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    The Toilet Salesman: The Oh...So Necessary Guy
    The Toilet Salesman: The Oh...So Necessary Guy
    The Toilet Salesman: The Oh...So Necessary Guy
    Ebook149 pages2 hours

    The Toilet Salesman: The Oh...So Necessary Guy

    By Mike Gilmore

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    About this ebook

    Sales representative by day; author by night. This is the real story behind selling one of lifes necessities. This is the story of The Toilet Salesman.

    Their official name is toilet or water closet but they have many vernacular names. Crapper, John, or Thunder Buckets are just a few. You can hardly go through a day without one but still you give them no respect.

    When they function properly, as in flush and forget you never give them a second thought. When they clog, leak, or break, they demand your immediate attention.

    Selling toilets is not romantic or likely to be the subject of the latest Hollywood action flick. Selling toilets is real everyday hard work to many plumbing sales associates in our country and around the world.

    Millions of people throughout the world have no access to toilets or even clean drinking water. In our everyday lives, toilets fall into that category of objects we just take for granted.

    This book contains information learned from almost twenty-five years in the plumbing trade industry. It is tastefully written, humorous, and filled with valuable information about toilets and the selling process. Once you have learned the contents of the narrative, you will dazzle your neighbors at the next block party about the inside story of selling toilets.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateApr 21, 2014
    ISBN9781491866917
    The Toilet Salesman: The Oh...So Necessary Guy
    Author

    Mike Gilmore

    The Diplomat is the third Levels of Power novel by Mike Gilmore. He receives his ideas for portions of the novels by closely following our national politics and world events. He works in the daytime for a world-class manufacture of plumbing fixtures and in the evenings writing novels. In addition to the Randy Fisher novels, he has written The Toilet Salesman. An autobiography about selling plumbing and electrical products in the real world. He lives in South Carolina with his wife and two cats.

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      Book preview

      The Toilet Salesman - Mike Gilmore

      © 2014 Mike Gilmore. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

      transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

      This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher

      make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book

      and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

      Published by AuthorHouse 04/16/2014

      ISBN: 978-1-4918-6695-5 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4918-6694-8 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4918-6691-7 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2014903244

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

      and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

      this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

      expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

      views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      1       Rocks in My Faucets

      2       Building Your New Home

      3       The Three-and-a-Half-Day Home Show

      4       The Length of Three Arms

      5       Warranty—How Long Is Enough?

      6       Bearded Ladies

      7       Sizes, Shapes, and Flushing Types, Oh My!

      8       Do You Squat?

      9       The Six-Thousand-Dollar Toilet

      10       I Want the Whole Pie!

      Read About Other Books by Mike Gilmore

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      No man is an island, and this book required the help of two people: Marilyn Gadberry, who made sure the humorous stories, had the proper amount of taste, and my wife, Cheryl, who made sure I did not step in it.

      INTRODUCTION

      Recently one of my colleagues, along with his family, was a guest on the Jimmy Kimmel Live late-night television show. They were actually in their home, participating by way of Skype. They were there as part of a scavenger hunt with a Thanksgiving theme. It was an interesting segment, and my friend and his beautiful family won a forty-two-inch flat-screen television for their efforts.

      I mention this event because it is one of my reasons for writing this book. When Kimmel introduced them, he mentioned that my colleague sold toilets for a living. As you watched Kimmel, it was obvious he could barely stop himself from making a wise-ass comment about toilets. To his credit, he did stop—I assume out of respect for his invited guests.

      Toilets are a funny-looking thing when you get down to it, but try going a day without using one. The invention of the toilet is one of the most important reasons we live longer today. Improved sanitary conditions are something that most people take for granted in their daily life.

      Today there are millions of people living without toilets and proper sanitary conditions. The death rate, especially for young children, is staggering. Even in highly developed countries like India, with a population of 1.3 billion people, only 30 percent of the citizens have bathrooms in their homes or easy access to public restrooms. Those without toilets find personal relief in open locations like farmlands, in deep gullies alongside railroad tracks, or along major highways. Leading health-care organizations estimate that over two thousand children die each day in countries like Bangladesh because of improper sanitary conditions.

