THE TESTING GROUNDS SERIES

Working At The Office Supply Store in Colorado

Next stage in my forever sales job, this time somewhere else

The year was 1983.

My second wife and I were moving to a new place farther north.

I’d quit the first store run by that bad, bad, criminal man.

Our kitten died, leaving us both disoriented and a little lost.

One very morose day, my wife and I were talking.

“I want to leave,” she said.

“Me too,” I said.

“But where?”

“I hear Colorado is nice.”

“But where?”

“Let’s just drive.”

And so we did.

What happened next, I talk about in greater length in my first published novel — truth disguised as fiction — Orange Cappuccino.

What I’ll relate next are just the highlights.

You’re going to see a pattern here as once again we encounter a bad, bad, criminal man as our boss.

You’ll see us working together as a team.

You’ll see us eventually escaping town in the dark of night.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

First, we had to get there.

And I got to see my very first snow.

We got to Colorado just in time for Christmas.

It took two trips to retrieve our goods from way down south, four 24-hour non-stop drives (except for that one strange night spent in some desolate roach motel — another story.)

We settled into our new apartment, and I went to look for work.

First day out, success! And not just for me. The personnel manager asked if my wife had experience too. She did. And so, on the spot, they hired us both.

To sell office supplies, of course.

We stayed one year only, but that one year was so filled with unusual things, I’ll be hard-pressed to choose what to tell.

Let’s go random, this time.

We were not in Denver, but we were still a mile high.

Staring always upward at Pike’s Peak looming over us.

So there was this dramatic gasping routine I’d do when calling on clients who were located up any flight of stairs.

That’s how I got my pity sales.

I mentioned snow.

I’d never seen snow before.

And I’d most certainly never seen snow piled so high it hid every vehicle previously parked in sight.

The morning that first happened, I asked my wife, “How’m I supposed to get to work?”

“Oh honey,” she said, “You’re not going to work today. We’re snowed in.”

“Really?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I love the snow.”

“I know.”

By this time, my wife and I were a well-oiled machine.

Working in customer service, she did all my inside work.

I don’t mean just administrative stuff, although she did that too.

She also did a whole lot of prospecting and qualifying customers for me to visit. A lot of suggesting solutions for problems only I could solve.

Back then, we didn’t have cell phones. We had beepers.

So my wife beeped me on the road. I’d call in. She’d send me off to sign up some new customer, answer some complaint, solve some inventory problem, or simply woo some new prospect into buying exclusively from us.

We were smooth.

It didn’t hurt she sounded like the sultry voice from one of those 900 call-in phone services.

I’m saying, we were successful.

So one night we entered the store secretly and rearranged the furniture to make a private office just for us.

They accused us of creating our own little kingdom.

Fair enough, but it was also a fait accompli.

Maybe we were a little smug. Success will do that.

The Universe still has a way of knocking such smugness down several pegs.

I told you to expect a pattern.

Especially about the boss.

Yeah, he was crazy. What we call PTSD today. He’d been the sole survivor of an ambush in Korea. He told me this one evening while driving home from a company meeting we’d had in Denver. His green eyes flashed angry vengeance for all the wrongs done to him by his own bosses.

“I keep a gun on me always,” he said. “I have one now.”

I stayed mostly silent and simply nodded in feigned agreement.

One day, he confronted everyone in a meeting fraught with anger and dismay. He blanketly accused someone in the room of subterfuge and betrayal and finished off by saying, “I’ve killed people before. I can kill again.”

My wife and I figured it was time to go.

We knew our disappearance might lead to further vengeance, so we snuck away in the middle of the night.

Leaving an accusatory note behind to explain the reasons for our flight.

Also leaving behind all our newfound success.

We packed everything we could fit inside our little camper truck we called Teddy. Then we hit the road and headed to Alaska.

And that, my friends, is definitely another story.

THE END