So I finally gave up, simply surrendered ,not a bit of resistence left in me.a LAMB.It has to do with a laminate flooring. It’ a long story and started in roaring early eighties, when Elsa and I were running our company in Toronto. Elsa was the soul of the enterprise and things were looking up. Also happened that with a help of our mutual friend who was a Canadian with a Swedish background, very capable and very much involved with us in the business, he made it happened that one of the largest Swedish companies developed an interest in our firm and became our partner. The company was Scandia. With that came all kinds of tasks and responsibilities and some of them involved that Elsa had to fly frequently to Sweden to all the board meetings and for me there were trips to Sweden to be introduced to all kinds of new things in the industry. I remember once we came from a short brake in Mexico to find out that Elsa must fly the next morning to Sweden (you can imagine the price of the flight ticket, but that’s a price of doing business).One of the Swedish associates in Toronto, a rascal, who knew the way around, suggested a joke. He knew that Elsa could not on a short notice, get a direct flight to Sweden and had to stopover in London airport, which is notorious with losing luggage of thousands of people on daily bases. So he dial the number of her hotel room in Stockholm after her arrival ,put it on speaker mode and when she picked it up, he asked her in changed official voice if she got her delayed luggage from the airport. And sure enough, I heard the sad, tired voice of the love of my life, complaining about her lost luggage to ,as she thought, an airport official and saying that she had to buy all the necessities and extra outfit and so on. We ,bastards, started to laugh, which in retrospect, was not nice at all. But Elsa is a good sport and at the end she saw the funny part of it. Or did she? My business trip to Sweden was very exciting and mind broadening. Again I have to use the question;”Or was it?” My Swedish business friends were showing to me new products in building industry and beside all kinds of new approach to manufacturing I was shown a new flooring product. It was made from wood byproducts, resins and polivinylchlodid and what not.They call it “Laminate Flooring”.It had an artificial smell to it , looked like Formica finish and faraway from wood. I did not like it, but kept my mouth shut for that moment. They asked me if I would be interested in introducing this product in United States and Canada, that they would back me up fanatically . I opened my mouth and I still her myself saying that I don’t thing that people on the American continent are ready for this and that I believe more in a real wood flooring. Stupid,stupid,stupid,stupid and one more time stupid. I was so stupid than,that I did not know the real meaning “stupid” till much later. This morning I gave up my pride and we bought almost thousand square feet of fairly good looking, hated Laminate Flooring. Elsa likes it and I guess, down deep, I do too .But when I was taking the boxes of the flooring inside from the garage , where it was unloaded ,I noticed something and I could not restrain from last revolting thought in form of one more of my stupid jokes. I called Elsa and told her to call the delivery people to take it back, that I don’t want it. She, sounding distressed, said “Oh, No.what’s wrong?”.I said: “ I don’t want it, IT”S NOT EVEN MADE HERE OR IN SWEDEN “ I yelled ,IT’S MADE IN CHINA.” I’ll be installing it the day after tomorrow.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:55:29 +0000
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