I'm an honest person.

But I happen to work in car sales. I got into car sales out of curiosity. My stepfather sold cars, and he made it seem like a romantic profession. He liked to talk about the freedom it gave him, and the thrill he got every time he sold a car. I love cars, so I thought selling cars would be a fun job.

But when I got into car sales, I discovered it has very little to do with cars. Car sales are about people, not cars. And really, the best background you could have to be successful in car sales wouldn't be in engineering, or anything to do with cars. It would be in psychology. Because everything in car sales turns on human psychology.

Human beings are simply not rational when it comes to three things: love, war, and cars. People are, to put it frankly, crazy when it comes to the purchase of automobiles.

Let me give you two examples. When I worked at a GM dealership, a middle-aged couple came in to look at SUVs. The woman clearly wanted an Equinox, but her husband wasn't interested. He steered her toward a Traverse, which is larger and more expensive, but more in line with what he thought she should have. The woman went along with her husband. So we test drove the Traverse and "worked numbers," which took about two hours, and came to a deal. I got my paperwork ready and we walked across the parking lot to the main building where the finance office was.

The instant we walked into the main building, she saw it. A brand-new Buick Regal sitting on the showroom floor. The woman nearly fell over.

"Oh my God!" she exclaimed. "What is that?!"

I explained what it was, and the next thing you know, we were opening the showroom doors and pulling out the Regal for a test drive. Once around the block was all it took. All thoughts of a Traverse or an Equinox had left her mind. She was completely in love with this burgundy Regal.

So we wrote her up on the Regal and they drove it home. This was on a Saturday night. On Monday morning I got a call. It was my Regal lady.

"Can you take this car back? I don't want it. My husband forced me to take it and it just won't work."

Her husband, of course, hadn't forced her to take anything. He had tried his best to get her into a Traverse and failed. Now she was back to what she had wanted in the first place: an Equinox.

Some dealerships would have told my customer she was Sure Out of Luck and there was nothing they could do. She had signed on the dotted line and the Regal was hers. But we were nice guys and tore up the contract. We took the car back -- with the 400 miles they had put on it over the weekend -- and sold her a new Equinox. The middle-aged couple left happy.

Or, take the case of the young couple who worked in military intelligence at the air base near my dealership. They ordered a new Volkswagen Tiguan. But when it took a little longer for it to arrive than expected, their anxiety got the best of them and they volunteered to retask a defense satellite to pinpoint the exact location of the ship it was on so they could have a better idea of when it would get here. I am not making this up. I don't think Uncle Sam would approve of that particular use of his satellite!

Did any of this make sense?

Hell, no. But car sales seldom make sense. It's crazy, mon.