The First Date
I met my wife at work after an embarrassing meeting. Our first date came about from the failed transaction that followed that meeting. Here’s how the transaction failed.
A couple of weeks after my meeting with Linda Heister of NCR, the plant manager at the factory where I worked told me that checks had arrived. I told him that was fantastic timing; I needed them for the current week’s check run. I asked him to bring them up to my office.
He said he couldn’t and asked me to come down to the shipping dock. I obliged. When I met him in the truck bay, he opened the door on the back of a truck and asked me why we needed a truckload of checks.
Flabbergasted, I told him I had signed a purchase order for 2,000 checks. This quantity would fit on one pallet. We were looking at a small truckload of pallets. The shipping manifest listed 200,000 checks. Now I was angry because I told Linda Heister of NCR that I needed 2,000 checks.
I stomped to the purchasing manager’s office (Dick) and asked him to show me the purchase order I signed. The quantity above my signature was 200K. That was nebulous, but in the argot of bean-counting, 200K = 200,000. My shoulders slumped. I was pissed. Dick snickered and winked at me, saying,
"The 200K must have looked like 2,000 while I you were looking into her eyes."
When I called Linda Heister of NCR to complain, surprisingly, she answered the phone. I told her we had a problem. She knew I needed 2,000 checks. Why did she send 200,000? Her reply:
“You signed the PO bud. Don’t you review these things before you sign them?”
Trapped, I decided upon a different gambit: I asked her out on a date. She was silent for a moment, then asked where we would go. I suggested dinner at a fine restaurant in Midtown Atlanta. The looker Linda Heister of NCR accepted.
Mitigating my professional error over the 200,000-check con, my mood improved. I would wear my best pants and shirt for this date. If she liked me, perhaps she would give me a break on her con job check order.
The date brought more interesting discoveries. I’ll cover that story next.