There were seven or eight of us at an early morning meeting and Bob, who was chairing the meeting, fell asleep. The rest of us crept out, and another chap and I went down to the street and stopped about a dozen people before we found six perfect strangers willing to go along with our practical joke. They came up and sat around the table for a couple of minutes (the rest of us were watching from an adjoining room) and then one of them made enough noise to awaken Bob. At that point another of them said, “O.K. Bob, we’ll do it your way, but you’ll have to deal with the consequences if it doesn’t work out.” The six strangers then got up and left, as did we. Bob sat there for at least fifteen minutes before he returned to his office. He never mentioned the incident to any of us.
***
I suppose we sometimes may know why we make a mistake, but usually a mistake is just a mistake. One of my co-workers, when I worked at the Canadian Pacific Railway, a usually very dependable chap we called the Bopper, made a beauty. His mistake caused a loaded box car to end up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, rather than Saint John, New Brunswick. At the CPR, incidents like this required a report to be made and a form to be filled out. One of the questions on the form was: “Why did you make this error?” The Bopper told the supervisor who was overseeing the form’s completion that he had no idea why he made the mistake. The supervisor, who couldn’t stand the Bopper at the best of times, snarled back, “Well, I know why you made it!” “Okay,” said the Bopper, handing him the form, “then you fill it in.”
***
I’ve never been considered a very patient person, but I believe patience may once have saved my life. I was driving to PEI for my annual vacation. This was decades before the Confederation Bridge was built, so any delay could mean missing a ferry crossing, thereby adding hours to the journey. I pulled into a gas station in a little town a bit northeast of Quebec City. The attendant told me he had to move a couple of cars before he could serve me (this was also before self-service was introduced). Normally, because I still had a quarter of a tank, I would have left and pulled into the next station. But this day, for some reason, I waited patiently. The delay was about five minutes. A few miles down the road I came upon a multi-vehicle accident in which six people were killed and six others seriously injured. I later learned that the accident happened about five minutes before I arrived on the scene.
***
He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You never knew what to expect from him. He’d be perfectly charming and effective at a meeting, and then the next time he’d be an insufferable, arrogant jerk. This inconsistency was holding him back in his career. He had a large family that he doted on. One day as we were going into an important meeting, I said to him “Act as if your kids were in the room.” There were no more problems with his behaviour from that moment on.
***
Shortly after I started working full time, I thought I’d saved enough money to buy some new clothes. I went into a store on Yonge St. in Toronto and, carefully looking at the price tags, picked out some items that I had enough cash to buy. I took them to a man I thought was a clerk, but who actually turned out to be the owner; a gentleman by the name of Max Gold. He asked me my name and where I worked. After I told him he said, “Lyman, let me show you some items that I think would look a lot better on you.” As he made each choice I kept a mental tally of the cost. “Mr. Gold,” I said, “these are too expensive. They add up to almost three times the amount of cash I have.” “That’s all right,” he said, “give me a down payment of what you can now and drop in each payday and give me what you can until it’s paid off.” He went on to say, “You see, Lyman, when you buy something cheap, you may be happy when you pay for it, but you’ll be disappointed every time you use it. When you buy a quality article, you may be a little concerned when paying for it, but you’ll be pleased every time you use it.”
***
There are as many theories about selling as there are salespeople, ranging all the way from the incompetent Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman to the super-salesmen-TV-evangelists. The best selling job I personally witnessed was the sale of a brand new automobile to a childless farm couple in Saskatchewan, neither of whom could drive. I didn’t see this as a particularly offensive act because the couple could clearly afford the car and surely one of them would learn to drive it. However, when about two months later the car still sat, unused, in their barn, I asked the salesman how he ever managed to make that sale. He told me he convinced the couple they shouldn’t sit by and have their hated neighbor be the first in the area to own that year’s model.