First Impressions

I have discovered over the years that you really can’t judge a book by its cover. I have met some folks that did not live up to my expectations, all for the better.

My first three stories all have to do with retail experience. Two when I was the sales rep and once when I was the customer.

You Want to Buy What?

I spent about four years in computer sales. Specifically I sold Macintosh computers from 1988 until 1992. Back then they were expensive. Well, they are still expensive but they were even more expensive back then. A 20 megabyte external hard drive would set you back $2,000. One megabyte of RAM was $700 and a laser printer was about $7,000. The standard workstation Mac was the Macintosh IIfx and it retailed for close to $10,000. Like I said, Macs were expensive back then.

So when I saw this guy jogging by the store suddenly stop and walk in, I wasn’t expecting much. He was wearing a sweat suit which made sense because he was covered in sweat. None of the other sales reps wanted to talk to the guy so I walked over and introduced myself.

He said that he had never seen our store before. “Do you guys sell only Macintosh?” he asked. I informed him that we did. At that point you would usually either see a customer walk out because they only wanted PCs or they would light up because they were Mac people and the store wasn’t cluttered with equipment they didn’t want to see. He looked interested. We chatted for a few minutes about the current state of the technology and what I thought and what we sold and where our price points were and he handed me his card and said we should schedule a meeting the next week to talk about some plans he had.

His card said, “Clayton Smith – President Smith Protective Services”. That was interesting. Smith Protective was a private security guard company that did all sorts of security work around the region. For all I knew he was National. One of his big problems with security guards was making sure they would walk around the building when it was closed instead of going to sleep or watching TV. The way they used to do it was with guard keys attached to the wall at various points in the building. The guard would walk around with a device that had a keyhole that would fit all the keys. When he got to a key he would insert it and give it a twist and it would register that he had been to that location. He would then walk to the next location and repeat the process. Mechanical checks could break or the keys could get stolen. Smith had come up with a system that used a small bar code reader that the guard would carry. He would scan bar codes placed around the building and the scanner would record when it scanned each code. This would be downloaded to a computer and a report could be produced that showed all of the guard’s activities while on duty.

The good thing for me was that the computer in question was a Mac. For the next year, I would sell Clayton one to two Mac SE30s a week. Some weeks he purchased a lot more. He became one of my best customers. Not bad considering the fact that nobody wanted to talk to him.

Credit Card Approval

My second story is much like the first. I was in the store when a kid walked in. When I say kid, he was probably 17. He had hair down to the middle of his back and he wanted to talk about doing video editing on a Mac. Again, nobody wanted to talk to him. Kids came in all the time to play with the computers. But rarely did they come in and ask about video editing.

At this particular point in time, editing video on a computer, any computer, was really expensive. It required additional add-in cards to get the video into the computer and then more cards to get it back out, and good monitors and tape decks that would sync with the cards and well, you get the picture. A full blown video workstation in 1990 was about $20,000 dollars, give or take a few grand.

I talked to this kid for about 30 minutes and didn’t expect to sell him anything. Even I thought those rigs were expensive and I sold the stuff. Then I asked him what he planned to do with all that hardware.

He said he had an idea to provide a video service to local high schools to record their student plays and musicals. He would set up two cameras in the balcony. One would be a fixed wide shot and the other would be a manually operated one that he would control to follow the main actors and singers around. This way he could cut back and forth between wide shots and close-ups depending on the scene and the wide shot would give him cutaway footage for when he messed up on the close-up. He would tap an audio feed from the mixing board at the school or take his own microphones if needed. During intermission, he would grab the tapes from the first half and run downstairs and set up a table to show people the footage so far and take orders for copies of the videos. He guessed that every person in the show would buy one and the more relatives they had the more they would buy. He would shoot the rest of the show, take more orders when it was done, and spend the next day cutting it together and starting duplications and shipping. He figured each school had at least two major productions each year and there were about 30 major schools in town, not counting Jr. High Schools that also produced shows.

Running the math he figured he would turn a profit in one year.

After listening to his pitch I was convinced he was right. But I still didn’t know how he was planning on paying for it. When the time came for him to come up with the funds he asked if he could use the phone. He called his Dad. They talked. He handed the phone to me. The guy said he was the kid’s father and he had his permission to use his credit card to buy the equipment. I asked his dad for all the required identification and checked it with the credit card company and the approvals came through instantly. It seemed the guy had serious money.

Over the next week, as the hardware came in from my suppliers, the kid would come in and pick it up. I met the father once as well. As far as I know, that kid made a killing shooting those videos.

My Price Range

My last retail story comes from the lovely state of California. I was in Los Angeles somewhere around the summer of 1979, I think. It has been a long time, so give or take a year on that. I was probably 18 or 19 years old. I was spending a few weeks with my brother who was doing his orthopedic surgery residency at LA General Hospital. During the days, when I was at home alone, I would go through his record collection and make recordings of the albums on his reel-to-reel tape deck.

Nobody knows what reel-to-reels are anymore but in the mid to late 70’s they were the best way to record audio. The audio quality was much better than cassettes. My brother had a Tanberg deck and back home I had a rather larger TEAC unit. My tape deck cost $600. Yeah, it really cost that much. Reel-to-reel decks were more expensive than any other form of audio tape recorder at that time.

The problem was after a week of dubbing records, I had used up all the blank tape I brought with me and needed to get some more. We all got in the car and drove to one of the nicer stereo stores near his house. I located the blank tape area and grabbed a stack of blank reel-to-reels. I think they were about $10 each. Even the blank tapes were expensive.

