“But why didn’t you go after other kinds of tourism accounts?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed low-class. We were all transportation guys, after all.”

“Well, why didn’t you just get rid of the rural areas and do a better job on the cities to suit the airlines?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “There were so few airlines and they just paid their bills and didn’t ask any questions. We didn’t want to shake them up by raising prices or changing distribution. They might have quit if we did, you know.”

Ridiculous, I thought. Obviously the airlines only cared about New York, Washington, and maybe Philadelphia—the big cities they flew to. Seriously, was anyone going to take a timetable from a motel in Utica, and drive six hours to New York to catch a flight? Was any United Airlines sales director ever going to care about a motel in Utica? Obviously not. They wanted their stuff at the Hilton, Sheraton, and Holiday Inns near the airport. I could ditch Timetable’s whole distribution system and do it all myself. If I bought this company, it would be 100 percent profit. Man, I wanted it bad.

Problem was, I’d lost almost all my money on the Harvard advertising agency fiasco.

“Well, a hundred thousand seems like an awful lot of money when all these airlines are about to quit,” I said.

“Quit?” he said. “Who said they’re quitting?”

“Why, you just did,” I responded. “Not that I didn’t know anyway. I mean, most of the guys I talked to said they might cut this out of their budget anyway.”

This wasn’t exactly true, but Mehr was clearly out of touch and easily alarmable.