How to Impress Clients

One of my primary duties at my new job is to work with a vendor to get the lab notebooks microfilmed. The microfilm acts as a backup copy in case something happens to the original. The owner of the microfilm company wanted to meet with me to tell me about the various services his company does, etc. The conversation turned weird, though, and that is why I'm blogging about it. It was too weird not to share!

I mentioned that I was from California, and Mr. Vendor asked if I ever ski. I said no, and he mentioned that he asked because he was about to go on a ski trip to Lake Tahoe. I said that I had been to Lake Tahoe in the summer, and swam in the middle of the lake. He responded to this by telling me that there are many bodies in Lake Tahoe, and that if you drown in the lake they probably won't recover your body. He said that the water is so cold that bodies sink to the bottom and never bloat. I was taken back by the morbidity of this, and said, "That's disturbing." He seemed pleased to have told me this for some reason.

The next thing he mentioned was that he recently did microfilming for a cemetery in San Francisco. This led to him describing how cemeteries are great customers, and he became a board member of his local cemetery so he is now a "cemeterian" and can go to their conferences, where he is able to sell his business to people who view him as one of them. He told me about several cemeteries he'd visited and went on to say his dream was to found his own cemetery. His cemetery would be a fun place to take the kids, and instead of grave stones they would use GPS to show who was buried where.

Overall, he was a nice guy. He was well dressed, middle aged, and charismatic. But wow, did he leave a lasting impression!