I have a gun to my head, and if you don't buy a box of pens from me right now, I'm going to blow my brains all over the ceiling.

When I worked at a sales office for a promotional products company in the 1980's, I actually heard those words spoken by a fellow colleague in his miserable little cubicle, directly behind my own miserable little cubicle. It was kind of a hoot for the sales room, we chuckling and wondering if someone was really on the other end of the line, Mike stringing the prospect along, presumably to a triumphantly impossible sale, everyone ending their own phone calls to watch this train wreck of a pitch. Thing is, it was funny, at that moment. A little break in the tedium. Comic relief.

But when that call was over - "you just killed me!" - he picked up the phone and slid his ruler down the page to the next line and dialed. He got the owner on the phone, introduced himself, and told him he had a gun to his head blah blah blah.

All day he did this. Eight hours of the same line to gas station owners, chiropractors, real estate agents, and the like. It was his plan. His angle. His new system. Just devised it over lunch. He wasn't trying to be funny. He had just gone insane.

Mike who had a system for winning at craps but never had a buck to play. Mike who had allegedly walked away from a sports talk radio show in Phoenix to be a professional gambler at Del Mar. The surf meets the turf meets Mike.

Mike, 40-something and never not drunk, who later went to jail for forging his own mom's signature on a whole book of checks he stole from her on one of his visits home. Mike holding a loaded gun to his head, and if you don't buy a box of pens from him right now he's going to blow his brains all over the ceiling.

I thought of ol' Mike when I saw THIS GUY'S SITE.

See, now, Mike didn't think about making people care about him first. Mike was not a cute little bunny. That's where he goofed.