Before we checked out, my brother wanted me to hear a set of speakers he thought were really good – specifically a pair of Klipsch speakers. I don’t remember if they were the Heresy or Belle Klipsch models. They were expensive. Probably in the $300 to $500 each range. My brother thought they sounded great and wanted me to hear them for myself. We located them in one of the listening rooms but couldn’t figure out how to make them play. Most stereo stores used complicated switching units to take the audio from amp A to speaker B or C or D at will. Most were easy to figure out but this one was a pain. Most are designed to require a sales rep. After a few moments of me trying to figure it out a sales rep came in and asked us what we were doing. I informed him that I was trying to get some music to play through the Klipsch speakers in that room.

“Don’t you think those are a little beyond your price range?” he asked?

I saw red.

“My what?” I asked.

“Those speakers are pretty pricy.” He informed me, making no effort to turn the speakers on.

I stared at him for a few moments and asked him how much he really wanted to sell things. I asked him to look at what it was I had already pulled from the store to buy, specifically the blank reel-to-reel tapes. I asked him how many deadbeats bought blank reel-to-reel tapes? The usual assumption was that expensive blank tapes that could only be used on even more expensive tape decks might tell someone who was attentive and smart that you shouldn’t insult them by suggesting that there is a price range in question at all. Not to mention that the guy with me was a surgeon and had more money than I did.

“So how about this. I’m going to buy these tapes because nobody else has them around here. But I no longer want to hear those speakers because I won’t be buying them from you no matter how good they sound.”

We left.

It is pretty safe to say that this experience in a stereo store in California shaped the way I treated the customers that walked into my store all those years later.

Who Was That Masked Man?

Finally, some days you find yourself in a place where you are just lost without a clue. What happens next can be enlightening.

This took place back when I was in college. My roommate was a guy named Ed who was famous for being a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. It was all he, and since we were roommates, I listened to when he turned on the stereo. I must admit to not being a terrible fan of Bruce myself. Most of his songs tended to sound the same. I know this puts me at odds with a huge percentage of the Rock & Roll community, as well as the entire State of New Jersey, but that’s just the way it is.

Kelly and I had been dating for several years by the time Ed and I became roommates. Ed’s girlfriend at the time was a pleasant person who rented a small house in town and was quite the chef. For all I know Ed married her later in his life but I don’t know since Ed moved off campus or flunked out or something and we lost track of each other. I do believe he finally got a degree but in what I’m not so sure and don’t have the interest to find out.

One weekend Ed’s girlfriend invited Kelly and me over to her place to have dinner with her and Ed. I think the menu was going to be shish kabobs. It sounded good to us so we went. It was chilly and raining that day as it very often was at A&M. While the ladies were working on dinner, Ed said that his girlfriend was having problems with her car and maybe we could take a look at it to see what the problem was. “Sure,” I said, as if I knew the slightest thing about cars.

We went outside and found her car in the driveway being rained on. He popped the hood and started it up and right away I could tell there was a problem. The engine was running very rough. It sounded like it was on the verge of dying at any moment. Not good.

And that was the extent of what I knew about cars. It didn’t sound good. I mean I knew how to change the oil and check for things like that but actually fixing something? Not on your life. As far as I was concerned, the engine had a problem so take it to a mechanic. I was not a mechanic. So I found myself staring at the engine with Ed’s tool chest next to me and thinking, “Yeah, that’s an engine alright.” Maybe Ed knew more about cars than I did.

About that time I noticed that Ed was standing next to me looking down into the engine with the exact same expression on his face that I had. It was the same expression I would have if I stepped into an operating room during heart surgery and suddenly the surgeon handed me the scalpel and said, “What do you think?” I was thinking this patient was going to die because neither Ed nor I had the slightest idea what to do to fix this car. I was a business major into movies and music and Ed was a Springsteen fan and that’s about it. We were both looking down into this gulping and choking and sputtering engine and hoping that good will and positive thoughts alone could bring it back to life.

We were completely lost and just to add insult to injury; we were also getting really wet and cold. Some alpha males we were.

It was about this time that I noticed this really scruffy guy walking down the street. He had long dirty hair and soaked dirty clothes and jeans with holes in them. He looked like your classic homeless guy out for a stroll. He was walking down the street in our direction. I remember thinking, “Man, I hope he leaves us alone.” He looked kind of scary.

But he didn’t leave us alone. When he got to the end of the driveway, he turned and started walking up to us. Oh, crap. This wasn’t good. He didn’t say a word as he walked toward us and hardly made eye contact. He got to the side of the car and turned and looked down into the engine and said, “Timing.” I knew just enough about engines to know that there was something related to an engine that was called ‘timing’ but I had no idea what it was or how to adjust it. The scruffy stranger turned and looked into the tool chest and reached in and pulled out a long screwdriver. He then held this screwdriver over the engine and slowly lowered it to some place that was a complete mystery to both Ed and me. Eventually it connected with something and he gave it a slight twist… and the engine began to purr like a kitten. In that instant it was the smoothest running engine I had ever heard. It was simply amazing.

Then he put the screwdriver back in the tool chest and walked away without saying a word.

I looked at Ed and he looked at me and neither of us could believe what had just happened. Many thoughts were running through my mind all at once.

Should we tell the girls what happened or take credit for the miraculous healing of the car ourselves? Who was that guy? What was engine timing again? Where did he insert that screwdriver? Where did that guy come from? Did we owe him anything? How was I supposed to explain this? Who WAS that guy?

Eventually I felt the need to at least say something to the mystical mechanical stranger with the long soaked dirty hair. As he got to the sidewalk I called out him, “Thanks Jesus!”

He never said a word in reply.

I think we let honesty get the best of us and we admitted to the girls that 1) the car was fixed and 2) Jesus had fixed it.