Regional Sales Manager
by Michael Estabrook—Age 55—Acton, MA
He’s my boss’s boss, and his entire division is out at this fancy-schmancy place called Mountain Shadows Resort and Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a national sales meeting. It’s all the normal business-type activities: training sessions for a new product, a consultant to answer our concerns about the latest industry downturn, a customer here to review an exciting new application.
It’s our free afternoon, thank God, and I round the corner of the bike rental shop and there he is, Gerard, our divisional vice president. He’s really a terrific person, bright, good-looking, multilingual, has a great job and a great wife and four beautiful children, and a huge house in the Boston suburbs. The world is his clam, so to speak.
“What’s the matter, Mike, not playing golf with everybody else?”
“Nope,” I shake my head, “Never have gotten into golf. Guess I don’t have the patience or something for it.” (Not to mention the money.)
“Care to join me on a bike ride?”
So I say yes, of course, and we ride for two hours over these wonderful winding scenic bike paths across streams and hiking trails, alongside palm trees, giant hedges and cacti. And even though my ass is hurting like hell by the time we’ve finished, I had a fine time.
Gerard is French so I got to talk about all my favorite French things: the Louvre, Monet’s Gardens at Giverny, Chartres Cathedral and Notre Dame, Moliere, Racine, Victor Hugo, Rodin, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin and Degas, Abelard and Heloise, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian Monks, Pascal’s Penses, Descartes’ Methodes, Montesquieu, Rabelais, Voltaire, the Maxims of Le Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Le Grand Meaulnes (my very favorite novel), and the great Provencal Troubadours.
Even though Gerard is French, he’s also a businessman, so he knows virtually nothing of these matters. He has been focused for too long on financial trends, quality engineering and manufacturing concerns. But it was fun watching the quizzical looks playing off his sunlit face and hearing his thick French accent.
When I get home and tell my wife about my fine time in the sun with Gerard, she shakes her head and laughs, “Only you would blow a perfect opportunity to impress the big boss by talking about something stupid like Provencal Poetry and Monasticism.”
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