Turtlefoot V: A Dark Race Becomes Magnificant

Fifteen minutes after Fernando dealt with the lady who argued Fernando should pay her and advertise for them, the phone rings again. The caller ID on this one?

Turtlefoot Enterprises!

Fernando rises from his seat with a curious flourish, leaving the empty chair spinning for a few moments as he crosses the room. Who would converse with him today? Kevin, salesman supreme? Sultry-voiced Kuwait? Nepal, the happiest woman on earth?

Giddy with excitement, Fernando picks up the phone. “Hello, Dominion of Movies.”

“Hi, is this Fernando?” The speaker is neither Kuwait nor Nepal, but a third woman. He picks up the barest hint of a Hispanic accent on the way she enunciates her vowels.

“Indeed so.”

“Fernando, my name is Madagascar, and I'm calling from Turtlefoot Enterprises. We have made some small changes here since the last time you spoke with a representative and I'd to go over a few of them with you right now. We have streamlined our systems to make it more appealing to smaller operations such as yours.”

“I'm happy for you. Do you still maintain the requirement that I spend about three thousand dollars on PoS software kept hooked into your system, whereby you can track my cash flow and skim a fraction of every transaction?”

This questions flusters Madagascar. “Many of our customers are quite happy with the simplicity our system provides. There is no hassle on your end, and we can provide assistance in helping you get that set up.”

“Is there still also an operations fee? Because it seems silly to pay you extra money so you can ensure you're taking my money.”

“Turtlefoot Enterprises has no control over how the software provider--”

“So yes. I'm sorry, an agreement between our respective businesses is not in the cards on this day. You're welcome to try again later. Things change.”

A pause. Then Madagascar says, “Oh, well, we'll be in touch. Have a good day.” She sounds relieved, perhaps because Fernando provided an invitation for another of Turtlefoot's sterling salesfolk to contact Fernando down the road.

That's fine. It makes for good stories.

Turtlefoot Enterprises, Mach IV

It is one of those impossibly slow days where absolutely nothing is happening in a wealth-garnering sense. The weather is fairly nice, there are high school football and volleyball games which everyone is attending, and to top it off the week's releases are profoundly lackluster. Even the random traffic passing by on the highway before the store is minimal. As a result, Fernando has spent most of the day reading Fark and ruing the fact that the new vanilla-walnut flavored coffee creamer he procured about a week prior had not been the wisest of purchases.

The phone rings. Fernando jumps at the call because, hey, maybe this means he will lessen the deficit he will have incurred through having had the store open today! He looks at the caller ID.

Turtlefoot Enterprises. You never expect them.

“Okay, what did I do and to whom to deserve this?” Fernando asks aloud. No one is around to answer, for even his Guardian Spiders have gone off to the Land of the Unending Sleep. He sighs in resignation and meanders over to the phone, picking it up on the fourth ring.

“Hello, Dominion of Movies.”

“Hi, is this Fernando?” It's a new person, neither Kevin nor the sultry lass from before. This woman's voice is irrepressibly bubbly and chipper. It reminds Fernando vaguely of hearing Tara Strong in...well, just about any role she's ever voiced.

“This is he.”

“This is Nepal, calling from Turtlefoot Enterprises! How are you?”

Yes, yes, obligatory social niceties. “I'm well. Yourself?”

“I'm great! The weather is pretty nice here, how is it for you?”

Now for the small talk. Okay, not like there's much better to do. “Actually, it's been fairly bad. Lots of clouds and rain. Frost in the morning. Typical October weather, really.”

This does not dissuade Nepal's cheer. “Oh, that must be good for business! It's nice now that fall is here and summer is over! Kids are back in school, people want to stay inside now and have everything fall into place!”

“Well, if there's not a football game of the high school or professional variety, nor any other kind of sporting event, nor any other kind of event. Then things tend to fall into a different kind of place.”

“Oh, Fernando, I'm sorry to hear that!”

“What will be will be. One has minimal control over the choices others make in life.”

There's a brief moment of silence, perhaps as Nepal mulls over how to turn the conversation away from its headlong rush to the bottom of Bleakness Chasm and back on track to Positive Land. Surprisingly, this does not happen; instead she barges full-tilt into the sales part of her spiel. “Fernando, have you reconsidered signing up with Turtlefoot and getting your movie for much less than what you're paying now?”

“Sadly, I have not. The stars have not yet aligned.”

Finally, her facade of mirth cracks and allows a minute bit of frustration or disappointment to seep into her vocal tone. “Oh, well, we'll be in touch then down the road then. Have a good evening, Fernando!”

“And you as well.” Nepal hangs up.

So continues the Turtlefoot Saga.

Round Three: Fight!

Fernando was helping a customer when the phone rang. Since he couldn't very well ditch to check the caller ID, he scoops the phone from its cradle. “Hello, Dominion of Movies.”

“Yes, is this Fern?” It is a woman's voice, the kind of woman's voice which is heard in stereotypical noir scenes, sultry and ephemeral like wisps of jasmine-scented incense floating in a dimly lit room.
“May I ask who is calling?”
“This is Kuwait, calling from Turtlefoot Enterprises. We just thought we'd call and check in with you to see how things are going. Business is doing alright?”

Ah, Turtlefoot Enterprises. It had been nearly a year since Fernando had last bandied with them, but the contact-person at the time had been Supreme Salesman Kevin. Mild curiosity piqued as to why Fernando spoke with a sexy-voiced woman, but he was not so curious as to be baited into a conversation he didn't want to have. “Things are well enough. I shan't complain.”

