I guess that’s why idea was shelved

AFTER serving a fiveyear apprenticeship, I worked for 16 years on the bench before I joined the technical service department of a supplier of materials used in our trade. my job was to test materials under customer conditions and advise marketing and sales. One day, the marketing manager told me the company was considering adding a new product to its range. It was something the company had invented, but so far it had allowed other firms to manufacture and supply under their own name. The proposal was to supply a limited range of it under our own name. There were two main types and a large number of different specifications, but only a few were applicable to our customers. So the marketing manager wanted to know which specs to offer them. To achieve this he asked me to come up with a questionnaire our reps could get their customers to fill in when they made their routine visits. I did, but once I’d completed it, he asked me to fill it in myself. I told him I’d only visited a few customers and could only guess what their requirements might be. he assured me that ‘a guess by an experienced person’ was called a ‘guestimate’ and would ‘do just fine’. Copies of the questionnaire were sent to area managers to distribute to their reps, and the area managers were also asked to fill in the survey. The next day my line manager told me he had also been asked to fill in the questionnaire, but had no idea what to say. So I passed on my ‘guestimates’, which he felt were reasonable. One by one the sales reps rang to tell me that as most of their contact was with buyers, not the users, they, too, had no idea how to fill in the questionnaire. and again I passed on my ‘guestimates’ — and also did so when the area managers rang to ask me to help them out. a month later the marketing manager came to see me and proudly informed me my ‘guestimates’ had been spot-on — the results of other questionnaires confirmed it. Naturally, I didn’t like to admit that it was not quite a coincidence the other results matched mine. Instead I ventured to say that craftsmen ‘were conservative about materials and equipment’ and because ‘they preferred things they knew and trusted’, they might be ‘reluctant to change’. The price ‘might be lower’, but ‘only the boss got the saving — they got the aggravation of inferior products’. So in the end we didn’t launch our own range, and my reputation was never challenged.

Derek trayler, Hornchurch, essex.