my other now 30+ articles covering the numerous different sub-atrocities within the overall atrocity that was the demise and disposal of my precious little Harry. Actually, "atrocious" doesn't come anywhere near to being an adequate adjective. Despite having been a professional writer since I was 16 and having upwards of 25 published books under my belt, I don't actually have an adjective that's adequate for the pure evil that was perpetrated upon Harry . . . and, by extension, me . There is not one word or one phrase that can sufficiently convey the depth and breadth of the sheer, unadulterated wickedness that festers without restraint within the walls of Massey University's Companion Animal "Hospital". What you, my readers (or those of you not on Massey's massive legal team payroll) didn’t yet know – because I didn’t yet know – is that record and evidence tampering (which, for any other New Zealand citizen would attract jail time of up to 10 years under the Crimes Act 1961 Section 258 (Altering document with intent to deceive) or Section 260 (Falsifying registers) , and/or a $10,000 fine under the Privacy Act Section 212(2)(b) - appears also to be included in the “we’re exempt” culture of Massey and its veterinary “hospital” staff. Note to Readers: The above laws aren't some hypothetical, bottom-drawer, dusty old legal tracts in archaic library textbooks. They're real, "living" laws that apply to every individual in our country. And today, they are being made to apply to Dr Stephanie Rigg and her "colleagues" who falsified Harry's records to create a cover-up of what they did to him . . . and to me. I will, duly, see Dr Rigg and her associates in Court. Dissecting the Cover-Up: Massey’s Metadata of Deception But back to what readers do know for a moment: You’ll know that I’ve been in the battle of battles for the past two months to extract Harry’s full records (or anything approaching them) from Massey’s Legal and Governance department. HOWEVER . . . there was one thing I hadn’t known how to decipher that they actually had finally drip-fed to me. It was File Name: Patient Change Log (Field-Level Audit) . I’ve been learning a lot about veterinary science, record-keeping, and law in general lately. Not because I wanted to. But because if you want to figure out how deep the rot really runs at Massey, you kind of have to. So I’ve learned a bit about how to decipher clinical metadata. Just e nough to realise that this Patient Change Log (Field-Level Audit) is exactly where the digital fingerprints of a cover-up are hiding. Despite the fact that this document has as much redacted as it shows (probably more), with ALL staff names and positions blacked out, for example -I still found four distinct “smoking gun” entries in these otherwise heavily-redacted metadata logs. BIG. FAT. SMOKING. GUNS. that amounted to one undeniable overall conclusion: This document isn’t a clinical record so much as it’s a literal crime scene . There were already so many dodgy inconsistencies in the few items I'd managed to pull out of Massey to that point (as I've documented in various of my preceding articles). But this document is where, undeniably, the bodies are buried. You just need to know which clod of dirt to look under. Hidden in Plain Sight . . . In A Little Thing Called the Metadata (That the Average Pet Owner Wouldn't Even Know Existed ) There are four hidden but key findings demonstrating that the entire timeline of Harry’s “experience” in that hellhole were was orchestrated, and the sudden "neurological event/decline" exit strategy planned for him were a total fabrication. And that fabrication had a start time. (For this start time we will initially revert our focus back to Massey's previously-supplied "Clinical Summary" (in all its dodginess) . . . We will then lead from the immediately below into the afore-mentioned "Patient Change Log (Field-Level Audit)". Bear with me. I promise not to let this get boring). Well, one of two start times. Either: (1) The 8.38am disconnection of his (with, by-then, the TWO 750% overdoses of the renally contraindicated convenience sedative with which the "crying dog"-sensitive ICU staff had plied him overnight) now life-essential IV fluids (8.5 hours into the prescribed 24-hour protocol that they charged me for). And/or: (2) When the day shift ICU "vet" arrived at 9am and decided a THIRD 750% overdose would be a strategic way do deal with a clearly already massively overdosed little 3.8kg, 15-year-old, dehydrated dog. Now WHY would any vet take such a decision? Well, for legal purposes, of course (remembering that the Venerable Dean Jon Huxley and the obviously not- so-new-broom Vice-Chancellor Pierre Venter, have all the money in the public purse to pay their top-tier external legal counsel . . . and by gum, there are enough of the buggers, if this site's analytics are anything to be guided by), I will precede the following by stating that these are my conclusions, made on the basis of the collation and evaluation of the information before me. That said, what I know of my readers is this: You are no intellectual slouches. Feel free to let me know if you can come up with any other conclusion from the information (complete with now numerous "receipts") that I have thus far presented, most especially here and here , and most tellingly of all, in today's expose. R emember, though, I held the ultimate evidence in my arms at 6pm on December 1 . . . and, some 45 minutes later, I let them take it (safely, for them) away from me, just like Harry's (the literal body of evidence) life had just been taken from him. Little Numerals that Tell A BIG Story The plan for Harry's manufactured exit is not so much written into the records, as it is revealed by the tampering with the logs. They lay bare the lead vet’s apparent plan that his life would come to an abrupt end by the pre-scheduled time of (well, they couldn't quite get consistency in the logs regarding the exact minute, but by the absolute latest time of) 17:00 hours i.e. 5pm . . . assumedly, the end of the day shift on December 1. Just in time to mark him "Deceased" and seal off the records of this catastrophically overdosed patient, before the next shift came on, saw his records, and someone started asking the immediately necessary, and certainly appropriate, questions. And those questions would (0R SHOULD ) have included , but would certainly not have been limited to: How long has this dog been in this state? Why hasn't any rescue and remediation protocol been undertaken? Why was he given yet ANOTHER administration of 50mg of Gabapentin at 09:00 hours after the preceding two during night shift? Why is he disconnected from his IV fluids? Who approved that and why? (And if they knew he'd starred in a multi-video student film festival that morning): Was he taken out of his cage and handled in this state? When did he last drink? Was he given any food before he entered this near-comatose state? Does the owner know of the overdoses and the state he's in? Have you filled in an incident report? Have any emergency specialists been called in for advice? and, no doubt, many more questions. OR . . . maybe not. It depends if the rot in that ICU is fully immersive, or if it's concentrated on Dr Stephanie Rigg's day shift and the ICU shift staff of the preceding (November 30) night. But none of those questions could be asked and none of that could happen. The day shift - led by "Dr" Rigg ("Steffi") - wasn't about to let it happen. Thus, the pre-timestamped, just before end-of-shift, Time of Death entered into the "Euthanasia Authorisation" form that they had all queued up for me long before I ever arrived at that Godforsaken facility that fated December 1 afternoon.

