Venice Pier Surf Report May 29 2007 / A True Work Story

Looking pretty iffy this morning. The S swell is still in good supply but it has just too much W in it and anything with any size is just a big closeout. There is the rare 'tweener where if can get in the position to get the end it could be fun, but it would be a lot of work for not that much reward.





Not surprisingly nobody out, nobody scoping and street parking still plentiful.

Light onshores, gray and cloudy, chill in the air. Thank God it's a 4 day workweek this week.

Saw Lucky and Tommy briefly this morning but didn't have time to chat. Some may have seen this before but it is one of my patented

TRUE WORK STORIES!

In the mid ‘90s I was doing Major Account Sales for a telecom company called LCI. My boss, a pretty cool guy named Van, came to our sales group on the last day of the quarter and asked us to pull out a miracle as we ( meaning he ) were going to miss our number unless we closed about 10K in business today.

Van had always been a pretty good guy, so I decided to take one for the team and go close some of my accounts that I had sandbagged for the following quarter.

For those of you who have never been in sales, let me explain what this means. Invariably in any sales organization there is an inordinate amount of pressure placed on the salespeople to not only sell, but to know what they are going to sell and when they are going to sell it. And, management wants you to know these things at least 60-90 days in advance.

The theory here is that if you have a product that has a 90 day sales cycle, you should know at least 60 days in advance of closing a deal which of your prospects might turn into revenue and which are just a huge waste of time. So, come the end of July, you, as the salesperson, should be able to know how many of your prospects are going to turn into revenue in September.

Salespeople, as a rule, think forecasting is the stupidest thing on the planet. But they also know that a big part of their job evaluation is whether or not they beat their sales goals on a regular basis.

For example, salesman A and salesman B each have a quota of 250K for the year. B hits 300K by September and doesn’t do much for the rest of the year. A does a steady 65K a quarter, for a total of 260K for the year. Every company on this planet will rank A higher than B, even though B sold more. This is where sandbagging, or delaying a sale, comes in. If B had put his prospects off ‘til later in the year, and been more consistent, he would have been better off.

At any rate, this is a long and winding way to tell you that when my boss, Van, needed some sales for the current quarter, I had some ready to go but was waiting for the next quarter to sign them. But I figured, hey, good karma and all, so I went out and put on the pressure.

At about 4 o’clock that afternoon I return to the office with contracts in hand.

Van was elated. He was high-fiving me, slapping me on the back and generally in a very good mood. Around 5:30 I left Van at the office to do his part of the paperwork and, it being Friday, headed for the nearest watering hole.

Imagine my surprise when I came into the office the following Monday to find an email Van had written to me at about 9 PM Friday absolutely flaming me for not doing all of my paperwork properly. And when I say flaming, I mean bringing up stuff about how I had missed his sales meetings ( one time he brought in a soggy cocktail napkin with some drunken scribblings about how we should do a promotion with Hooters ) , how my attendance in the office was below what was needed ( yeah, I was out selling, you jerk ) and how in general, I needed to improve everything in every way possible.

Not exactly the accolades I was expecting.

Better still, he had cc’ed HIS boss, too.

So, basically, I was completely fucked. My career at LCI was effectively over as far as any chance of promotion goes – that was just the way they were.

Needless to say, I was pissed. In our one-on-one meeting later that morning I got in to a huge screaming match with Van that nearly came to physical violence, and ended with me storming out saying that if the burden of my paperwork ever out weighed my production I would rather just plain be fired.

Not much was said between us for the rest of the day until Van came over around 4 and asked me if I wanted to grab a beer after work - his treat. I think he was trying to make up for what he did in some small way for what he had done. My response was that I would rather drink warm piss on live TV that spend 5 more seconds than absolutely necessary in the same building as him, so he dropped it.

After stewing all day and night about it, I decided on a plan for revenge.

You see, as a manager, Van didn’t have any direct responsibility other than making sure that his salespeople sold. And since we were out of the office most of the time, that gave him a lot of freedom during the day, which he made use of to do things like play golf, go home and sleep, get drunk….you name it.

Since this was the dawn of cell phones and voice mail, he always made it seem like he was sitting right there busily working away, even if he was on the golf course. But this was also the time when cell minutes were more expensive than Faberge eggs, so nobody gave out their cell number; nobody wanted unwelcome incoming calls eating up their minutes and having to pay $10 a minute in overage charges. Better to give out your pager number and return the call if it was important enough.

Now, I had known since I had started there that Van had never changed the password to his voice mail inbox, which was defaulted so that the extension number was the password. So, since I knew his extension, I also knew his password.

I decided to go in and delete every voicemail he got before he had a chance to hear it.

It was great. I remember that the sequence for delete was “7-6-#”, so every 5 minutes or so I would dial into his voice mail and hear the “ You have 3 new voice mails” and go to town – delete, delete, delete. Awesome.

After about 3 days of this I started listening to the beginnings of the messages and they were getting more and more urgent “ Van, I need you to call me back ASAP” “Van, where have you gone” “Van, this is Jim, your boss , and I need “ …deleted them all.

I figured I would do this for another week or so just to teach him a lesson. But you know what? I never got the chance to stop. The following Tuesday, one week after I started my attack, I came in that morning to find……Van’s office empty. Yep, he had been summarily fired for being out of the office without approval and not responding to his bosses.

Guess my plan worked a little too well.

But you know the funniest part? About 2 years later I saw Van at a Chamber of Commerce “Business after Hours” and told him the whole story. And instead of him getting mad, he laughed his ass off. At the time he could not figure out what the hell his boss was talking about when he showed up late Monday to can him, but he got something like three months salary severance and landed a better job about 2 weeks later. He was so appreciative he even bought me a beer. Later, he even came to work for me at a systems integration firm.

So, the moral of the story is - don’t be afraid to really screw up someone else’s life if they piss you off. You’ll feel better if you do and there’s the off chance you might even wind up helping them.