Two Tone Jimmy
or
Where High Pressure Sales Techniques and Mental Illness Meet
Ronald H. Allen
Published by Ron Allen at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Ronald H. Allen
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I hate high pressure sales routines! My wife knows I hate high pressure sales routines, but sometimes she judges the potential rewards sufficient to justify a violation of my sensitivities. That’s what happened the day we met Two Tone Jimmy.
My wife and I had taken our first cruise a few months before and we were hooked! Any mention of a new cruise opportunity would cause us both to sit up and start salivating. One of her friends had received a mailed solicitation announcing a free three-day cruise for anyone who would come listen to the sales pitch for a new “vacation travel service.”
Well, the promise of a three day cruise to the Caribbean was too much for Becky, and she eventually wheedled me into making an appointment with the service’s representative to see what special products they offered. At the top of their circular, in bold print, was the comforting statement that “this is not a time share proposal.” That made us feel better, because the Florida panhandle had been awash with time share schemes a few years before, and we all remembered what a rip-off most of them were. Free TVs, stereos, and weekends at local beachside motels, had enticed many people to buy time share memberships that proved to be so encumbered with red tape and restrictions that their annual “benefits” remained unused year after year. No one around here was still enamored by the phrase “time share.”
This agency, however, advertised itself as a travel service, and since we really enjoyed travel (especially cruises) we were moderately interested in hearing their pitch. Of course, the temptation of a three day cruise to Nassau also helped pique our interest in sitting through a potentially grueling, pressure cooker sales presentation.
We arrived at the travel service sales office, a few minutes before our appointment. I didn’t want to take the chance that they would drag us in early and inflict more than the allotted hour of arm twisting upon us. As the pert young temp receptionist signed us in, made us initial a hold harmless agreement, and warned us that the doors would automatically lock if we decided to leave early – and of course we wouldn’t get the cruise either – we started to get the feeling that this might be the mother of all sales pitches.
I knew the sales reps were on a tight schedule and could only devote a certain amount of time to each “client” so the longer the sales person took to greet us the shorter our torture time would be. I was elated when our sales person used up several minutes of our allotted time before he shuffled out of a nearby cubicle, perused our filled-out questionnaire, and invited us back to a table in a large room with several similar tables surrounded by other reps and clients.
I was struck immediately by the unusual appearance of our rep. He was on the young side of middle age, but he had a distant look in his eye and a large irregular scar across the right side of his forehead. It was obvious that our guy wasn’t the freshly out of high school or freshly into retirement types that you normally see in such circumstances. Generally, these jobs are so difficult, only the most desperate people will stay with them for very long. These jobs are for the truly hardcore unemployed.
He introduced himself as Someone or the Other, but said his nickname was “Two Tone Jimmy.” Being moderately hard of hearing, after years of working around jet airplanes and exploding bombs, I thought he said “Two Ton Jimmy.” This misunderstanding stayed with me throughout the entire session, and I wondered how he got his nickname. Since he was short and rather slight, I concluded he must have lost an enormous amount of weight at some time in the past.
As Two Tone slipped into his sales pitch, he almost immediately started a parallel account of his very colorful and hardly believable life. We were treated to a couple of minutes about the “not a time share” time share arrangement, which leaned heavily on the fact that you’d usually have to travel to get there and would have a “vacation” while you were there, to make this a “vacation travel service” instead of a plain old time share scheme. After a few words about how great and novel this new vacation plan was, Jimmy would lapse into some interesting - at least to him - phase of his past.
Jimmy, at one time, was trained as an Army Ranger – or so he said. Based upon my thirty two years of military service I could tell he was moderately familiar with military terms and some of the bases associated with Ranger training, but his stories were not your run-of-the-mill basic training stories.
His most remarkable feat, as a Ranger, was to jump from an airplane with a defective chute, fall several thousand feet to the ground, land hard enough to bend his rifle barrel, then walk several miles to a rendezvous with his other team members. The other team members were amazed, as was I, that he had survived the fall. It was even more amazing, because the jump was at night, and his fellow servicemen had somehow known that his chute had not opened, even though it was pitch black outside the aircraft and all their parachutes were designed for night jumping, which means they were black.
Anyway, Jimmy dazzled them all, and finished Ranger training even though his instructor didn’t like him and derisively called him “Hollywood.” Eventually he won the respect of his instructor to the point that the instructor wanted Two Tone to marry his daughter. Two Tone declined the honor and left the Rangers sometime later for an unspecified reason - possibly because his rifle barrel was bent.
This marvelous military career was remarkable enough to keep my wife and I entertained, although we did sneak an occasional incredulous sidewise glance at each other to reassure ourselves that we weren’t dreaming. We also edged our chairs a little closer together and a little farther from the table.