I got fired from my first job. I had fought long and hard to get it, finally landing a position that I hadn’t even applied for, getting hired just on being persistent. Having seen the scores of my interviews and psychological tests, the consultants had recommended hiring somebody else.

I knew that when I called the CEO a few nights later, while driving on the highway. We talked about the job, and my tests, and I remember telling him that I disagreed with the results because I knew I’d be great at the job. He agreed.

“I agree, those tests are a bunch of crock,” he said. “I like you.”

He liked me so much that he offered me a job. Not the one I had applied for, but another one, a little different. The one I had applied for was a sales manager’s job in Finland. He asked me if I’d be interested in starting up their exporting efforts to the UK.

On one condition. Since I was young, and a recent college graduate, he thought there might be a chance that the government would subsidize my employment. If I could check that, and if that was the case, the job would be mine.

I did, and it was, and I was hired. I was ecstatic. After about a year of job searching, after hundreds of different kinds of applications, and close calls, including one which, had it gone through, would have made me the CEO of a hockey pant factory, I had a real job. With a small, small salary. At a real office. With no computer. But a real business card.

Two weeks later, I was on a plane to London, England, armed with those said business cards, a few brochures, some samples of our products, and – nothing else. Also, after that year of unemployment, I had no money. I had got an advance, and of course my travel expenses were covered, but it was going to be a long fortnight in England, as they say there.

My mission was to spend two weeks in London, and sell plastic video cassette cases, preferably to major distributors, such as Buena Vista. I remember Buena Vista because that was one of the two major distributors I did manage to get a meeting with. The other was a company that did the actual copying of the movies.

In the two weeks prior to leaving for England, I had gone through the company’s promotional material, sent dozens of faxes to England trying to set up meetings, and learned the biggest trick of them all: turning the case upside down to demonstrate that the VHS tape stayed in place, and wouldn’t drop down.

The day before departure, I bought a new, pinkish, purplish shirt to guarantee a good first impression, and off I went.

I had been employed for a month when I got back to the home office, and filed my report. The CEO was happy with my effort, and things looked good. What I didn’t like was the 60-kilometer commute each day, because it forced me to get up earlier than I wanted, and because gas was expensive. That’s why I was happy to get a transfer to our “Helsinki office” about three months into my employment.

I was also happy to get away from the CEO for a while. Not only had he hired me on minimum wage, he was also a smuggler of magnetic tape. One part of the company put together the VHS tapes that another part of the company wanted to put inside the cases I was trying to sell to the UK. That magnetic tape is expensive, because the importers have to pay copyright royalties.

But not if you smuggle it inside a container that’s supposedly carrying something else. Also, the “factory” was a garage somewhere.

I still didn’t have a computer, but I did have one at home, so I could make polished Excel charts for my contacts. I had also got into something of a quarrel with the CEO because I had filed an expense report on my new batch of contacts, for which I expected to get paid. He said that deal only covered my UK trip.

Since I only got minimum wage as my base, I wasn’t very happy, but he refused to pay me for those new contacts. Now, I felt that I had been a pretty good subordinate, even agreeing to fill plastic bags with candy before Xmas, so that he could then send candy baskets to our clients.

He did agree to get me a computer, though. We drove to a law office – that held bankruptcy auctions – in downtown Helsinki. He parked his Jaguar on the sidewalk, and waited in the car while I ran upstairs, and carried a second-hand Schneider computer downstairs. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but the computer had a black-and-orange monochrome display.

I kept faxing my contacts in the UK, and I was getting close to a deal, when one morning, the CEO called me up.

“Hey, I want to see you at our office here today, OK?”

“Sure,” I said, got in my small white car, and drove an hour north.

He asked me to sit in the chair across from his desk.

“You know, business is hard,” he said. “I’ve been at this for 20 years, I’ve had several companies, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to be able to break the ten million markka barrier. It’s funny, because I’ve tried everything. There’s just something that’s stopping me, and I don’t know what it is,” he said.

“Well, you’ll get there, for sure,” I said, baffled.

He wrote something in his Time Management System calendar.

“You’re fired,” he said. “Peter will take over as a consultant,” he said, referring to a guy I had met a few days earlier.

I was shocked. I cried. I drove back home with tears in my eyes. There I was, unemployed again, after five and a half months on minimum wage. The government subsidy for my minimum salary would end in two weeks, together with my probationary employment, which meant that I could be terminated just … like … that.

Like I wasn’t good enough!

Of course, I sued him.

My lawyer, retained by the labor union, told me it was an open-and-shut case. Obviously, I had been fired just as the government subsidy was ending.

Of course, I lost the case. A staff member testified against me, saying that the project had ended. If there ever had been a UK project, she had said.

I’m pretty sure there had been one, though. Because I still have a Donald Duck tie to prove it.

My hotel in London was small, but clean, and at a good location, with the closest subway station just a ten-minute walk away, and the closest KFC and Burger King just around the corner. It was also a walking distance from the Hyde Park, and the Hammersmith Odeon (now Hammersmith Apollo).

Then again, since I had very little money of my own, even with the advance, everything was a walking distance away for me. I took the subway to my first meeting, and the train to one of the major distributors way out in the suburbs, but the rest of the time I walked.

The big distributor liked my turning-the-case upside down trick, but not my prices which were double what they paid then. And Buena Vista guy offered me a cup of coffee, but I didn’t drink coffee then.

I had just those two meetings set up before I arrived in London but I was going to be there for two weeks. I didn’t have a computer, there was no Internet – technically, there was, but our company, for example, didn’t have email – and I didn’t have a mobile phone.

I had the phone book.

And I was paid for every new contact I made. That got me out of the door every morning. I would go through all the companies listed under “video” on the yellow pages, make a call, and try go get an appointment. All I needed was to get in. By the second week, I stopped making phone calls, and simply walked in, and asked to see the person in charge. I went to video rental stores, to sleazy looking film production companies, and to not-so-sleazy looking film production companies.

By the second week, I had come up with a system to help me with my dire financial situation. On my way back from one of the meetings, I hailed a cab, and went back to the hotel. As I got out of the cab and asked for a receipt, the cab driver gave me two receipts. They were both empty, and he was too lazy to even fill in the fares on them.

To me, the extra receipt gave a chance to take some of the money from my expense account and move it to my personal account, both accounts being just piles of money on my bed. So I kept walking one way, and taking a taxi every once in a while, to get those empty receipts. The drivers didn’t care, so they almost always threw in an extra, blank one. I then made it a fare of a few pounds, and moved money from one pile to another.

I didn’t make any sales. I did meet a lot of people and collect a lot of business cards as evidence for each meeting for my report – and to make follow up calls once I got back to Finland. I also made enough off my forged taxi receipts to have some pocket money for shopping.

So when I did come back to Finland, I returned in style, wearing a moss-green jacket, my two-week old pinkish-purplish shirt, a brand new purple vest, and an equally new red Donald Duck tie around my neck.

Because everything was going so well.