(UPDATED) PROOF: Massey Vet, Teaching & ICU Staff INTENDED Harry to Die & Were Actively Facilitating It . . . & the VCNZ Has A MASSIVE Conflict of Interest

by Jordan Kelly • 17 February 2026

Harry WAS A Marked Dog. I Had Hoped Massey Vet Staff Couldn't Have Been Any More Wicked Than They'd Already Been Caught Out Being. But YES , Actually, They COULD .

CATASTROPHIC 750% OVERDOSING & DEATH . . . Gross Malpractice, Deception & Management Malfeasance at Massey

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NOT ‘Euthanasia’: A Cover-Up & A Coerced Termination Under False Pretences

by Jordan Kelly • 12 February 2026

FOR LATEST INVESTIGATION FINDINGS: GO HERE . My Precious Little Boy Died Needlessly, In Intense Physical, Mental & Emotional Agony . . . After Massive Overdosing, Intense Cruelty & Intentionally False Diagnosis by Massey 'Vet' (So Called) to Enable His 'Disposal' After Lab Rat-Style Experimentation

Massey University's Upside-Down Prioritisation of Taxpayer Funds: Fiscal Malfeasance & the TRUE Cost of Institutional Arrogance

by Jordan Kelly • 11 February 2026

While my focus is on the 750% overdosing of my precious little dog, Harry, with an unauthorised, contraindicated convenience sedative, his conversion from patient to live specimen, and the subsequent destruction of evidence (HIM), Massey’s focus is on deploying a taxpayer-funded legal hit squad to 'profile' me.

ICU Vet, Massey Neurologist & Dean of School: Dangerously Deficient or Just Plain Dangerous?

by Jordan Kelly • 8 February 2026

An Expert Contributed Commentary (FOR LATEST INVESTIGATION FINDINGS, GO HERE .)

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