The Old Dog Chronicles

The necessity for me to prove that hackneyed old adage wrong came about on February 9, 2009. It began with a page at the Honda dealership where I’d been selling Hondas for the last 13 years;

“Old Dog to the business office, please. Old Dog, please come to the business office.”

It was my sales manager, and I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. He’d warned me a few months earlier that my weekly draw was outpacing my commissions and that if I didn’t begin to lessen the gap quickly I was likely to become the first man in history to lose his job as a car salesman for something less egregious than aggravated assault on the owner.

I wasn’t sure why I’d been paged to an office other than his but I suspected that he didn’t have the guts to fire me all by himself. Dean was reputed to have a rather impressive male appendage but I’d come to observe during his tenure as sales manager that his balls were the size of bee pollen.

He just couldn’t handle conflict. During one dramatic episode I watched a terribly distraught general manager make a cathartic apology to the sales force he’d been abusing for the past 20 years. The GM and Dean were good friends; in fact, he’d given Dean his position of sales manager. Watching his friend’s anguish was more than Dean could bear; he walked to and stood facing the door while hanging his head and staring at the floor. He looked like a little boy being made to stay in a room while his father beat his mom; I thought he’d pee his pants before it was over.

So there I was; 58 years old and unemployed and in a sense, relieved. I had, after decades of trying to make a living as a car salesman, finally failed in my attempt to do so. I had proven to myself and the entire world that I was not very good at something I really disliked doing.

For that reason, as well as the fact that the auto industry (and the entire US, for that matter) was in the throes of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, finding gainful employment as a seller of automobiles was out of the question. But the rent still needed to be paid so if I was going to continue living with a roof over my head I was going to need to learn a new way of making a living—some new tricks.