It is almost pointless to try to describe the elegance and splendor of the setting. This affair was clearly on par with a royal wedding. All guests was presented with a piece of Baccarat crystal as they exited, and were whisked away in a private limousine, courtesy of AT&T. Those guests who preferred to stroll in the moonlight first were discreetly followed by an AT&T observer, who radioed to the waiting limo driver when he thought the opportune moment for taking the guests home had arrived.
At first this all frightened me deeply. How could I ever hope to compete against people who could afford to spend money like this? Then I turned it around. How could companies that wasted money for their own self-aggrandizement ever hope to compete against me?
Their wealth, their bloated, grotesque display of it, distorted their corporate focus. The competition between the giant telecom companies centered more on how to impress the clients than on how to improve service or lower prices. Telecommunications is a very thin-margin business. These obscene expenditures only raised the overhead of the giant companies to the extent that they were not in a position to lower prices and rejoin the competitive fray. The one-upmanship that the big guys played with one another made them ripe for the picking from an upstart, downscale company like IDT.
As a matter of policy, we still use our same old folding display whenever we attend a trade show. We try to offer our clients great service and innovation, but there are no free drinks at the IDT booth. At the time, though, I wasn’t interested in making any stands on principle, or on the virtues of corporate frugality. I just wanted people to come to our booth. So I put on my IDT baseball cap and told Marc that it was my intention to join these lovely women and give out our literature to incoming visitors. Marc greeted my plan skeptically. “You’re ugly,” he said. “Well, there’s only two of us here, and you’re not any better looking,” I replied. I left Marc alone at the booth and went to join the models handing out literature.
It wasn’t my looks, however, that landed me in hot water. The small press notices our callback services had generated by servicing the NBC Olympics contingent had aroused the ire of some of Europe’s largest phone monopolies. True, we were almost broke and had almost no clients, but a monopoly can never be too careful, and instinctively feels the need to squelch any would-be competitors in even their most fetal state. I had not realized how threatening our fledgling efforts were to them.
