Moron Enterprises

I wrote a little while back that I like taking pictures of when I’m on the road, specifically pictures of collisions. I don’t know why. I just do. Today was even better than normal.

I started my day off visiting a customer with my dad, so I didn’t take my normal route to work. I went straight down Crenshaw, and the whole time he kept saying we should have taken the freeway. I couldn’t figure out why the traffic was so slow until I saw this.

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People in the entertainment industry get to meet celebrities and go to big Hollywood events and get free DVDs. People in the record industry get to go to concerts and grab free CDs. What do I get? Well, I can do anything plumbing related pretty inexpensively, but there’s much better things than that. We work with a lot of food companies, and when you get them out of a bind, they reward you with product.

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I’ve been making a point to delete any paperwork related to finances as soon as I am done looking at them. I don’t need to leave stuff lying around. I took a look at my direct deposit slip today to make sure things were in order and realized, I have no idea what my salary is currently. I must have received a raise or two without my knowledge. That’s not too bad a problem to have at all.

I have been on time to work the past three days. That means the number of times I’ve been on time to work in the past two and a half years has gone up almost 63%. Hard work is rough. I need a break.

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Customer: How much are those parts?
Me: They’re not too much, about $500.00 or so.
Customer: Do I have an open account with you?
Me: No, it doesn’t look like your account was ever opened.
Customer: What’s the hold up on that? Why isn’t it opened?
Me: Probably because you have no money and don’t pay on time.

So I didn’t say that last thing, but give me a break. Why do people expect everyone to give them an open account? If you don’t have an established line of credit, no one is going to front money or product to you. If you can’t buy it from us, go buy it from someone else that is foolish enough to give you terms better than payment on delivery.

I have an addiction, and I’m sure many of you share this same addiction. The Internet is far too entertaining. With YouTube, Digg, Facebook, and many other sites, it’s hard to get stuff done. There are days I hardly get anything done. Those days I call weekdays. I kid. It doesn’t take much for us to admit that we all waste time at work when there is Internet available. As long as you’re being honest with yourself (and use Firefox), you can also fix your problem.

For those of you that don’t have access to enable content filtering on your firewall, you can install Leechblock, a Firefox extension which allows you to create a list of websites and set time restraints on when you can access them. You can even lock yourself out of the options during the time restraints. This still doesn’t stop you from disabling the extension or opening Safari, but it’s a start. If everyone installed this and used it during work, we could probably pull our economy out of the hole.

I spend a lot of time on the phone with customers, and I’ve learned a few things about sales.

Sound confident and people don’t question what you’re telling them. You can sell more stuff that way. There is no need to lie to people in doing this. You are presenting them with products they can use at a price they are willing to pay. You are just convincing them to do it now, rather than later.

The other thing I realized is that people are not comfortable with silence and talk way more than they should, giving out needless information. Sometimes this lets me know exactly where I need to price myself, but most of the time it’s people just rambling on with additional information after they’ve told me everything I need to know. From my own experience I know they are just to try to elicit a confirmation of what they’re already saying, because they’re not positive about what they’re doing.

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Greg is 6′5″, a manly man from the Midwest, and the hardest working man I know. I will often wake up in the morning, and by 6:50 AM I will have half a dozen email messages from him about systems I need to size and quote to customers he has visited in the previous days. It’s also not uncommon for me to receive emails and scans as late as 10:00 PM that I know are coming from our office.

Greg isn’t afraid to go the extra mile for a customer. The reason Coca-Cola likes us so much is because Greg made a trip out there two years ago on the 4th of July to get some parts they needed for their plant shutdown. Greg has told me about how he was looking for more work one summer in addition to his regular job, so he drove half an hour every day so he could shovel manure. Greg has missed one day of work since he was sixteen. He can tell you the exact date. He seemed so disappointed when he told us about that day, and noted that he went to see a doctor to prove he wasn’t just being a wuss.

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I have a deadline to finish up this report for an energy assessment survey that we did for a customer, and I’m up late and just ready to give up for the night. Fortunately I have the ability to skip out on work in the morning to finish up this report. It’s like just skipping out on my 8:00 AM classes, so you can finish up the project for the 1:00 PM class, not realizing you are digging yourself into a hole for the early class as well. I thought the days of having this feeling of adrenaline mixed in with despair were long gone with college.

It seems like just yesterday I was awake in the dorms, delirious and struggling to finish my C++ program and noticing that everyone else online was also trying to finish the same project. Those were good times. Now I must sleep, because in the real world there is no AP (academic probation) or STD (subject to dismissal). There is only fired.

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