It was later in my career when I made my way into agricultural sales. I had a lot of interesting experiences, which is reasonable given the amount you need to learn about a customer’s farm to properly take care of them.
We’re going to call the gentleman I’d gone to visit Mr. Meyers. We’ll just say that his real name is unimportant and leave it at that. At any rate, he was on the younger side of the spectrum, and as he had a dairy operation, it was never in my best interest to try to catch him early in the morning.
I remember being slightly excited to see him outside of his house when I pulled in the yard – it meant the game of hide-and-seek to find him would fall my way. With things going my direction, I was shocked when he turned, went back in the house, and closed the door behind himself.
As a salesperson, one gets used to proverbial doors being slammed – that was my first experience with the real deal.
I was just in the midst of working through my circumstances when the door opened again, and Mr. Meyers re-emerged. . . With a double-barreled shotgun in the crook of an arm. I’ll admit, I had more than a few hesitancies when he pulled a single shotgun shell out of his pocket and started the loading process.
There was only one thing for me to do at that point – get down on the ground and shout, “I don’t know what I did, but I’m suddenly very sorry about it!”
Well, that and hope that he got whatever was flapping around overhead hunting his chickens…