The Stopper
I walked along with everyone else out of the plane, down the passageway, and into the waiting area where I was supposed to meet the client. The inside of most airports are pretty much the same. This was San Juan, Puerto Rico, and its distinguishing features were the humidity and teenagers in military uniforms with automatic weapons. 9/11 was four years away and air travel was still fairly casual. I hadn't even bothered to bring a passport. I had been hired to spend five days showing an injection molding company how to prepare for an upcoming quality audit.
The Owner of the company called Yvonne who handled our sales, and she had closed the deal. Yvonne closed lots of deals, 35 to 40 a year for me, and who knows how many for others doing similar work. Of the hundreds of deals she had set up for me, this one had the strangest requests for schedule and accommodations. The owner wanted to schedule the five days of work with a weekend in the middle. This meant I would be in Puerto Rico seven days, but only charge for five. He wanted to save on the airfare by avoiding flights on Friday through Monday. The second condition was that I would stay at his home, instead of a hotel, again to save on expenses.
Yvonne had checked with me before agreeing. I thought it might lead to more business on the island if we helped this guy keep his head above water. Anyone struggling as he must surely be, would pass on great reviews to other local manufacturers. Also, it might be nice for a change, to take in the sights instead of the same old pattern of fly in, work, and fly out. I told Yvonne that it would be alright.
The owner came up to me, we made our way through introductions, and then walked out to where his wife was parked at the curb. She was sitting behind the wheel of an 18-year old, Ford station wagon. They were both dressed casually and wearing blue jeans that had been broken in long ago. This made sense as we were headed to the plant and would put in a good half-day's work.
The manufacturing operation was in Toa Alta, about forty-five minutes from the airport. The owner explained to me that he and his wife were from Chicago, but lived in Puerto Rico thirteen weeks a year, to satisfy the residency requirement and avoid paying U.S. taxes. The owner had invented plastic mouth pieces that were an inexpensive yet effective alternative to the traditional metal and wire braces. They made them in Puerto Rico and shipped them all over the world.
The plant was a small home that had been converted. The interior was now primarily office cubicles with six clerks who took orders and shipped out the mouthpieces. The office shelves were loaded with thousands of mouthpieces, boxed up and ready to ship. The attached garage had been made into the production area where an ancient piece of equipment banged out the mouthpieces.
The owner introduced me to Sarah, who would be responsible for putting in place the things I would recommend. They couldn't have picked a better person. She was pleasant to work with, smarter than she needed to be, and wasn't turned off by the extremely boring subject matter. Sarah and I made good progress that first afternoon and then it came time for everybody to go home. I climbed back into the station wagon with the owner and his wife, and we headed for their house.
The armed presence at the airport was also spread across the entire city. The majority of commercial storefronts that we passed had security gates and an armed guard at the front entrance. Liquor stores, pawn shops, markets, appliance stores; street after street – they all were armed to the teeth.
I began to view the owner's financial prospects differently as we approached their home. The wall surrounding the community where they lived, and the guard station entrance we passed through, I took to be standard fare, after the ride across town. However, the signs I saw indicated that we were headed into the Dorado Beach Resort. They had built their home on the golf course fourteen years ago for eleven million dollars.
My client was the former President of the American Orthodontist Association and his invention had put his Chicago orthodontic clinic profits through the roof. When the parents of Illinois teenagers discovered they could straighten their kids' teeth in half the time for $120 instead of $3,000, he could hardly keep up with the demand. He then began to promote his product to orthodontists throughout the U.S., but none wanted to abandon their $3,000 fees. Undeterred, we went abroad, first to Africa and other underdeveloped countries where the product and its affordability were welcomed with open arms. Fourteen years later he had been to over a hundred countries, training orthodontists and dentists, who in turn ordered products from his plant in Puerto Rico. The little converted house in Toa Alta with its seven employees produced annual revenues in excess of $30,000,000.
