The Glassman Cometh
“He’s here” I hollered to Julie, shoving the last bit of sandwich in my mouth, washing it down with half a glass of water.
Dakota exploded into the room, leaping and bounding across the floor, her claws clattering and scraping on the hard-wood. I hauled her by the collar across the room and shoved her out the back door, much to her dismay.
Julie walking into the room, groaned at the mess of dishes that seemed to follow me at mealtimes, and herded them into the kitchen where she hastily stowed them into the dishwasher and out of sight.
Strange, he hadn’t knocked yet. Oh yes the doorbell, I now remembered, was broken. “Coming” I called, as I walked over to the door. “Hello.” I greeted him as I opened it. “Hi” he responded blankly.
The man stood there blinking at me for a few moments, completely expressionless. ‘What the heck?‘ I thought, as he stood there motionless and expressionless, as if waiting for something. ‘Well, I guess he’s leaving it all up to me then…‘
“Come on in” I said, and stepped back from the door, letting him in and then closing it behind him. I stuck out my hand, “I’m Chris McCulloh”. “Gregg Sanders” He said un-enthusiastically as he gripped my hand for a moment. I motioned to my wife, “And this is Julie”.
“Hello” he greeted her.
“Hi” she greeted him back, however her greeting came with her customary large smile.
At that point he decided to continue his blank blinking stare at me.
I waited a moment. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. This was a sales man after all, who had come into my house to sell me some new windows. I assumed he would have a whole program worked out that he would like to perform for us. Maybe not. Did he want to see the windows? Did he want to sit down? I was becoming very uncomfortable in the cramped doorway so close to him. If I was going to have this gray haired man staring at me awkwardly, perhaps I’d rather have it happen seated some distance from him.
“Would you like to sit down somewhere?” I asked.
“Sure” was his reply.
‘Great‘ I thought, ‘At least the sales pitch is sure to be short. Probably something like, “your windows suck. I’ve got good ones. You give me x,xxx.xx dollars and I’ll give you mine and take away yours.”‘ This would have been nice, as he was already 15 minutes late, and I had a going away party for one of my oldest friends Timmy that evening (I think I was one of the only people who still called him that. I got funny looks and giggles for it too). I was eager for a short visit, a cheap quote, and to be on my way.
“Would you like to sit in the living room or dining room?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter” He shrugged.
ARG!
“Ok… how about the dining room?” I inquired.
“Sounds good to me.” He said. It didn’t sound like it sounded good to him, but I didn’t care at this point.
I led the way into the dining room, past the door where my dog barked and scratched frantic to get in and tackle the man with paws and licks. My plan had been to leave her out there to throw him off of his game, just for fun. Now it didn’t seem he would have a game from which I could possibly throw him off of, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I just left her outside.
I moved to the head of the table, and began to sit down. Then, for the first time, he decided to take initiative and sat at the opposite end of our long table in the seat to the left of the foot of the table which also happened to be closest to the door, and the barking dog. ‘What the heck? ok…‘
I moved around the table and sat directly across from him. Julie chose a seat next to him, and we all stared at each other. This was not getting off to a good start.
He asked us a few awkward questions, with lots of long pauses in between as if he were waiting for me to say some sort of magic word.
“What do you do for a living?” He inquired to me.
“I’m a computer programmer” I replied.
“Oh…”
Then after about 15 seconds, thinking he was waiting for me to elaborate as if computer programming were a secret word that needed explanation, “I make websites” I explained further.
“Neat.” I was almost sure he was going to say something about some 14 year old nephew who made websites too and look at me as if I should call him up so we could go drink koolade together. Instead he turned to Julie, apparently satisfied with my answer, “And how about you, what do you do?”.
I grimaced. I knew it was coming, and I knew she hated it. “I’m an admin.” She laughed softly somewhat embarrassed. I knew she hated having to say that. She had a bachelors degree, and yet she was ‘just’ an admin. It was not a hard job, but she held her office together, and put up with more b.s. than anyone should have to. Students treated her like she had an IQ of 80, and the people who’s grunt-work she did acted as if she spent her day playing solitaire, and taking the credit for all of the things she did for them. If she hated admitting to being an admin. this much, I wasn’t sure how she was ever going to manage to mumble out that she “stays at home” when we had kids. We’d cross that bride when it came…
“Oh” He said, again expressionlessly.
After a total of around 15 minutes of this awkward forced conversation he said he would like to begin measuring the windows.
“Great!” I said, a little more enthusiastically as I would have liked. The dog was wearing on all of us. The louder she barked and scratched, the harder it was to ignore. Now and then she move to the screen and scrape it with her claw, tearing it noisily. “Let’s do the basement first”.
