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including how I (A) schmoozed with receptionists, (B) introduced my products and myself to nurses, and (C) handled brief, unscheduled meetings with physicians. A and B went pretty well, but C demonstrated plenty of room for improvement. Having gained access to the Promised Land—the back office—I quickly established rapport with a nurse who subsequently asked the doctor to speak with me for a moment. Bingo! This job is going to be even easier than I thought! Jack and I exchanged knowing winks, neither one of us aware that the dam in my brain was about to burst, unleashing six weeks’ worth of acquired knowledge.
    Not wanting to scare off the first physician kind enough to take the time to meet me, I was simply supposed to introduce myself, give him a brief synopsis of Zithromax, and ask if he had any questions. If he did, then I could launch into my “detail,” as I had been trained to do. To say that I dropped a torrent of information on the poor, unsuspecting pediatrician would be quite an understatement. To this day, he may never have spoken to another rep. Pfizer people called it “brain dumping”; even today, I can still hear the truck backing up. Beep … beep … beep.
    “Hello, Doctor, my name is Jamie Reidy, and, having recently gotten out of the army, where I was an HR officer, I am a new member of Pfizer’s new Pediatric Division, and I will be bringing you Zithromax, the world’s first once-a-day for only five days oral antibiotic for your ear infection patients. Zithromax works great, as evidenced by its equal efficacy when compared to Augmentin in this six-hundred-thirty-plus patient study, and has thirty-three percent less diarrhea, which will give you one-third more sleep at night as you’ll get thirty-three percent fewer phone calls from angry moms at three in the morning, and, with its cherry flavor, Zithromax tastes even better, and I know how important that is for your moms not to have to fight with the kids to get their medicine down because, after all, if they don’t take it, it’s probably not going to work. Am I right or am I right?”
    I had plenty of time to ponder my own question asthe previously nice nurse escorted us out of the office. Jack held a little coaching session with me in the parking lot. “Dude! You need to chill the fuck out!” Thus my first sales call proved both ironic, because rarely in my career would I ever again convey so much product information to a physician, and prophetic, because my postcall behavior revealed an innate desire to cheat the system.
    I slunk into the Lumina and pulled out my laptop computer so I could enter my “postcall notes,” a brief description of any information I learned or shared during the sales call. Before my next visit with that physician, I was expected to read through those notes and then use the information to my advantage. For example, “Doctor, the last time we spoke, you expressed interest in using Zithromax in your bronchitis patients. …” Of course, after that stellar debut, I could only say, “Doctor, the last time we spoke I verbally vomited on your loafers.” As my laptop booted up, I turned to Jack and asked, “Does that count for four calls or just the one?”
    He turned in the passenger seat to face me, his head tilted and eyebrows scrunched. “How many docs did you talk to?” he asked.
    “One,” I said.
    “Well, then I guess you made only one call. You weren’t a math major, were you?”
    I shook my head. “No, it’s just that he has three partners, so I thought maybe, ’cause I got to the back office, it counted for four calls.”
    Jack stared at me for a long time before the smirk crept into view. Nodding his head slowly, he started to laugh.
    “You made only one call today, but in a few months, after you stop getting lost and doing twenty U-turns a day and people start to know your name, that’ll count as four calls.” I looked up from my typing to see him staring at me with a sparkle in his eye.