Tell-Tale Wing Tips

Just heard a friend talking about his “yawner meeting” and it reminds me of one I attended a few years back. Well, more than a few…years. The car business has “standard in the industry” Friday morning meetings, presumably to pump the sales peeps up for the dynamic weekend coming up. They are mandatory even if it’s your day off. And we used to have to dress up with suit and tie, shined shoes, shaved, showered, and buffed up.

 

One Friday meeting I was dressed to the nines, even though I was off, and sitting in my chair at the meeting room waiting for the sales lobotomy to come. As everyone filed in I saw the sales manager’s eyes were just rolling, bleary and red, from an obvious late night drinking binge, which he was prone to do. We called him Rosie, and not because of his attitude because it was rarely rosy.

Rosie had really nice suits, silk ties, and $500 wing tip shoes, and he was dressed to kill. But I noticed, what he obviously missed, he was wearing a brown wing tip and a black wing tip on the other foot. I waited until every one was seated and the meeting was ready to start, then I opened my big mouth and said, “Hey, Rosie! You get dressed in the closet this morning?” He looked at me, confusion on his face, so I said, “Look at your shoes.”

It took him a few seconds to focus on his shoes, but everyone else saw it immediately and the laughing was well under way when he realized the truth of the matter. He got red in the face, (Rosie was his name, you see), looked at me, and yelled, “Burnett, you’re out of here, don’t come back until tomorrow, then you better be ready to sell some Goddam cars!”

It was the only meeting I ever got out of.