No one ever entered the front doors of Southeastern Summit seeking either siding or new windows. Most of our customers came by way of commercials aired on a local television station during the Jerry Springer Show. One episode however featured the confessions of deviant participants in amorous relationships with farm animals; it caused a flurry of self examination: Did we want the company to be in any way associated with such perversity? After much back and forth arguing our CEO, Lou, decided no, he wanted nothing to do with that episode. As he would come to do ever so harder in proceeding months he applied pressure that day to the boss of our cold calling tele-marketers, demanding, "Get me some leads."
The cold calling telephone team was by far and large an ever changing down and out lot. They came and went by bus and beat up cars and were helmed by Lee a flamboyant and hectoring leader with a ratty ponytail and ever present stopwatch. He was full of bluster and promises of good leads in the offing. And each month when the itemized telephone bill arrived with evidence of calls to such locals as Tahiti and the Sudan he would sack whoever he thought had made the calls. He fired others too for reasons that smacked of whim and he did so with such frequency Lou had to warn him he didn't want any legal wrangles over terminations of unjust cause. This line of reasoning came to a head the day Lee fired one of his employees for being so drunk he fell out of his wheelchair. The last thing Lou said he wanted was to be sued for discrimination against the handicapped. Lee assured him his ass was covered and he returned to the phone room to once again berate his charges in the name of good leads.
Southeastern Summit had four salesmen. Number one was Lou's son, Jay. He got the most promising leads. Lou's nephew Jeff got second dibs. Then came Mark and Curtis. Jay was buoyant and jocular and turned many a lead into a profitable sale. Jeff too brought in a lot of cash. When the two of them were in the office they often bickered over tapes of Howard Stern on air that a mutual cousin in New York recorded and mailed to Jeff. But most often they were on the road and closing sales. Their customers almost always had good credit scores and their deals were often financed at favorable interest rates through an undisclosed arm of the company headed by Lou's wife Fay.
The deals of Mark and Curtis were more often than not accompanied by twisted circumstances and hard luck stories. Their customers invariably had poor credit ratings and outstanding debt. Mark was always surprised. To hear him tell it his deals frequently took hours of hard selling to land and were filled with cross the heart promises of good financial standing. His jobs were forever straddling that hurdle of should we do it and just not worth it. For they were literally without fail problematic. On one job he sold the crew who went down to install the siding returned with a video tape of the property. By the video footage you would have thought you were looking at a tornado ravaged house that had just eked by total devastation. When Lou called Mark into his office to assess whether such a house in its present shape could be fitted with siding Mark said no way. When informed it was one of his deals Mark blubbered that it had been night time when he measured the house for how much siding it would take to do the job and for that reason he hadn't gotten a proper look at just how dilapidated the house was. Perhaps the answer for Mark's poor vision was due in part to his habit of taking his son's extra Ritalin at the end of the month.
When a deal needed it Lou would say, "Irwin. give 'em a raise." And the latter would then work with eraser, exacto-knife and glue to change the sums of weekly checks or credit scores before submitting the paperwork to a finance company. This was a fairly routine undertaking and perhaps in some cases it gave that little extra nudge that sent some errant spending individuals free-falling into that dark chasm of inescapable debt.
The installation crews to hear Lou tell it were animals. With regularity they went disappearing from jobs not finished, or clashed with the home owners. Some of the installers were just shoddy workmen. This was the case with the Mac brothers. I dealt daily with the phone calls of customers upset with the labors of the two Mac brothers. One time it turned out they had installed a front door upside down and backwards and for reasons no one could ever explain they had also drilled several holes through the center of the door. Another one of the installers while waiting on Lou one day to send him on his way regaled me with stories of brawls in which he'd gotten the upper hand. The one he was most proud of however he'd lost. In that one he wound up with a hatchet embedded in his forehead. There it remained until a doctor in the emergency room extracted it. And through it all he beamed he never, not even for a moment, lost consciousness. With a big tooth missing smile he happily pointed out the prominent scar.
Over the course of my year and a half at Southeastern Summit the frequency of the phones ringing slowly diminished and sales petered out. It got to the point where Irwin would pick up a phone to see if there was a dial-tone. Then when the phones did ring it turned out to be customers seeking repairs. Our commercials on the Springer show brought in fewer and fewer leads until we reached a point where we could no longer afford to air our commercials. The telephone room too failed to generate any good leads. It got bleak and the mood in the office was sullen. Our salesmen called in ever more frantic, each with a plea; I've got to have some leads. Lou paced the hallway, muttering, "Jesus it's slow." I worried. For I was living paycheck to paycheck and couldn't afford to miss one. But it was all Waiting For Godot at Southeastern Summit. The leads just weren't coming. Then shortly before the company went belly up the dreaded day arrived. Lou said he was sorry, but you see how it is. I was laid-off. I promptly began collecting unemployment. And my days which followed on the government's tab were idyllic ones.
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