      It is a sad story, but improving health conditions around the world is not the reason for this book. This is the story of selling toilets in America and other developed countries. Only the efforts of dedicated manufacturers of plumbing fixtures and their employees bring these great products to consumers to provide proper sanitation to our country and prevent disease.

      To them I dedicate this book.

      CHAPTER 1

      ROCKS IN MY FAUCETS

      Selling plumbing fixtures requires training. Sales associates need to do more than point their finger at what the customer wants and simply nod in agreement. Just like many consumer products, plumbing fixtures reach the packing department after assembly with a large number of components carefully designed and honed to work as a system. Yes, as a system.

      Take your Lexus LS460, with the shocking sticker price of over $72,000. The car is a system of many components that need to work in perfect harmony for the car to run efficiently and get you where you want to go. Should any of these components fail, you may reach your final destination by way of a friendly tow truck. Just how embarrassing is it to be standing at the side of the highway next to your very expensive broken-down car? The raised front hood is a dead giveaway to every passing motorist. Some of them will be looking smug as they speed by.

      All plumbing fixtures—including faucets, toilets, and water heaters—are part of a system and need to work together. For the consumer to receive what he or she wants for a fair price, plumbing sales associates need to know about the products they sell and the proper application.

      Earlier in my career, before I flipped over to the manufacturing side of my industry, I managed a number of distribution warehouses. One time, years ago, a woman purchased a fifty-gallon electric water heater from one of my counter sales associates. Now, fifty-gallon electric or forty-gallon natural-gas heaters are an everyday item in our industry, so the sales associate had no reason to doubt what the customer needed.

      About three weeks after the sale, I received a hot call from the consumer. She complained very loudly in my ear that the water heater was always running out of hot water. It was defective.

      Let me tell you one thing. Water heaters are what I call a dumb animal. Either they work or they do not. They will continue to heat water until the cows come home as long as they are working properly. No if, ands, or buts.

      She insisted that someone from my company come to her home to inspect the heater. She had already paid the plumber to install the heater and had no wish to incur an extra expense from the plumber. For the record, if you purchase the fixtures yourself, plumbers will normally only guarantee their work, not the fixture.

      I made an appointment for the next day and arrived at the home. The homeowner had cooled down by now and led me to the garage where the offending beast was located. I forced the heater to kick on and checked the electrical amperage, and the heater was drawing the proper amount of current. I forced both the top and then the bottom 4,500-watt elements to work separately. Normally only one element works at a time. The bottom element maintains the water temperature and the top element pops on when the heater receives heavy demand for hot water.

      Everything seemed to be working properly. Now I needed to check on the potential demand for hot water. Water heaters put out a determined amount of hot water based on their electrical configuration, wattage of the elements, and size of the holding tank, and then selected for their application. In other words, to supply the entire home or a point of use water heater and supply water to a single lavatory or kitchen sink. This particular home had only two bathrooms and one kitchen. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until I checked the master bath.

      It was full of beautifully designed plumbing fixtures. Boy, I wished my branch had made the sale, but the owner had selected everything from a big-box store. The highlight was the shower system, a custom-made enclosure of tile and stone with a fixed showerhead and personal hand shower with diverters and five body sprays. A thermostatic mixing valve designed to provide plenty of hot water at a very precise temperature controlled the entire system.

      I closely examined the transfer valves. The owner could operate the fixed head or hand shower. One or the other, but not both at the same time. No problem with that. The five body sprays all came on together. Each one discharged 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Now combine the body sprays with the fixed head or hand held shower, and the user was drawing fifteen gallons of hot water every minute (five body sprays and one fixed head) against a fifty-gallon water heater.

      The heater could produce sixty-seven gallons of perfect hot water the first hour and was capable of a twenty-one-gallon-per-hour recovery based on increasing the incoming water by 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Well, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out the problem here. If the bather was using six outlets at once, he or she would use up the hot water in less than five minutes. Even increasing the outlet temperature from the heater to a dangerous level, the bather would still run out of water in under nine minutes.

      The water heater was undersized for the application. Even with an eighty-gallon water heater, there would not be enough hot water. The homeowner needed the newer instantaneous gas heaters that can provide unlimited hot water. This new type of heater was just coming into the American market at the time.

      The point of this story

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