“So, look,” I said. “The details don’t actually matter.”
“Don’t they?” the man asked. His little entourage sat at attention. My business partner, Toby sat at attention too.
“No. Not to you. You’re interested in quality, right? Well, our drones are the best. That’s all you need to know.” The man laughed and it rippled through his little group. I failed to see what was so funny. Toby cleared his throat.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You and every other drone producer is going to tell us that your products are the best but the fact of the matter is, it's not the best product that gets bought out, it’s the one with the best advertising. So, sell it to us. Make us want them. What about your design makes them the best?”
Did I look like a salesman to him? They wanted to talk to the designer, not the fucking ad man. This was above my pay grade and I didn’t like the way this guy thought he could make us jump just because he had a contract and we wanted his signature on it. I could feel myself getting mad. This was starting to feel like a waste of my time and I didn’t take kindly to people who were stubborn for the sake of it. If he wasn’t going to give us the contract anyway, what was the point of us coming?
“Look,” I said, sighing, done with their shit. They wanted something from us. If they needed to fall in line and give us what we wanted. “You don’t need to know any more about the design than we’ve told you.”
“That’s exactly what we’re interested in,” he said. “The design, math, whatever you do to make those things.”
Whatever I did to make those things.
That was a nice way to reduce my life’s work into a single meaningless statement.
“Here it is; you don’t need to know any more math than what it’s going to take to cut us the check.”
“What my partner is trying to say,” Toby said, getting up, “is that getting caught up in the details is counter-productive. When we present our products, we don’t present our formulas and prototypes, we present solutions.” He shot me a dirty look. The guy crossed his arms.
“Regale me then. What are your solutions?”
“I’ll take it from here,” Toby whispered to me. I hesitated because fuck that guy and his cronies, but I stood down. Sitting, I watched Toby carry the rest of the presentation. See, he was the only one they really needed for this. Why the hell did they ask for the designer to show up and explain it all to them like they were five? They wouldn’t remember a thing that I told them, just whatever trashbag criteria they used to choose who would be getting money from them. I wanted to, but I didn’t interrupt or walk out.
It was over quickly.
We walked out of the meeting room towards the elevator. Toby yanked on his collar and cursed.
“You okay?” I asked.
“What the hell do you think?” he snapped.
“Whoa, why are you mad at me?” I asked. We entered the elevator which was thankfully empty.
“You’re not coming to the next meeting. In fact, I’m relieving you of the duty completely.”
“Fine with me.”
“I swear to god, man,” he said, leaning back against the mirror in the elevator. “You can't do shit like that. You can’t talk to clients like they're your goddamn cadets. We want something from them. You have to make them want to give you their money.”
“No, they want something from us,” I said.
“They’re the ones with the money, Easy. You like money? You want to make money? If you didn’t you’d be giving your fucking drones out for free.”
“We have money, Toby.”
“That’s not the point. We have competition and if they get ahead of us, they get our money. If we aren’t making money, we aren’t profitable and if a business isn’t profitable, it goes bust. People care about the person behind the product. They want to meet the designer but you're about as presentable as a pile of compost.”
“Just wait. They're gonna be calling tomorrow with a contract. I’m telling you.”
“Not with the shit you pulled. Couldn’t you even wear a fucking suit for this?” he said, sneering at my outfit.
“I wore a uniform for years. I didn’t get discharged from the army just to get back into one.”
“Anything, literally anything would have been better than those fucking jeans and that flannel,” he said. “And would it kill you to shave?”