The Sales Meeting

Last year, my friend Kara, who is the Marketing Assistant on both of my book lists, came into work on a Sunday to paint a cardboard cutout of an ocean.

What does a blue-painted ocean have to do with publishing you might ask?

Well, it doesn’t relate at all except that my Michael Scott-like boss tends to have grandiose ideas when it comes to his presentations for the National Sales Meeting.

Most of the Acquisitions Editors and Marketing Managers present in lecture format; sometimes, they will do a little extra and bake cookies to please the crowd.

We do not peddle our books to customers at the sales meeting, rather it’s an internal meeting where we push the books on our sales representatives and prepare them for how to sell the product. Because most of the sales reps don’t have a background in mathematics, many are intimidated by selling the higher-level books like Calculus, especially when we have four different versions of the book that accommodate to individual professor’s needs.

Most of the sales reps cannot differentiate between each of the books we have to offer. There is an early transcendentals textbook, which means functions are covered from the beginning of the text, a later transcendentals textbook simply titled Calculus, discussing these functions in the latter part of the text, and two separate condensed versions of each of these books.

My boss, Tom, an awkwardly tall, goofy man who tends to avoid real work at all costs, wants to make selling calculus easier on these reps, so he thinks way out of the box in order to have the presentation resonate in the reps’ minds long after the meeting.

This year our team discusses the plan (or rather we listen to him ramble on about his absurd ideas). We appease him (because he is in charge of our year-end reviews… wait a minute, last year it seems I wrote my own review and he signed off on it) and agree to a sketch where he dresses up as a chef from the Italian region Sardinia, with a specialty in cooking geese, and a love for Italian opera composed by Bellini (yes, he creates a whole irrelevant back story). As the head chef, he is going to “cook our competition’s goose.”

He builds his own prop kitchen out of cardboard boxes, black Sharpie® markers, and duct tape for the actual presentation. He wants the rest of us to dress up like chefs, bring in kitchen utensils, and take photo ops for the creative services team to make a chroma (basically what we call a full color cardboard cutout).

I agree to dress in white, but I will not wear a chef’s hat and I refuse to bring in any of my wares!

Of course, Tom is prepared with cooking tools for our entire book team. Conveniently, downstairs in our office building is a kitchen store, with every person’s dream customized kitchen on display. We are all coerced into going downstairs, already dressed up in our culinary garb, as if we were going to contend for a spot on Top Chef (or maybe Hell’s Kitchen).

For whatever reason, the clerk at the kitchen store obliged to our request to take photos at one of the kitchens. Surmising our relationship, I held an egg beater; my boss held a butcher knife.

I haven’t felt this embarrassed since my mother forced me to take a picture with my college mascot, a wildcat, at parents’ weekend brunch for the freshmen class. As you can see from the photo above, I conveniently tucked myself away as close to the back as I could get.

Kara and I often apply the ludicrousness of our work life with that of the television show The Office. Then, the week before the sales meeting our feelings were reaffirmed (albeit with a stretch of our imaginations) by an eerily coincidental episode of The Office that involves Dwight’s plan to cook his road kill goose.



Tom stands in front of sales reps from each region of the country, as well as the VP, who is his boss, and in a butchered Italian accent he tells of the importance of reinforcing Algebra concepts if students are to succeed in Calculus.

He is professional despite his guise and makes his point as he places the competition’s textbook in his makeshift oven. And while this book is baking, he takes out his secret weapon, asking sales reps for volunteers.

He whips out the “Orgasmatron,” a backpack device reminiscent of the Ghost Buster’s Proton Pack.

The oblivious sales rep volunteer is told to put on the Orgasmatron and with each question answered correctly about the “assets” of our book and the “shortcomings” of the competition, the rep gets to shoot at the goose, which of course by this time is cooked medium-well.

Tom puts on a potholder and takes the competitor’s book out of the oven (the book is now magically charred with pages torn up, a bait and switch move).

He asks the first question, “What does early transcendentals mean?” The sales rep responds, “logarithmic and other functions discussed earlier on in the book.”

“Correct, you may now shoot the Orgasmatron,” he says. As crazy as this all seems, he gets the job done in having the reps retain all of the complicated information to sell these books.

A Nerf ball flies out of the vacuum like tube (how the heck did he create this thing I will never know).

“Feels good, doesn’t it. Maybe you’d like a cigarette now?”