Date Rape Dan

Once upon a time, I worked for a company with a VP of sales who was a complete doofus. Come to think of it, that describes more than one sales VP that I've had the pleasure of knowing, but one particular guy is story-worthy.

I called him "Date Rape Dan," because in a meeting where we decided to decline some particular client request, Dan had this immortal quote, which seemed to be taken right from the date rape handbook:

Sometimes no doesn't really mean no. Sometimes no means maybe.

It seems clear to me that even a moderately sharp sixth grader could say what Date Rape Dan meant to convey without sounding so stupid.

Date Rape Dan became infamous among his employees for asking them to figure out how to do rediculously impossible tasks. He made one guy responsible for seating an extra person in an already cramped room but insisted that it was not his idea that people got less work space. He blamed that decision on the person who he put in charge because he had not explicitly said, "take away some of those people's space."

He would instruct someone to "tell them that we can't meet that price, but do it in a way where they accept it and still want to buy the product."

"Well how can I do that?"

"That's for you to figure out. Be careful with it. This is hard."

Good advice, huh?

Allow me to recap my three favorite Date Rape Dan stories. On second thought, I can't narrow it down to three. Here are my favorite four.

The president of our company wanted Date Rape Dan to start writing the release announcements for new software. In the past, he had always done that job himself, and the company was big enough that it really should have been something that he could delegate. However, he didn't trust the engineers who understood the release to put enough sales spin into it, and he couldn't trust the sales organization to understand the features.

He called a meeting with Date Rape Dan, a marketing subordinate, and several of the developers.

The president prefaced the meeting by explaining that he wanted to "take the meat of each new feature" and turn it into a marketing slick. We then started to go bullet point by bullet point through each new feature.

For each item, a developer would explain what the feature was and give some information about why it was beneficial. Date Rape Dan and the marketing guy would take notes, restate what they thought they heard, and look to the president for approval. Every time the president nodded that he got it right (which sometimes took several attempts), Date Rape Dan would chime in with, "All right, that's some good meat on this one."

(I'm not paraphrasing. That really is exactly how he said it.)

This meeting went for a few hours a day for several days in a row. The routine never varied. Finally, on day three, the president got worried and asked, "Dan, you're not actually going to put the word meat in the release announcement, are you?"

Date Rape Dan assured him that he wasn't, but continued to overuse the word "meat" for several weeks.

We were waiting for the programming to be completed for some long-forgotten custom deliverable. The programmer doing the coding was (and still is) named Chikako. It's pronounced just like it's spelled.

Date Rape Dan asked the status and was told, "we're waiting on Chikako."

Chikako was integrating some software that had been provided by another vendor. I don't recall where that vendor was located, but I know that it was not Chicago. Regardless, Dan assumed that the other vendor was in Chicago and that we were waiting on that vendor. He called and chewed them out, even though they had provided their software weeks before.

When Date Rape Dan was new to the company, he went to lunch with one of his employees. He asked about the process for something or other. The guy started explaining the process. He went on for several minutes. Date Rape Dan would nod and without saying anything, encourage him to elaborate.

At the end of the long explanation, Date Rape Dan paused as if in thought. He then looked up and asked his only question about the process: "Where'd you get that ice cream?"

In the technology investment capital boom of the 90s, our company executives made their pitch to a number of investors. They were trying to raise capital in order to implement an aggressive growth plan. It was a huge step in moving from a small company to a serious force in our market.

Date Rape Dan was, of course, part of these meetings. I, of course, was not at something this important, but I suppose that he was to present the sales plan to the capital investors.

I'm sure the presentations got boring, but Date Rape Dan couldn't get it in his head that these were significantly important presentations to his career.

In one meeting, he got bored, so he picked up a discarded candy or gum wrapper from the table. He put it in front of his mouth, stretched it tight with both hands, and blew. The wrapper started to buzz/whistle, and Date Rape Dan made it whistle out a little rhythm.

Meanwhile, someone was in front of the room trying to speak, and his nasty glares couldn't distract Date Rape Dan from his candy wrapper melody. His employee sitting next to him had to give him a sharp elbow to the ribs to get him to knock it off.

Date Rape Dan's career at our company didn't last much longer.

For the last several years, Date Rape Dan has held an important position in the Louisiana state government. He runs a group of people whose role is to attact technology companies to come to Louisiana and to help the ones in the state grow. Good luck, Louisiana.