We all walked down to the basement, and inspected the window I had broken several days before which was the main reason for his visit. I had been pushing on the glass to close it because of it’s lack of a solid surface of frame to push on, and my hand had gone clear through. Amazingly I had only received two small cuts on my fingers, and an inch long shallow gash on my ankle where a large chunk had fallen, miraculously striking my sandaled foot with a long flat edge, while jagged pointed pieces had narrowly missed my exposed feet.
The glass now lay in a small pile below the window where I had gathered and placed it the night before, which he managed to step on several times despite my warnings and reminders.
While he ever so slowly measured all seven identical basement windows, and pontificated about how shoddy and fragile they were, I kept running back to the open window, which Dakota continually came to and teetered perilously on the edge trying to build up the courage to jump down seven feet onto a pile of broken glass, and pushed the mutt back out of the window well and into the yard with a harsh word and a yelp from her.
He began to warm up when he saw my empty server rack, at which point he asked for a lesson in IP addresses, which I was happy to try and provide. The conversation began to warm after that, and we moved through the rest of the house talking about this and that (mostly windows).
He talked primarily to me, but he would stop here and there and turn to Julie exclaiming “My these windows are dirty”, or “Do you guys have a problem with spiders? There are so many cobwebs here” and “There’s mold all over this frame, which is typical for aluminum, and if you’d just get some bleach…”. Julie glared, growing more aggravated with this long winded buffoon with each condescending comment.
17 windows and almost one hour later we were sitting back at the kitchen table. It was now almost 7:30, the original endpoint of his visit.
At this point he began, in awed tones, describing the greatness of his company. Showing us award after award that Unique Windows and Doors had won. How vastly superior they were to any other company, and how he had fallen in love with them from the moment of his first interview.
At 7:45 I finally cut him off. “Look, we have a going away forever party for an old friend in 15 minutes, and it’s been an hour and a half, and you were 15 minutes late. We really need to get going, so could you please tell us the price?”
I had just stabbed his mother, spit on his fathers grave, sold his children into slavery, taken his wife for my own, and slapped him across the face with a wet fish. “Well… I know I was 15 minutes late, and again I apologize for that (Again? This is the first apology he’s given…) but it will only take me a few more minutes. I’ve got a whole presentation I normally give and I’d like to get through with it. I know I’ve been a little long winded up until now, but I’ll speed it along. Only a few more minutes really…”
“Ok” I said. As always, I was too nice.
“We’ve really got to get going” Said Julie. She was ready to kick him out.
He completely ignored her, and as I wanted to know the price, I just let it slide.
He dug into his bag and got out some example frames and a heat lamp. I was intrigued by the lamp, and sat bored through the frames until he got to it. He spoke, as always, directly to me, except when he turned to Julie to explain how easy it was to clean the windows, to which she only glowered and rolled her eyes at me.
Finally he got to the heat lamp, which at this point had heated up to 450 degrees. He placed pane after pane of glass in front of it, and had us put our hands on the other side to show how much heat they let through. The single, double, and triple blocked nothing. The government rated glass blocked some. The double paned with pink insulation blocked all of it (was that supposed to be a joke? Did I look like I had time for jokes?) and of course his piece blocked about 98% of it.
His piece was tinted. Julie pointed this out. “Oh yeah…” he said as if he noticed this for the first time ever, “…but it doesn’t look like that once we put it in.” Yeah. Right.
“Look, we really have to go” Julie started again, she had obviously come to the end of her rope. “Could you please tell us the price”.
He hesitated. “Look, you guys have really big windows… Barring price, do you like our product?”
“Obviously” I responded.
This pleased him greatly. “Good! I’m glad to hear that! So you’ll go with us then?”
I could tell Julie was ready to shout at him, but she, in a pleasant if not incredulous voice, said, “Your the only person we’ve seen, and you haven’t even told us the cost yet!”.
He looked as if she had slapped him. “Well, obviously I haven’t done my job properly. I thought I explained how other people’s windows were…”
I cut him off, “look, if you could please give us the price, maybe we’d have a better idea of what we want to do.”
He looked beaten. Had he wanted us to just hand him a blank check so he could get to work?
“Ok, well, it’s going to be high, because you have really big windows, so be prepared to be shocked…”
He began adding… by hand. He added for about 5 minutes. I corrected one of his sums. He pulled out a calculator. I sat there mouth agape. Why had we just sat through all of that calculation when he had had a calculator the whole time? He checked all of his sums. He began randomly and chaotically jotting numbers in various locations all over the map he had made of our house and furiously turning pages in his price sheet.
Finally, he turned over a business card, wrote down some numbers, and slid it across the table to me.
$22,000 for 17 windows, 7 of which were tiny basement windows.
He was out of the house within 5 minutes. We all but booted him out the door. We were an hour and a half late to the party, where even after a 30 minute drive we still hadn’t ridiculed him to our satisfaction, and we continued to deride him far into the night…
