This was intended to be one of those oh so clever moments. I pumped the word “sales” into my thesaurus and was going to clutch in my dirty little fingers veritable proof that “sales” was synonymous with words like deceit, lie, fraud and what not.

Dammit. This thesaurus is defective. I never should have listened to that salesperson who told me it was unabridged.

One time I learned an important lesson about sales. I’ve told this story before but this time I’ll try to tell it shorter and better.

I worked for a big company. They needed to modernize an entire department. The estimated cost of the project, in 1995 dollars, was $25 million. To put that into perspective, later I ended up living in a small town that considered adding a much needed new bridge across a small river at a cost of $15 million in 2004 dollars. So yeah, the project was pretty big.
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