The Substitute
The phone call came at 9.30 in the morning – an t request to substitute for a snowbound trainer. It rather mucked up the day – but it’s remarkable how things turn out if you look for alternatives.
By the time I found the venue and tottered across the ice rink of a car park carrying all the training materials, I was ten minutes late. Yet everybody else made it and we ended up fussing around bringing in extra tables. In fact it wasn’t until after six in the evening that I realised I hadn’t given out a single DVD, not one piggy card…
It was too late by then, of course. With 34 distributors in the place, all the staff would have been approached so many times they must be sick of us.
But not so. “Do you know why we’re all here?” I asked the barmaid. She had no idea – and nor, come to that, had the receptionist. So they each got a DVD.
There didn’t seem to be any other staff about the place and by the time we’d finished the evening meeting and I set off home, I had resigned to having to make up the deficit the next day.
But then, stopping for petrol on the way home, the guy behind the till suddenly stared and said: “What’s that all about then?”
“What’s what all about?”
“Your badge.”
Isn’t it odd how you forget about the badge. It becomes invisible after a while – except to everyone else. So he got a DVD too.