I was almost broke, an underperforming salesman on the cusp of losing his job, his apartment and his car. The girlfriend was already long gone and, if I owned a dog, I’m sure he’d have run off, too. I came back to my crappy dwelling after a long day that started with getting ridiculed in a sales meeting for being the lowest producing sales rep for the fourth month in a row and continued with a long string of appointments where I didn’t get an order. It was only Monday and I had the sinking feeling the rest of the week was going to be the same day repeated. That’s the way the previous week had been. Hell, the previous sixteen weeks had been like that, so there wasn’t much hope for this week to be any better.

I stopped by the local Chinese place on my way home and picked up an order to go. It was cheap, but not very good. I ate it anyway, finishing up by breaking open the fortune cookie and reading the little slip of paper inside it. “Everything can be yours,” it read. “All you have to do is ask.”

I know, I know, you really shouldn’t take those little sayings seriously, but there was something about this one that made sense. In fact, it felt like it was Meant, capital M included. Unlike every other cookie fortune I’ve ever gotten, I kept this one. I pinned it to the corkboard over the desk in my little home office area even before I cleaned up the trash from my takeout dinner and washed my hands.

My hands were barely dry when someone knocked on my door. My landlord, with papers in his hand. Not good. “Jimmy,” he said, “I’m here to collect the rent. You missed last month’s payment and you’re already two weeks late with this month. I gotta have the money or you’ll have to move.”

“I know, Mr. Blakemore,” I nodded, “but things have been really tight.”

He stood there looking at me for the longest time. Too long. Then I realized he wasn’t moving. I waved my hand in front of his face. Frozen. As Elmer Fudd would say, ‘there’s something skwewy going on... ‘

Then I thought of that little piece of paper, that fortune from the cookie. “Will you give me ten days to come up with the money?” I asked.

“Oh, sure, Jimmy,” Mr. Blakemore smiled, suddenly unfrozen and putting his hand out to shake on the deal we’d just made. “No problem. I’ll drop by next Wedneday.”

“Thank you, sir,” I grinned, closing the door behind him.

I was pondering the oddity of the whole situation. It was strange enough that the landlord had given me the ten days I asked for, but what was the deal with him standing there like a statue for twenty seconds or more? Weird. Very weird. I shrugged it off, though, flipping on the TV so I could watch a movie to keep me occupied until bedtime.

The next morning, I went to work, expecting it to be just another Tuesday, and went out on my sales calls. The first client had the potential to be a good one, but I couldn’t ever get them off the fence and buy from me. The meeting with their buyer started off the same and then we got to that point where the client is tossing up objections and the salesman is trying to overcome them. Then there was total silence in the room. The noise of the factory and the low buzz of the office stopped completely. The buyer was frozen in place like the universe was waiting for me to say something and restart everything. I blurted out, “Will you tell me what it will take to get an order from you?”

“If you can get the price down by ten percent, I can give you an order,” he told me as the noise started up again. Weird.

Discounts aren’t a problem if the order’s big enough. Customers can also get a break if they pay up front, or on delivery, or pay the invoice within ten days. I got out my calculator.

“I can manage the ten percent,” I told him, “if you give me a pre-paid order for at least five thousand units. Can you do that for me?”

“Not a problem,” he answered. He didn’t even blink.

“How many units do you need?” I continued.

“We use about three thousand a month,” he answered.

“Can I make this order for six thousand units and set you up for another in two months?”

“That’d be great,” he grinned.

“Shall we tell your finance people to set up the payment?” I pressed on.

“Let me call them and I’ll take you down there myself,” he replied.

He did, and within twenty minutes I walked out of there with a signed order and a receipt slip for a wire transfer of two-point-one million. All I had to do was ask.

I had one more call to make before lunch and the office was along the way, so I stopped by and left the receipt in my desk. I didn’t want to accidentally lose it somewhere.

On to the next appointment. I usually had trouble getting past the receptionist, even with an appointment, but today there was a frozen silence, so I just smiled at her and said, “Would you please tell Mr. Higgins I’m here for our appointment?” and she caved. He came right out, shook my hand and led me back to his office. We made a little small talk and then everything went quiet. Higgins was frozen in place, looking at me. I thought of Yogi Berra’s line about déjà vu all over again while I pondered what to ask for.

“Will you tell me what it will take to get an order from you today? I asked. Why not? It worked on the last sales call.

Sure enough, the noise of the world came back and Higgins sat there for a moment, apparently thinking of an answer to my question.

“Well, Jimmy,” he said, “we only use about a thousand of your units a month, sometimes more and sometimes less depending on our production. We buy them from Ace Industrial Supply because they can turn an order around overnight for us. We order by four and they deliver by eight the next morning. An order is usually between thirty and fifty units. Our system works with Ace but I’m starting to think they’re gouging us on shipping.”

“Can I step out and make a phone call?” I asked him. He directed me to a small conference room where I made a phone call to our warehouse manager.

“Pete?” I said when he got on the phone, “Jimmy Carlson here. Can we help out a local customer by turning an order around for them overnight? Say they order by four and we deliver by eight the next day? Probably thirty to fifty units at a time and several orders per week?”

“That’s no problem, Jimmy,” Pete told me. “I got trucks on the street by seven every weekday. I can set up a route with them as the first stop.”

“What would that do for the cost per unit?” I asked him.

“It’s fifty bucks a stop unless they’ll take a whole truckload of about a hundred of those units. Those we do for no charge.”

I thanked Pete for the information, hung up, and walked back to Mr. Higgins’ office.

“Our warehouse manager says he can do it,” I told him. “Fifty dollars per shipment on local deliveries under a hundred units and he can put you as the first stop on his route. Will that work?”

“We can certainly try,” he smiled.

“How would you like us to bill you?” I asked him.

“Can we get a monthly invoice at net thirty?”

“I don’t see why not,” I replied and started figuring out what his per-unit price would look like. When I showed him the numbers, he noted that I just saved him about fifteen percent. I gave him the sales secretary’s phone number for future orders but wrote this first one out myself so I could get the process lined up for him to have what they needed the next morning. Twenty-seven units isn’t much, but a sale is a sale and this was only the first of a long run. All I had to do was ask.

The rest of the week went the same way. Frozen silence followed by me swinging for the bleachers and asking for a big order. It never failed. By Friday morning I had gone from the office goat to the sales department’s G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) by producing the biggest week ever by any single sales rep in the company’s history. That was all well and good, but the payday on those orders was ten days away and I only had five days before my rent was due. I went to my boss and asked him for a small favor.