The Nostalgia of Age

As the continuing press of age impacts me, my sense of nostalgia closes in on my memories and I begin to think of meaningful things that took place in my life. I recall, while fairly new in a position at Munsingwear, that when I had some free time, I would go to the Return Department and look around. I noticed a large supply of salesmen samples returned with several women there working to refurbish them. . On investigating why they were being returned, I found that we gave them one third off of our wholesale price. I stated to my boss that it would save a lot of manpower if we gave the 50% off and had them keep the samples. I don't have any idea how much money was saved but it sure impressed the ladies doing the work and I was thanked for the suggestion. In that same vein, the returns were also burdened with a large supply of briefs, most of a specific style. I looked at the briefs and found that the major reason was the rubber band encased in a ribbed knit around the legs, had hardened due to hot water in the wash. This caused the hardened rubber to cut through the ribbing. They had also yellowed because of the affect of the bleach that was used. Because we sold a tremendous quantity of that style, I went to Research and Development and talked to a fellow named Reink. He was one of our resident experts on the knitting of our materials and told him about the problems I had found. Did he have any ideas on how we could eliminate the rubber band and improve the yellowing factor? He said he would get back to me and a couple of weeks later he came to my office and showed me a sample brief which now incorporated a white cotton yarn with certain quantities of Nylon and Lycra. To shorten the story I asked that he make up a few dozen so that they could be sampled and soon after distributed them to various people in the office and waited for their results. They were a smash and it gave us a big step up over our competitors. Our returns became negligible, our salesmens were very pleased to have the samples to sell at their own sample sales. Everybody was happy--the ladies in the Return Department, the salesman, the Advertising Department had a new development to shout about and of course the management began seeing an improvement in the work hours and in profits. Well, as I started out to say, my memory reminds me that, while in my new job, which had nothing to do with the Return Department, came a great learning experience and some praise, although no money, from my boss. It's one of the nice things about age, you can reflect on some successes, no matter how minor they may seem, and smile.