Yesterday's entry set me to thinking about things that happened while I was driving a car.
In the late sixties, I was employed by a company which primarily rented electronic test equipment. I worked for a subsidiary of theirs, involved in the long-term leasing and financing of the same things, a natural fit.
The company had several locations around the country and prided itself on its huge inventory, and how fast it could supply whatever rental customers needed. To expedite the process further, it used an open WATS line keeping the offices in continual contact, via microphones instead of standard handsets. That way, if any office didn't have a particular widget in stock and someone said so out loud, someone in another location could simultaneously hear that and say "We've got one here." The item could then be shipped immediately from the other location, quickly serving the customer's need.
In time, it was decided to take the company "public" and preparing the stock offering took key mangers out of the day-to-day operation for a significant amount of time. Unfortunately for me, my "boss" was one of them. In his absence he arranged to have a salesman, let's call him Dick...because that was his name, fill in until his return.
Now Dick was a true company man in every way, and quickly realized that the WATS lines were already in place and paid for, so why go to the additional expense of making private calls to discuss pending financing transactions?
In no time, people started coming into my office to tell me Dick was on the WATS line wanting to talk to me. And then, if I responded, Dick would start spewing information about potential customer's financial conditions and considerable other data that had been entrusted in confidence to us.
I asked him to kindly refrain from publicly disclosing information in that way, because aside from breaching basic customer confidentiality, who knew who else was listening in one of our other locations. Dick replied that he didn't care, the phone cost savings to our bottom line was far more important.
Having no other alternative at that point, I stopped responding to Dick's WATS calls. "Tell him I'm not in," I'd say when he called, then immediately call him back on a regular phone.
Now, not being the brightest bulb in anyone's chandelier, it took Dick some time to finally figure out that, quite often, I was in the office but merely avoiding public discussion of my customer's private information. After that went on for a while, and he became hotter under the collar, he informed me that in order to smooth things out he was flying down from Massachusetts to discuss the issue.
When the day arrived, I picked him up at Newark Airport, and headed down the New Jersey Turnpike toward our office in Metuchen. In almost no time Dick began listing all the insubordinate things I'd done, particularly my total disregard for his money-saving WATS line idea. I naturally responded with some thoughts of my own.
By the time we were midway between Exits 12 and 13, still quite a ways short of our destination, Dick was so enraged, he terminated me right then and there in the car. Upon my sacking, I pulled my vehicle over to the left, the high-speed lane and small open strip next to the center guard rail, then came to a stop. Now, this wasn't exactly like today with hordes of traffic, but there were still plenty of cars whizzing by us. Then, I turned to Dick and said, "Get out!"
He turned blue, then green, then a couple of shades of purple as he replied, "You can't do that. This is a turnpike, I could get killed out there." I told him he should have thought of that before he lost his cool, because the car belonged to me, and I didn't want him in it. And that's when this grown man, in his mid-thirties or so, began to blubber, whine, beg and sob.
Now ordinarily, I'd perhaps have said a few things more, just to be absolutely sure he knew what kind of person he was dealing with, then acquiesced and driven him to the office. But this guy was a boob of a magnitude I couldn't comprehend, and I'd met plenty of people by then. So I waited for an opening in the traffic, crossed the pike, forced him out on the "safe" side, threw his luggage at him and drove home.
To this day, I don't know what Dick did from there and certainly don't care. I do know there was a service center a few miles further along, and this was long before cell phones so maybe he walked there or thumbed a ride. As far as I was concerned though, I felt really fine, except, I was hoping to teach that guy a lesson. But as I sit here remembering it all, I sincerely doubt that pompous, self-important oaf had any capacity to learn at all.
That's it for today folks.
Adios
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