the bitter taste of defeat

Currently listening to Morbid Angel - Formulas Fatal to the Flesh

A couple months ago, I recommend to one of the teams that I work with that they completely revise their pricing strategy, because it didn't make sense. Cables that were 25' long were less expensive than cables that were 14' long, for example. They made the changes I recommended a few weeks later. I expected that the changes (all of which were price increases) would improve their margins while slightly hurting unit sales. In the end, we'd sell fewer cables, but make more money selling them.

I was reviewing sales with that team this afternoon, and it turned out that my new pricing scheme had largely backfired. Unit sales were down about 30%, and profits were off some 20-25%. Needless to say, we'll be changing prices again tonight.

This experience got me thinking about other failures and missteps I've experienced in my life. Here are a few more:

When I first started working for my current employer, one of my responsibilities was entering unit forecasts at the item/store level into the replenishment system for the telephone category. Most people entered forecasts in whole numbers, e.g. "12." This was not precise enough for me, so I always entered them out to two decimal places. I've always been pretty fast on a 10-key, and got to the point where I could update 1000 forecasts per hour. One day, I missed a decimal point on a store, and instead of entering "12.34" or whatever as the forecast, I entered "1234." I didn't catch this error, and didn't learn about it until I got a call from the store in question a couple weeks later. They were wondering what they were going to do with the 700 units of that phone that had just arrived on a truck. They should have received 7 units. Oops.

I was in choir my senior year of high school. The choir put on a dinner theater every year, and in a strange twist of fate, I was given the part of Ricky Rock in the dinner theater, which was entitled "Ricky Rock's Record Hour." In the show, I played a TV dance show host, and was required to sing a solo rendition of "Just Give Me Some of that Rock 'n' Roll Music" (or whatever it's called). Anyway, I didn't get many opportunities to rehearse it with the band, so I often started singing at the wrong time. One particular night, I went and talked to the band and asked them to insert a break after the first few bars so that I could get the song right. They agreed, so I was pretty excited about finally nailing the song. However, it became clear after they started playing the song that they had forgotten about our little agreement, because the break never came. They kept playing while I nervously danced (if you can call it that) around the stage. I finally started singing some 30 seconds too late, and completely botched the song. Unfortunately, this also happened to be the night that they were taping the performance for people to purchase. My screw-up was captured for posterity. I hope the tape my parents bought has permanently disappeared.

As a young teenage driver, one of my favorite things to do was to drive my dad's Porsches when he wasn't around. One Saturday, I decided to move the 911 Turbo after I finished washing it. Unfortunately, I didn't turn the wheel hard enough when backing out, and ran into the other Porsche that was parked in the driveway. The damage to the parked one was minimal--just a scratch--but there was a 2" dent in the 911's rear left quarterpanel. You can imagine how thrilled my dad was about this. You'd have thought I let the car roll off a cliff the way he reacted.

Anyway, that's enough blunders for now.