True Employment Tales

Back when I worked for Myers Tire Supply, and the name is actually a misnomer because Myers does not sell tires, they sell tools, supplies, and equipment for tire and under car service, I had a truck (and by truck I mean 18 wheelers not pickups) repair shop that was a long time customer. The people who ran this shop were complete and total assholes. They took forever to pay their invoices, they gave me a hard time every time I stepped into their shop, and they loved to make me wait forever before they would commit to an order. I was probably the last sales rep in that business who would put up with their shit so they felt like they could dump all over me and waste my time.


One day they told me they had found a lease company that would back them in a big purchase of a truck tire changer, a passenger and light truck tire changer, a truck tire balancer, and a passenger and light truck wheel balancer. I was kind of shocked because they had such poor credit but when I found out the lease company was for real I quickly found all the equipment they wanted and I made them an offer. They accepted and we made the deal.


It turned out I had sold them the wrong type of truck tire changer. The one I sold them looked like this:


The problem was this changer took three phase electric power and they had single phase power at their shop. They refused to buy a phase converter which we offered to sell the at our cost and they insisted we get them a different changer.


We agreed to pick up the wrong changer and to send them one that kind of looked like this one instead (and no, you smart asses, the guy did not come with the machine):


The original truck tire changer that they had agreed to buy was $12,000 plus. The one they ended up buying I sold to them for $9000. At first they were over joyed I was saving them $3000 off the original price, but when they found out my cost was about $5000 on the second changer they got steamed. I figured that $4000 profit on the second tire changer was about equal to the shit they gave me for three years. They bitched and moaned about paying so much for the second changer but since they signed the lease there was nothing they could do about it.

********

Yeah, I know. Sometimes I'm a bad monkey. And you know what? My badness caught up to me because a few months after that deal I flipped my almost brand new Toyota truck over three times in the middle of a rain storm and my brand new to me truck was totalled. Thank goodness I suffered only a scratch near my left eye, my seat belt saved my life.