an email sent to dadx, a well-to-do employee of NCR.

Whenever I make a purchase off Ticketmaster, they give me an offer to do a survey. It's pretty boring, consisting mostly of questions like "Was it easy to find what you were looking for?" "Why did you choose Ticketmaster?" and other questions that you bullshit through to see what the special offer is at the end...

The offer I have gotten the past four (yes, four) times is a one-year magazine subscription for $2. I don't care how crappy of a magazine it is, if I get mail that doesn't say "You owe us $X" I'm happy.

So I am now a subscriber to TIME, Sports Illustrated, Men's Fitness ((those boys are CUTE!)) and Fortune!

I think my personal net worth increased twenty per cent upon receiving my first issue.

So I started reading it tonight, and I found an article called "The Art of Selling." It talks about some of the greatest salespeople or selling techniques of all time.

The most entertaining quip of the article was this bit on John H. Patterson of NCR:

"John H. Patterson, National Cash Register's founder, had strange and stringent rules for his hires. He built fields on NCR's campus and required salespeople to do exercises. He dictated how much they could pay for neckties. He once fired an emloyee who nearly slipped from a horse during a character-building equestrian event he organized. Seen as the father of modern sales force, Patterson mentored (then fired) IBM founder Thomas Watson Jr."

Interesting.