Chapter 1

Thanks to my usual Editors: Dowyd & DuffieDawg

and several advance readers that prefer to maintain deniability

The economy took a nose dive in my city about three years ago and it was just about the worst financial year of my life. The next year was even worse. This last year made those previous years look like a time of wine and roses. The omens for the New Year looked, if anything, worse still. Doom and gloom were the watch words of the day.

To make things worse still, our talented daughter Ripley, currently off at University, has found out that she is likely to be accepted into a prestigious graduate school program and now has plans to not just get her Bachelor's degree next year, but to continue until she receives a Doctorate. Her mother Florence, "Flo", and I are so very proud of her, but we hadn't the heart to tell her that we had nearly no hope of getting the tuition money for her graduate school studies. She'll have to take out a mountain of student loans to see her way through. We just won't have the money to help her.

There was a single slight bit of good news however, our younger son Drew announced that he would not be attending the local city college this fall and that he had already made plans to join the Marine Corps when he graduates from High School this summer. This was a great relief, but no great surprise. JROTC had been his favorite classes during High School and he was certainly buff enough (and a little thick in the skull) to make a good Marine. Drew had no real scholarly ambitions anyway, but at least this way Uncle Sam could pay his tuition later on if he changed his mind. He'd need some college at least, to help get promoted later on if he decided to make the corps his career — which wouldn't at all surprise me. At least now that would be on Uncle Sam's dime instead of ours.

My wife Flo is an angel, and I really don't deserve her. She is extremely even tempered, and calm under the most trying circumstances. She can think quickly under pressure. She is the rock of our family and the one true love of my life. Like me, her family never had the money to send her to college, nor did she have much ambition to ever go on her own.

Our daughter Ripley resulted from an 'accident' we had had during our Senior year of High School together and we were quickly married the day after graduation. Our son Drew came a few years later. I guess it was nice that we got our child rearing done fairly early in life so that now we can hope for an empty nest while we are still in our early forties and might be able to kick up our heels a bit in the future.

The holiday season at work had been very subdued this year. No surprise, especially not after three straight years of declining sales. My boss Ron tried to lighten the atmosphere of doom and despair, but he wasn't fooling anyone. If anything he was usually the most depressed person in the room. Scuttlebutt had it that there would be layoffs (again) in January, and I was likely to be vulnerable this time around. I was scheduled to have a long personal sales meeting with him next week that would probably decide my fate with the company.

I've been with USALift for about fifteen years now. We're one of the three largest forklift dealers in our large metropolitan city and the only company still selling only US made and manufactured forklifts. Very patriotic, but our products are more expensive than the numerous Asian made ones, especially Toyota's forklifts. In these days of tight financial times, getting a customer to spend 10-25% more for a virtually identical quality product is a tough sell. Very tough.

Five years ago when times were still pretty good, we had a sales force of over ten, today we only have five outside salesmen left. If commissions get reduced any further, I know we will lose at least two more. Like me, everyone is getting by financially just by their fingernails.

My first job was a forklift operator right out of High School for a sleazy fly by night trucking company. I wasn't too surprised when they suddenly packed up and shut down operations by surprise a few years later (and owing me two weeks of salary I could ill do without), but I had learned enough to nearly immediately get a better job at USALift working in their maintenance and support department. After a few years, I got promoted over to the sales side of things where I have been ever since.

Selling isn't my favorite thing in the world to do, but I seem to have a bit of a knack for it. I'm not the best pure 'salesman', and could never earn my living selling refrigerators to the Eskimos, but I understand our products inside and out and know what they can and can't do. I project honesty and sincerity to my clients, and never, ever, promise anything I can't deliver. This approach works well with our older and more established clients. I may not bring in the top new sales figures, but several of our longest established customers are secure in my care ... unless we lose that damned McCoy account.

