Lessons Learned in a Hurry, part 2

Yesterday, I posted about the results of hurry on my gelatin dessert. Today’s post  is about a lesson learned while selling curriculum at a local home-school fair. It’s about the mistakes that happen when you’re in a hurry, but it’s also about how quickly and easily a reputation can be destroyed.

I believe that it was Warren Buffett who said, “It can take twenty years to establish a good reputation, and only a moment to destroy it.” We lived the truth of that at this fair.

The “hurry” issue was that we got to the curriculum fair last weekend without a calculator and without the cash box. Now, my mother and I have been doing this for eight years. We have it down to a science. We have checklists. A streamlined setup. A standard patter.  We’re practically programmed for this sale. There is absolutely no reason that we should forget the calculator. Much less the cash box. Fortunately, we live only ten minutes from the venue, so it wasn’t — well, shouldn’t have been — a big deal to run back and get the missing stuff.

Except for these two men.

Mom went on the day before the sale opened to set up our booth. She found the place designated for us, laid down our “special” floor. (Lovely inch-thick foam tiles that feel SO much better underfoot than concrete slab. This matters when you are going to be on your feet on that floor for two solid days, a total of 16 to 20 hours.) Set up our tables. Hung our banner. Set up the display boards and literature racks.

The idea was that then we could just bring in our books and samples and set them up the next day without getting all nasty and sweaty. Because it’s bloody hot in Memphis right now, with temps in the 90s and heat indices in the 100s, and the venue for this fair is a large, open area. It’s air-conditioned, but it’s so huge and open that the benefits are minimal.

So we arrive for opening day, ten minutes before the doors are supposed to open to the public. I drop Mom and my sons at the front door with a load of our stuff, and head to find a parking space. Gather up the rest of our stuff and head for our booth. When I get there, all of our stuff is piled higgledy-piggledy in the main aisle, and my mother is on the verge of tears. Apparently, the people who set up the booths accidentally switched our space with the space  next to us.  We had been placed in the corner booth, and the other people had been placed in an “interior” booth. And a last-minute exhibitor with only one table had been set up next to our booth, in the aisle.

The other people (I’ll call them the X’s) didn’t come in on setup day — X1 arrived early on opening day and began setting up. So the problem wasn’t noticed until X2 arrived and found that he was in the “wrong” booth. He wanted the corner — and was determined to have it.  (He had apparently asked for it at registration. But there is no extra charge for the corners, and there are only so many corner booths to hand out, y’know?)

So, even though we had set our booth up on the day designated for setup, and even though BOTH booths already had their special flooring down and half their merchandise out on the tables, and even though customers were beginning to come through wanting to look at product, the booth had to be switched. AND the last-minute exhibitors had to be moved as well … because if they were outside the corner booth, then it wasn’t a corner booth anymore, and their display would block the X’s stuff from being seen.

Instead of waiting until we had cleared our things from the corner booth, X2 started picking up his stuff and moving it. He’s mixing up floor tiles and product from the two booths, and blocking the entrances to both booths, and my mom is trying to keep our stuff separate from theirs and organize the switch. This is where I show up with the news that we don’t have the cash box.

It took us more than twenty minutes to get everything moved, and by the end of it, we were all hot and sweaty. And we’d lost at least six sales opportunities because our stuff was all in a mess and we couldn’t show it to people who came by. And here we are almost an hour into the fair, and we’re just now getting to finish setting up our space — when we’d come a day early and gotten everything ready specifically to avoid this kind of problem. (And then I had to leave my mom and sons to do all the setup while I went back for the cash box and a calculator.)

Now, here’s the thing. The X’s say they are Christians. They are promoting a Christian service. (A service, ironically, that my family has been paying members of for more than 20 years.) And yet they are willing to inconvenience an entire aisle full of exhibitors to demand what they want.

Instead of showing Christ’s self-sacrifice, love, and forgiveness, they demanded their “rights.” Not only that, but they demanded their “rights” at the expense of women and children, and with, clearly, no compunction about the inconvenience caused to all of the other sellers in the area. They made a big fuss about a simple mistake, and caused the organizers of the event no little embarrassment and inconvenience. What a great witness.

They got their “rights,” but I think, somehow, that they missed the bigger opportunity. How much better it would have been for them to have said, “Yes, a mistake was made, but that’s all right. It would cause too much confusion for us to switch now. We’ll stay where we are; don’t worry about it.”

Sure, they lose the prominent end-booth, and maybe they have to swallow their pride. Sure, they have to give up some “rights.” But they don’t lose the respect and loyalty of customers who have been with their organization for two decades. They don’t upset and inconvenience a couple dozen people, and they show everyone around them the kind of attitude that the Lord they claim to serve would have shown.

I’m pretty sure that they realized this after the fact, because they spent the whole rest of the fair trying to make up to us. Both men came and apologized, both kept asking how our sales were going, and tried to make small talk. But they never would have had to do all of that if their rush to claim their “rights” hadn’t gotten them into that position in the first place.

Tags: challenges, character, Christianity, kindness, Philosophy, Religion, True Stories