The house was an architectural digest winner, looked big enough to have its own gift shop, and Chi Chi Rodriquez lived next door. They had an indoor and an outdoor pool. The big room in front had a thirty foot ceiling; glass ran from top to bottom and looked out on the golf course. The home was filled with museum quality art and artifacts from all over the world. Once the owner found out I was an art major he apologized for the paintings in the house, as the humidity forced them to keep the good stuff in Chicago. I only went into five rooms during the time I stayed there, yet there were so many treasures in just those rooms alone, I never had enough time to look at everything. Two pieces that really blew me away were the Kandinsky, that evidently didn't qualify for Chicago, and mounted on the entertainment room wall was an eighteen-foot long, hand-carved, outrigger canoe from Indonesia.
They lived in this enormous modern mansion, just the two of them. Their two kids were grown and had moved on. The owner was laid back but his wife was a classic type A personality, who obviously wore the pants in the family. They were both as simple and unpretentious as one could imagine. They had never had any servants but they did pay a landscape crew to handle the outdoors. His wife did the cooking. The meals were spartan but good. She had an annoying habit of standing over you toward the end of the meal, insisting that you finish everything on your plate.
My third day in Puerto Rico, Hurricane Georges ran the length of the island. The owner had been tracking the hurricanes path and sometime after dinner, calmly went around the house flipping switches that propelled roll down covers that stretched over every window including the twenty footers in the big room. Before Georges finished its work, it had caused the most damage in more than a dozen years. During the twelve hours we were in lockdown, I never heard a sound.
I stayed in the "small" bedroom off of the library. At eleven o'clock, the owner and his wife would retire and I would roam the house for hours examining the incredible collection they had assembled. It was during one of these night strolls that disaster struck. I picked up a small dark blue glass object that looked like a flask of some sort. I was rotating it in my hands to view the exterior surface when the small stopper came out of the top of the flask and fell to the marble floor, breaking into dozens of pieces. The stopper was the size of a large marble, also dark blue glass, a sphere with a stub that went into the mouth of the flask. I doubt there was any object in their entire house that wasn't worth at least a thousand times what I was charging them for the week's work.
I collected all of the pieces off of the floor and put them in an envelope I found in the owner's office. I spent the next day and a half trying to decide if I should tell the wife about it, or pretend it never happened. With the thousands of things that were in that house how would they ever even know. Then again, that hovering over the dinner plate routine made me worry that anything was possible with her.
I had struggled whether to come clean for a day and a half and one morning after breakfast, I told her, "Wouldn't you know it. I was looking at something last night and I broke it".
She could see I was holding something and she asked nonchalantly, "Okay, let's see what you've done".
I first showed her the flask. She gasped and both of her hands shot up to grab her throat. Her eyes were as big as plates. This wasn't going well.
I then handed her the envelope with the flap open so she could see the broken pieces, and I said, "The stopper fell out and shattered on the floor".
She immediately relaxed and asked, "The stopper?"
I said, "Yeah, or what ever it's called".
She had fully recovered now, "You had me going there for a minute".
I said, "It kinda looked that way".
She said, "That's nothing, we can get another. There's nothing special about that. Any glass stopper will do. Our daughter is going to Thailand after new years and she can look for one".
Her husband had observed the whole exchange and said, "Don't give it a another thought".
Sarah arrived to take me to the plant to continue out project. I wondered all day if the owner and his wife had chosen to give me a break and downplay the whole thing with the broken stopper. They had certainly been convincing when they assured me it was no big deal. There was no way I could tell for sure. Sarah drove me back to their house at the end of the day. I sat down to dinner with the owner and his wife. The owner pulled something small out of his shirt pocket and placed it on the table in front of his wife. It was the stopper, once again whole.
He said, "This was my little project for the day".
He told us he had used clear dental resin cement and reconstructed the stopper from the pieces. My first reaction was, "No f---ing way". Then I remembered he was an orthodontist; they fix tiny stuff for a living. He may have even had fun doing it. The stopper was once again a perfect dark blue glass sphere, with a little stub that his wife put back in the top of the flask, and not another word was said.