McCoy Distribution is our regions' largest trucking and retail distribution center and they handle at least 90% of all the local supermarket chains and convenience stores. The company is gigantic, and uses a great number of our forklifts loading and unloading the hundreds of trucks that come and go each day. Henry McCoy, Senior was a rootin'-tootin' larger than life poor ole country boy who bought his first truck while still a teenager, and built it into an impressive empire fifty years later, including air freight and marine shipping enterprises. He was also a very religious and God fearing man who didn't like his employees to work on Sundays and held his executives to high moral principles. Old Henry was also a patriot, born and true, and he never minded paying a bit more for a 'Made in the USA' product ... in fact he insisted upon this to all of his suppliers up until the day he retired and handed over control of his well-oiled empire to his only son, Junior.

Henry McCoy, Jr., was a slightly different sort of animal. The kid wasn't stupid (smart enough to get an Ivy League MBA) but he was a bit short of common sense, in my opinion. In a scant six months, Junior had set about changing absolutely everything in the name of increased efficiency. Policies his father had established decades ago were abolished, and the new corporate mantra was to squeeze every dime of costs wherever possible. Every supplier contract was now being 'reevaluated' personally by Junior himself and it seemed unlikely that he would tolerate our slightly more expensive products and services, even in the name of patriotism.

Penny wise and very pound foolish, if you ask me. They were already making exceptional profits due to their high productivity, but Junior wanted to rake in truly obscene profits, even if he had to gut the company to do it.

Now, his next order of business was to gut our contract.

I'd only met Junior once before, and had been very unimpressed with him. He appeared to be a "know-it-all" smart ass kid who walked about with a perpetual sneer on his face and looked down upon everyone in his staff, whom he considered to be little better than menial servants. According to stories I heard from salesmen from other companies, Junior was also a world-class horndog. Allegedly, his father had been forced to pay off at least three women employees who had been aggressively sexually harassed by Junior. Senior would never have tolerated this behavior for a moment from any of his other executives, but somehow Junior had gotten away with this sort of behavior so far.

This new meeting on a Monday morning with Junior went about the way I expected it to. Even with our costs cut to the bare bone, Junior wanted and expected an additional 25% across the board discount.

Absolutely impossible ... and I told him as much, but he didn't seem to much care. He'd "bring in Russian or Chinese made forklifts if it would save me five dollars", he said with pride. It wouldn't in actuality save him a single red cent though. Both countries made notoriously unreliable products, especially their cheaper value end machines. Maintenance costs would go through the roof and productivity would certain go way down as a result of the low reliability, but Junior couldn't be bothered with those facts.

The meeting broke up with no agreement, and it appeared likely that no agreement could or would be made. I told Junior that I would review his proposed revised agreement with my boss and I would call him back on Friday.

"Great!" Junior exclaimed. "You can then take me out for dinner and a few drinks ... on your dime, of course ... and we'll discuss things then!" With that, the meeting was over and I headed back to the office to discuss the situation with my boss.

Ron, our Vice-President of Sales, and my boss, took the news stoically and in fact actually better than I had expected. My sales quotes had been pretty much directly at our cost and I had already given our best and only possible offer. We had known that Junior was going to slash all expenses and most likely force us out of the bidding for any future business with them, so the news didn't come as a complete and unexpected shock.

We spent the rest of the day reviewing all of my other sales accounts, and we agreed that while we would probably maintain all of those clients, our total gross annual income was likely to be reduced again this year. In total, my projected commissions from our sales and service contracts this year, barring any significant new customers, was likely to be reduced by about 40%. Ouch. This was worse than I had expected.

At the end of our meeting, Rod shut his eyes for a few minutes and then looked up at the ceiling for awhile before speaking to me.

"Greg, I'll be bluntly honest with you. Losing forty percent of your income this year might be the best case scenario. If we lose McCoy, our flagship account, more than likely we'll be padlocking the doors for good by the end of next summer. I'll have to start off by laying off more employees now, but we're down to the bone already. Losing more salesmen won't help us bring new money in, and Support can't spare any bodies either or we'll start losing other accounts due to poor service. It's a total ratfuck — we're now screwed no matter what we do!"

"Somehow, whatever you do, you've got to find a way to keep McCoy or we're all going to be out on the street. Take him to dinner, wine him, dine him and get him laid if you can. Hell, blow him or bend over for him yourself if that's what the bastard wants. I don't care if you have to give him your wife naked on a silver serving platter as long as he signs the Goddamned contract!"