The Counter Never Lies

Then I was offered my first sales job. The territory covered northern New England: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Taking it meant leaving my home and family in Connecticut and stepping into a territory that had long ranked among the company’s best. This was during the years when New England was still an industrial juggernaut. Factories were busy. Customers bought things. A young salesman could look at the map and believe opportunity was waiting behind every door.

I was replacing a man named Bud Morgan.

Bud was no more than five feet two inches tall and probably around seventy-five years old. He smoked a pipe. He drove a black Buick sedan that always smelled of pipe smoke. He carried a black, hard-sided leather briefcase approximately the size of a suitcase. Everything about him seemed established: the car, the pipe, the briefcase, the territory, the relationships, and the quiet assumption that he belonged wherever he walked in.

For the first couple of weeks, Bud took me around the territory. I was twenty-three years old, just out of school, wearing whatever I believed a salesman was supposed to wear, and trying to absorb a business from a man who had already mastered it. The difference between us was not subtle. I had product information. Bud had history.