All it took was a comment from Jamie Campalongo, CEO of Pittsburgh Transportation Company (a.k.a., the cab company) to get things started.

A guest on my show (and a terrific one, at that … I really liked this guy), Jamie talked about how difficult it was to find “Anyone … drivers, cabbies, dispatchers” who could pass a drug test prior to beginning employment with any of his companies.

(By the way, if you think you’re not renting from “Yellow Cab” when you call, say, “Colonial Cab” or “People’s cab”, think again … if it’s a cab company and if it’s in Allegheny County, then Pittsburgh Transportation almost certainly owns it.)

Anyway, this (comment about drug use) took me to Lee Taddonio’s comment in a recent news article wherein he was quoted as saying, “four out of ten manufacturing job applicants are turned down” … because of drugs in their urine.

So, I dug up Sir Edward Gibbons’ famous “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (which was published in 1776) … to see just what parallels might exist between our present U.S. society and that of the Roman Empire in her last days.

(You see, I had read this tome in high school … it was on a recommended reading list provided to me by a gentleman by the name of R. Burt Gookin. Mr. Gookin was at that time - 1963 - President of H.J. Heinz Company. Mr. Gookin often chose me to caddy for him at Longue Vue Country Club where, in response to my incessant questions about how one might become successful in life and business, he advised me to “read the Greek Tragedies.”)

Essentially, Gibbons said that the Roman Empire succumbed to Barbarian invasions because of a “loss of civic virtue” among its citizens.

Sir William makes many references to “discerning emotions via non-verbal means” in his vast writings. In fact, fifteenth century traders (his contemporaries) were quite attuned to either spending, or not spending great sums of time and money based upon both the unstated and/or understated positions of their business acquaintances.

Camel traders, for instance, were particularly concerned with the eyes. A world-class camel buyer, for instance, would partake of a naturally occurring drug called Belladonna; this otherwise harmless seed when properly administered would have the net effect of dilating one’s pupils for a thirty-to-sixty minute period. This, in turn, was extremely useful to the buyer of the animal; after all, the desert-walking salesmen of this era were quite adroit at terms of watching the buyer’s pupils --- so if the buyer liked what he saw, the seller saw the pupil dilate and his sale price simultaneously increased.

You get it, I’m sure.

I had every intention of doing this deal --- I had already rationalized the payback and I believed that I was making a good investment.

But you know how it is when it’s time to actually pull the dough out of your bank.

As she was pushing me to do these very things, however, I became annoyed. For one thing, I felt like I was being patronized. Further, she had this compulsion to continually let me know how successful she was as a business owner. In time, I really began to personally dislike her. She never got the contract or the check.

Later on, I called the owner of her company (a friend and a great guy) to say that he himself could drop by my office any time he liked to pick these items up, because even while I was sold, I simply was not going to give the sale to her.

He was lucky. Most buyers would not have done this deal.

He commented, “You know, you’re not the first person to tell me how intensely aggressive she is. But on the other hand, my other sales guys have been so weak at closing that I had to bring her on board to at least show them how it’s done.”

I grasped this completely. Because thirty-five years of selling has taught me exactly how difficult it is to cover that “last (sales) yard” … those thirty-six inches between the one and the goal line. How many times do you see an NFL game where the ball gets to the one but no further? You truly need some special individual to force it to pay dirt.

This is probably the one-thousandth time in my long business career that I have been taken aback by the surrogate representation of one of my people.  My first thought when I heard his outbound message was, “ugh … anybody listening to this is going to paint a mental image of someone who simply has no joie de vivre.”

So, I called this particular individual (who, by the way, is a wonderful person and a super-performer) and informed him of how I personally interpreted his outbound message. He is a young guy and was quite grateful for the constructive criticism.  

(Constructive Criticism … the subject of an entirely different future blog.)  

But it got me to thinking. In today’s electronic age, there are so many avatars being employed as substitutes for the individual him or herself.  Think about it … in addition to voice mail, there are now electronic signatures, stand-in representatives (such as FaceBook and MySpace), and, of course, those avatars themselves!