But then the System Integrator started to back off. The guy said he didn’t wanna crawl around in grit for six weeks and install this stuff. (I liked going to the steel mill, it was just about the only place where they’d let me in anytime I wanted to show up. I felt accepted there, and in the state of mental rejection I was in, soot and slag was a lot more appealing than phone calls.)
I remember arguing with him one day on the phone, and as soon as I got off the phone, my boss Wally called me into his office and explained to me that this deal had no life left in it.
The integrator wasn’t gonna play ball and the steel mill project was dead.
Eventually the job itself tanked and Wally and Fred did what was, in hindsight, the kindest thing they could do: They fired me. They knew I was a good guy, they told me I was a good guy, and they would put in a good word for me if anybody asked. But we’d all tried everything we could think of to make it work and it wasn’t working.
Did I feel ashamed of myself at 9:30 in the morning when Laura glanced up and saw me walk in the door, having been fired from yet another job? You bet. Did I wonder where my next check was gonna come from? You bet. Was I a perpetual misfit? You bet. Did I wonder if I was ever gonna find my groove? You bet.
But such was my tuition in the school of hard knocks. No way around it. Up to that point I had all kinds of fictitious notions about what it took to be successful in sales and the only thing that could rid me of those notions was the hardness of the pavement.
