Stitch together (part 8)

Exodus: A departure of a large number of people.


After Josh's dismissal, we were realizing that Todd's facade as a cool, hip boss was just a just a front. In Todd's warped mind, he was setting an example by firing Josh. Minnow was Todd's toy and he wasn't going to let anyone try to play with it, let alone change it (even though his game plan changed every day).

This dude was a complex individual and he was hard to psychoanalyze. If a shrink could look into this dude's head they would see a person who suffered from a host of mental problems. I think he suffered from delusions of grandeur, manic episodes that stemmed from latent homosexuality and BSDM (bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) behavior. All in all, he was one sick person, in desperate need of psychological attention.

Jerry, the salesman left shortly before Josh's dismissal. He had endured with the idiocy for more than a year and he was happy to leave with some of his sanity still intact.

Lolly, who had only been with the company for a few months, said Au revoir around Christmas time and decided it was better to be unemployed than work for this nutcase.

Once Jerry left, the company was basically left without a salesman, so I was selected to take his place, which I at first resisted, because I was hired to do branding and marketing for the company. I eventually gave in, because I realized that without a vision/direction/goal or budget we couldn't really market very well. I was also thinking that by heading up the sales deptartment, I could help steer the company into calmer waters. I actually did a great job working with our international dealers and customers, building relationships and brokering deals from Hong Kong to Warsaw (and everywhere in between). The real trouble started when I started to learn about our actual production of machines.


Since I started, I was told that we manufactured hundred of types of machines that could stitch everything from A-Z. In reality, the only machines that were manufactured were "ONE" machine: a 1950's era machine that was made in China, shipped to our warehouse, disassembled, reassembled, repackaged and reshipped. All the other types of machines were used products (bought from dealers and factories) that were repainted and sold as new. Now, even though I had no idea this was going on, it would have been fine if our customers had actually received their machines in working order....

The actuality of the situation was: we were taking orders (and money), for machines that may never get produced, let alone refurbished and sold as new. The machines that our customers wanted, we couldn't produce and they were starting to get pissed, real pissed. As the salesman, it was my job to deal with all the problems that arose from incomplete orders and keep the veil cast over our consumers eyes. As an optimist, I'm thinking "better late then never" we'll get their machines to them, but there were some people that had been waiting twelve months for a machine that would probably "never" get made. This place was turning out to be a nightmare.

The wheels at Club Minnow were beginning to fall off.