Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Things they don't tell you at Harvard Business School...

I made a sales call today.

Before that, I went to Taco Bell. This may or may not be related to the fact that I wanted to throw up.

I asked to speak to the owner. Let’s call him Fred. Well, I’m going to anyway.

“Is Fred there?” I asked with tremendous self-confidence.

Well, Fred wasn’t in but James could talk to me, he’s in charge of advertising, not Fred.

James listened for almost two seconds (I got to say my name and half of the call letters of the station) and then lit into me.

“We ain’t buying no advertising right now, bud,” (he called me “bud”), “So I might as well save you some time.” And then he hung up on me.

(apparently the man in charge of advertising isn’t the man in charge of public relations)

As my wife will tell you, you can’t get rid of me by just hanging up on me once. So I called him back.

This time I did the talking to begin with. I told him I didn’t appreciate his attitude and we needed to start over. He agreed and said….

“We ain’t buying no advertising right now, bud,” he said, “So I might as well save you some time.”

This wasn’t the starting over I was hoping for, but he didn’t end it there. I then was treated to his two- minute rant about how he had 10 calls in the last 30 minutes for advertising (yeah sure) and he needed to be selling his product, not talking to me. It was like a tantrum thrown by a two-year- old who didn’t want to go to bed.

I couldn’t believe how childish he was.

So, I did the only thing I could.

I called Fred at home and tattled on him.