Dressing the Part

In the promotional products industry, most of my clientele are white collar Fortune 500 companies. As in any sales position you need to dress the part. This means that 99% of the time I’m in a full suit (IBM school of blue suit, white shirt, blue tie). Well, this next meeting I couldn’t have been more off base on how I presented myself.
I received a referral from a client on a Wholesale Frozen Foods company in Chicago that might need promotional items. I’m scheduled to meet the owner at 8:00 A.M..at his warehouse/office. This guy starts his day at 1:00 A.M. so I’m getting him right before he goes home for the day. The warehouse is on the South Side of Chicago which is not an area where they are holding Boy Scout meetings. Though I’m ready with my samples and my black suit and tie.
As I pull in all the workers(again not Boy Scouts) are looking at me like I’m from Mars and a few of them are ducking behind pallets of frozen food. I walk into the dispatch room/office and there is my owner I’m meeting with. He is talking to a Chicago Policeman with 2 other guys that work there standing nearby. I see the owner pull an envelope from under his desk blotter and hand it over to the policeman. I turned away quickly( I really wasn’t prepared to be a witness to a illegal payoff to a Chicago policeman). As I’m facing another man in the office(I believe the co-owner of the company), he says” What the *^%$## are you looking at!” OK. No sweat. I think I have an extra pair of underwear in the car.
The room clears and the owner says to me, “ Danny, next time you come to meet with me, drop the suit. All my guys here think you were either with the IRS or The U.S. Immigration Department.”