Sausages

He (Sales Manager Roddy) expected to have a bright future here but, unfortunately that’s not the way it turned out for him. Initially sales went up and he was the bees knees. His self-belief and arrogance went up in direct proportion to the number of sales to the extent he thought he might actually be the actual messiah. I can pinpoint the day his fortunes changed. It was when he decided to re-arrange the cars in a particular order. You would be forgiven for thinking there is not much to lining up a few cars so that customers can come along and look at them. But there is in fact a degree of science and a whole lot of art to it. It seems that most salespeople fancy themselves as a bit of an artist (usually a bullshit artist was the only kind of art on display) as everyone I ever knew had their own special formula for getting it just right. Including me. In our dealership though, we had an artisan who would let us lesser mortals line them up the way we thought best and then come along and sort it out.

First the technical part. They had to be lined up in rows, that much would seem obvious. However, the gap between each car and the exact forward position was critical. That’s pretty much it and you’d be forgiven for thinking that it seems quite easy. Someone had made it their job to make sure that it was their job. So if any car was even slightly out of position from the way he would like it done, then we had to redo it. That was fine actually as there was nothing else to do. Is car sales a hive of constant activity? Not even a little bit. We were over staffed by quite a lot. Not because we had an enlightened employer who had a social conscience and liked to see people in work. Nope, the real reason was it took about six months for a new sales person to become half way competent at selling a car. Co-incidentally, it took about the same amount of time for a new salesperson to realise this was not the life for them and move on. Staff turnover was therefore horrendously high. Rather than address any issues and fix the problem, senior management just kept the process of recruitment going like a sausage machine. We were the sausages.