I pretended to be my boss's favorite company, so he flew to Europe for a job that didn't exist.

Here's what happened.

Subscribe to Am I the Jerk on YouTube and hit the bell for notifications.

This was in the throes of the analog mid-90s.

Facts Machines FedEx, dial-up computing and voicemail were the most common business tools.

I was a young regional sales manager for a major

branded consumer product. I covered the grocery class of trade in 11 Western states.

My division worked out of Chicago and I had a home office on the West Coast.

I had made my reputation by typically making my quota and keeping costs within budget.

I would get reassigned to struggling markets and more often than not, I would usually

make my sales number. Nothing too fancy. I just figured where the best opportunities were and

concentrated on them.

In those days we had something called market development funds, MDFs, or as we called it,

making days fun in the time before such things were deemed illegal.

It was money we could literally use for almost anything you could imagine.

Wining and dining, sending buyers to the Super Bowl, taking them on market research trips.

I once took six honchos for a weekend of fishing in Mexico.

As long as you had the receipts and your boss knew, except in cases where they specifically

asked not to know, we were free to spend money as we saw fit.

This was old school madman style slush funds, all tax deductible.

Typically the MDF money was 2% of your total annual gross sales and was use it or lose it

meaning it had to be spent because it wouldn't roll over. I always had some left over. As a team player I would let

...