“Well, good. That's good. The weather has been alright there?”
“The weather has been unseasonal here,” replies Fernando. “But, listen, I don't want to take up any more of your time. You still aren't a fit for me, so I'm still uninterested.”
“Oh, I understand. Well, if you change your mind you've got my number and you can give me a call most any time and I'd be glad to help.” Kuwait says this with a throaty chuckle.
“Excellent. Good day.” Fernando hangs up.
“Who was that?” asks the customer, one of Fernando's regulars.
“People trying to sell me something using a fun new tactic. Unfortunately for them, I had my emotional centers surgically removed so I am unaffected by appeals to my baser instincts.”

And so the communications freeze between the Dominion and Turtlefoot Enterprises resumed, only for it to break some time later like two horribly compatible people who only tolerate one another for the occasional sex-romp.

Persistence Is Not a Virtue

It's a rather cool, cloudy Thursday afternoon. Fernando is sipping from a freshly-filled water bottle. The phone rings.

Oh, goody. The rental distribution people from about three months ago. Fernando thought he was finished with them. But, business being business, Fernando cannot simply allow the phone to go unanswered. Dammit.

“Hello, Dominion of Movies.”
“Yeah, hi, Fern. It's me, Kevin, calling from Turtlefoot Enterprises. How are you?”
“I'm...fine.”
“Great. Let me tell you something, Fern, and I don't know if you've heard the news, but that thing that Netflix did the other day is just phenomenal. I couldn't believe it, and let me tell you that the phones have been ringing all day with video stores calling, letting us know that they need stock for the upcoming months. So many people have...they're just so upset over this that they've canceled their subscriptions entirely. And that's good news for people like you, because it means they've got nowhere else to go for the movies being released over the coming months. I mean...lemme ask you, Fern, you've got friends who use Netflix, right? Are they as upset about this as the people I know? I mean, come on, give people actual value for their money, right?”
“I guess so,” answers Fernando. He hears a faint inhalation as "Kevin" readies to continue his pitch. “But let me stop you so you won't waste any more of your time. I'm still not interested in what you guys have to offer.”
“But, Fern, tell me, how exactly this won't work out for you. The depth and breadth of titles we can offer has worked for so many of our customers and it can work for you, too.”
“Well, yeah. They're your customers. You provide them with that which they view as adequate value for their money. I would not receive an adequate value for my money, hence my disinterest.”
“Listen, Fern, I can give you references to a number of my clients. Ask them and I'm sure--”
“Sure they'll say marvelous things, yeah, I know. That's why you would mention these clients to me in the first place.”
“If you'll just help me out and tell me how it--”
“The plural of anecdote is not data. That's all the help I'm giving you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a store to run. Good day.”

Will Fernando experience a Round Three down the road?

On Bridge-Selling

One Wednesday afternoon Fernando found himself speaking on the phone with a representative from a movie distribution company, something of a coincidence seeing as Fernando's current distributor had just recently fucked up royally and managed to get him zero of the copies of Little Fockers he'd ordered, forcing him to pick them up at the local Wal-Mart.

This man took Fernando's meager abilities at salesmanship and pooped all over them. He knew his stuff. He mentioned things in the industry that only someone who had actually worked in the industry would know (as opposed to people who sit in a distribution office). Fernando wishes he had the sales chops this guy did. All in all, he did his job very admirably and sold Fernando on his company's business model, which he made sound as if it had been carved by Christopher Lee himself using a mithril chainsaw on a metric ton of unicorn butter.

But despite the man's overbearing charisma, Fernando is not an idiot. Anything that sounds too good to be true most often is.

So Fernando did some snooping on the internets and turned up some kernels of information that the nice salesman had neglected to mention during his piece. Like the fact that Fernando would have to pay a $40 per month subscription fee to use the company's services. Or that for Fernando to get the super-low prices he had been quoted he would need to order a great many movies...not aggregate, no, but from each distribution company. So he'd need a glut of Universal followed by a glut of Paramount followed by a glut of Lions Gate followed by a glut of Weinstein Brothers and so forth. The size and composition of Fernando's customer base is such that he has minimal use for a large variety of indie and foreign films or, conversely, twenty different copies of Black Swan or The Next Three Days. And this does not, of course, even touch on the logistics of inventory management in finding space for all these additional, mandatory films.

What peeved most Fernando is not the fact that these constraints existed so much as that they had been kept veiled and would likely have sprung up as an unpleasant surprise after a hypothetical contract signing had gone through. Of course, Fernando could always void the contract, but that would require him to pay, according to discussions of this company's business model that Fernando had espied online, $250 to the PoS (that's point-of-sale, you pottyminds...though the alternative expression is also rather apropos in this circumstance) software distributor to give him an alphanumeric code that would allow him to cancel his $40/month account. Rather shady, all told. But Fernando supposes that is what stellar salesmanship and burgeoning success in business is all about.

So when the gentleman called back the next week to attempt scheduling an in-person sit-down with one of his company's representatives, Fernando informed him that these services were not something in which he was interested at this time. The sales representative of course apologized and attempted to regain Fernando's trust by offering him “incentives” for keeping the company in mind, but Fernando did not allow his opinion to be swayed.

Fernando would rather deal with the occasional no-show movie, for which he is not charged, from his current distributor than sign on to a company set upon screwing its customers out of money through subscription and cancellation fees.