Eat Green Chile, It'll clean you out!

When I left home to travel the country, "back in the day" as my girls would say, I spent some significant time in New Mexico. I went to work for a man, or should I say, a prince of a man, who taught me many things. First and foremost I learned to shut-up when the men were talking politics, that is, New Mexico politics, but to listen carefully to what was being said. My job was to sell CheckRite, a bad check collection product--and I quickly and effectively realized that the writing was on the wall, in the form of the uncollected checks tacked to the walls behind the lunch counters and dry cleaners' bulletin boards. Whenever I saw one of those spurious checks tacked prominently behind a lunch counter or a dry cleaner, I knew I could score. My handy dandy directory of known bad check writers was the ticket not only to retrieving one's clothing, but for me, it was a ticket to a sale from a merchant who had one too many of those dead-letter checks wafting in the breeze, never to be collected. Once I showed the business owner my directory of deadbeats, I could almost always score a sale...walk in, look for the sometimes crumpled or dog-eared check and show in my directory that this could have been avoided had the merchant invested just a few dollars a month to mitigate the bad check problem before it started. It was a pleasure to commiserate with the owner over just how much money was being lost, so as to demonstrate the wonderful prospect of cutting those deadbeats off at the knees. Why, with my directory of deadbeats, I had the certain confidence that with patient understanding, I could prove immediately the efficacy of this information. Of course, I was not alone. Inez was ruthless in her discussions regarding these uncollected checks, and she converted the hardest of all cases. All business owners should have access to an Inez in the back room. And everyone should at some time in their lives, experience the wonder of the arroyo and the warm , sometimes blast furnace heat of the good, good green chiles, that, as Inez would say, will "clean you out!!!