Looking back, it seems to me I could walk into trouble just as blindly as I can a good real estate deal and a lot of it was job-related, by which I mean owing to the job as opposed to on the job.

My first white-collar job was as a Cost Accounting Clerk working for National Cash Register at their business forms printing plant in Arlington, Texas.  It paid well and was interesting to boot.  I learned about lithography, offset printing, letterpress printing, bindery techniques, work-and-flop printing, work-and-turn printing, the many types and weights of paper and card stock in addition to the principles of Cost Accounting.  And I was using the hottest new technology – NCR’s mag-stripe ledger which captured and stored on a magnetic stripe the information that was being typed on a heavy card stock paper ledger.

I also got to hear some pretty good stories about the origins and early problems of the company, which started out as the National Manufacturing Company in Dayton, Ohio, as well as the history of some of it’s luminaries, including one-time owner John Patterson and the creator of the ultimately ubiquitous THINK slogan, Tom Watson, whom Patterson fired and who went on to become CEO of International Business Machines (later IBM) which thrived by advancing  punched card tabulating technology.

The most interesting stories, though, were about the early salesmen’s life on the road hawking cash registers, a device that was unwelcome in many quarters because by recording sales as well as drawer openings and closings, it could put an end to the practice of tapping the till.  Bartenders were especially displeased about having to use one and more than one salesman was severely beaten when they showed up on a cold call.

Of all the stories, however, the most intriguing were about getting cash registers to the buyers.  In many cases a freight worker would collude with people who worked at the place it was going to be used and when it arrived they’d run and tell their cohorts, which resulted in some unknown personage taking a sledge hammer to it somewhere between the freight yard and the delivery address.  So, in order to protect both the product and the salesmen, they started shipping the machines out with manifests listing the contents as barbed wire and marking the crates accordingly.

Big mistake – In those early days no invention was more reviled than barbed wire.

But I got myself into a whole ‘nother kind of trouble…

.
NCR held it’s national sales conference in a different city every year and during my time it was held in Dallas.  Attendance was mandatory for sales and production management staff, which included everyone in the office except me, but because the plant would be closed due to the conference, I was invited.

In order to have time to yuck it up with old friends and former co-workers coming into town and to be sure about getting to the conference in time, the guys decided to book a hotel room for the night before and we all went out to one of Jack Ruby’s former clubs.  I wasn’t quite 21, but I could pass and was allowed in.

I don’t remember how long we were there before two thirty-ish woman came in and were escorted to a nearby table.  Nature being what it is, I went over and asked if either would like to dance and was declined.  Neither was interested in dancing, but one asked me to join her for a drink.  Not two minutes later, some dude I didn’t know swooped in and started chatting up the other and after a while suggested we all go to his home.  None of us had our own wheels, but I was able to borrow car from a co-worker and off we went.

Thus began the absolutely weirdest and most nearly fatal encounter of my life.

I’ve never seen such a strange house before or since.  I could tell from the outside that all the windows were blacked out.  On the inside, the whole place was draped in black velvet, and apart from a couple of floor lamps and several erotic statuettes, it was unfurnished.  There was no way to tell where the entrance to any other room was and the guy pointed to a break in the drapery and said, “You two can go through there.  We’re going this way.” and the two disappeared through another break.

In the morning, the woman who had been with the owner of the house came storming into the room her friend and I were in and started yelling about how she wanted to get the Hell outta there and ranting about how she’d spent the whole night trying to protect her friend by forcibly restraining the other guy from joining us and how pissed off she was by the fact that he had decidedly more interest in me than either of them and he was right on her heels demanding we leave or he’d call the cops.

As soon as we were out of that nightmare of a house and in the car, the women started popping pills and yakking about how they’d run out of this, that, or another thing and asked if I’d take them to get something from one or the other’s home and then to a local pharmacy since neither of them had a car and I didn’t have any more sense than to agree.

And it was that decision that almost got me killed.

When we arrived at whoever’s home it was, they got out of the car and said they’d be right back and the one riding in the front with me left her purse on the seat next to me.  But, they didn’t come right back and I got more and more nervous as the minutes passed.  After I had been waiting in the driveway for about 15 minutes the thing I was most afraid would happen did happen – Someone pulled in behind me, got out of his car, and approached me.

“Can I help you?”, he says and before I could answer he asks, “Are you wanting to get yer car out?” and when I said yes he went back and pulled out of the driveway to let me out and then he pulled right back in.  So, there I was in the middle of the street with some strange woman’s overstuffed purse still on the seat next to me.

Oh, God.  Oh, God.  What do I do now?

Easy.  Open the door.  Put the purse on the street.  Close the door.  And bearing in mind you’re in a residential area, get the Hell outta here!

I’d not gotten much more than half a block away when I heard a loud popping sound behind me and looked in the rear view mirror and saw the guy who’d just set me free standing in the street with the purse one hand and firing away at me with a gun in the other.

I’m tempted to say I was glad he couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle, but I think it’s more on point these days to say I’m glad he had no 2nd Amendment skills…