She Was The Judge

Sometimes the universe is unkind. And karma is a bitch. I had a particular salesman on my crew at the Honda store I ran for some years. He was young, very good-looking, and had all the right expressions and sounds, and his customers loved him. He was perfect, he didn’t know anything about much of anything and just did it how he was told to do it.

He had a customer late one afternoon. We were a small town dealer, we rarely sold more than a hundred cars a month, but we only had four sales guys. Angelo upped a lone woman driving a late model Accord and I watched them wander around, and I could tell then she was a problem. She was doing the pointing and talking, obviously directing the game, and Angelo looked like a scared puppy.

They took a new Honda for a drive and then they went to Angelo’s office to write up. I sneaked into the next office to listen. She was absolutely blasting my guy, starting with the tired old insistence that we weren’t going to to play any car salesman crap on her. And she hammered him for a price with a stern, “Don’t tell me you’ll try and talk to the boss, just tell me what you will do.”

I listened some more, found out she was a judge in our little town when she told Angelo how come she was so smart. It went on for a while. Angelo was trying to get up and come talk to me and the woman got abusive and started screaming in Angelo’s office at him. There wasn’t anyone in the showroom but I knew the ladies in the admin office could hear her loud and clear.

I was done with it and I walked into Angelo’s office, introduced myself as the general manager, and she blew up at me. I like selling cars and I can overcome the worst customer but after about ten minutes of trying to calm this woman down, I reached in my pocket and grabbed one of my business cards, set it down on the desk and wrote the name of the general manager of the Honda dealer in the town sixty miles away and wrote his phone number on it. I handed the card to her and told her to leave, and if she wanted to buy a new Honda my suggestion was to go to another dealer and “this guy is the closest.” And I told her to leave again as I got up to leave. I told Angelo to go away and I walked into my office.

She finally left, probably pissed there was no door to slam, and stormed down the ramp and out to her car. We talked about it, made car salesman jokes about it, and I marveled at the opportunity I’d given to my competitor down the road. My friend there was a smart guy. And I’m sure he would appreciate my humor.

I didn’t think about her anymore, it was just a war story like they all become. A few years later I was getting divorced and went to the first court hearing. My attorney and I rose when they introduced the Your Honor and I shrank like six sizes when she, the devil incarnate would be Honda customer judge, stepped to her podium in the sky. She used it well. And she looked down at me and gave me an evil, soul-sucking smile. Payback.