I have linked way too many times to my old Sunstone article about my time in Summer Sales–installing security systems sold by young returned-missionaries-turned-door-to-door-salesmen in the greater Denver, CO area–but that’s only because it still boggles my mind how, after all these years, we still allow such flagrant and pernicious dishonesty in our midst. The fact that Lavell Edwards Stadium strictly bans beer ads within its precincts, yet allows Vivint to purchase banners, is the epitome of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Seriously, we are encouraged to regularly attend an endowment ceremony wherein Satan himself says “You can buy anything in this world with money”—and that within a temple you can only enter if “you are honest in all your dealings with your fellow man”—and then somehow consider it a virtue to go out and cheat our way to as much money as possible. In the Sunstone article itself, I deployed Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to try and untangle this baffling incongruity, but now I’d like to also highlight someone who got cut for space from the original piece.

One of my co-workers that summer was this young, tatted-up high school drop-out with a Harley Davidson named Kyle. He smoked, drank, swore, had facial hair, and everything else they tell you not to do at BYU-Idaho; hence I was initially suspicious of him when he moved into my apartment with all the other techs. But happily, I swiftly repented of my wrong first impression, “for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart”; we became fast friends that summer, and often worked on each other’s installs together.

At the risk of cliche, he was the proverbial biker with a heart of gold. He was exactly the sort of man Joseph Smith was talking about when he said, “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor, than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite”^[1]Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith, 1976, pg. 303.. Kyle it was, more than all the other techs (including me, it must be said), who would straight-up refuse to do an install if it felt morally wrong. One time for example, he received the call to install a system for this geriatric old woman who appeared to be legally blind. Testing his hunch, he held up the system keypad and asked the lady which button he was pointing at. “Is it a 9?” she asked, squinting; it was the # sign. “I can’t do this install,” he said simply, and packed up and left.

We later learned that this lady had even expressed misgivings during the initial sales pitch, saying she would prefer to discuss it with her adult son first. The sales-rep (who, again, was an RM and a BYU student) had then asked when her son would be back in town. “Oh, Tuesday,” she said–which would be just after the federally-mandated 3 day grace period when a customer is entitled to a full refund. “Well, why don’t we install the system now, and then you can discuss it with your son on Tuesday?” offered the sales-rep. It was slimy, and the only reason that blind old woman on a fixed income didn’t get locked into a 3-year contract for an unnecessary security system is because Kyle had a conscience.

By chance, that exact same sales-rep sold a system to a deaf woman–not going deaf, mind you, not legally deaf, but completely deaf–and Kyle was again the one assigned to do the install. Not knowing ASL, he communicated with her via written Post-It notes. Before he started drilling holes in her walls, he first tested the siren to see if she could even hear it. She could not. Once again–and to the consternation of the sales-rep–he determined that he could not in good conscience install this security system, and informed her of the same. She agreed, and said he had a good heart.

Shortly after these two incidents, our office met some arbitrary sales goal, and so we were all treated out to a nice sit-down restaurant in downtown Denver. Kyle happened to be seated next to the exact same sales-rep who had sold to both the blind old woman and the deaf woman. As was his normal M.O., Kyle ordered a Budweiser. But after the server placed down his drink, the sales-rep, without the slightest shred of self-awareness, asked in all earnestness, “You’re not going to drink that, are you?”

Kyle did not respond, but simply stared at him mouth agape. This is what he finally had the nerve to get self-righteous about? This is what finally awakened his moral code? A friggin’ beer?! I had never witnessed a more stupidly obvious example of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel in my entire life. If it had been fiction, this exchange would’ve been considered ham-fisted and too on-the-nose.

Kyle left and sat at a different table; and to this day, I wish I’d had the wherewithal to join him.

That night, not just Kyle but the entire technician crew got even more blackout drunk than usual. I didn’t join them, but I couldn’t blame them, either; when you are working an inherently dishonest job wherein you feel a bit of your soul die each day–and I mean that literally–your options are to either drown your anger or lose your conscience. And they chose not to lose their conscience. One of the techs told me that if it hadn’t been for me, he would’ve assumed that all Mormons were crooks. And there was nothing I could say in return.

Kyle and I remained friends and confidants till the end of the summer, and even burned our work-shirts together under the light of the moon once our contracts were up. Sadly, however, we lost all track of each other once we both quit and moved on, as tends to happen with work friends. I started grad school at Utah that Fall, and even tried to email him 2 years later when I completed my MA, but never heard back. He never migrated to FaceBook, which, while good on him (sincerely), that also means I never learned whatever happened to him. I had encouraged him to go back for his GED, and even get his Associates, but have no honest clue if he did or not.

I’m a community college professor now, and I have taught many, many students who remind me of Kyle. Who knows, maybe that awful Summer is what first set me on this career trajectory (certainly I don’t feel a piece of my soul dying each day in this line of work). I do still occasionally wonder what happened to him. I worry about him, and of all the students like him–the working poor who are exploited, slandered, and marginalized at every turn, by those same self-righteous “Pharisees, hypocrites!” who “tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matt. 23:23), and are still doing so today.

But I don’t worry about the state of Kyle’s soul, because I well remember that whenever it was a choice between the money (“You can have anything in this world with money”) and his conscience, he always chose his conscience. And when the Great and Terrible Last Day comes, and both tatted-up Kyle and the clean-cut sales-rep are called to stand before the judgment bar of the Lord, I think I know know for whom it will be better.