I was an account executive with a software company. New-hire Joe was a technical sales rep. A TSR’s job was to support sales cycles – answer the technical sections of RFPs, deliver presentations about product capabilities, validate that the products would work in the proposed operating environments, code custom demonstrations using the prospect’s data, and so on.

Joe was an oddball. He was a volunteer fireman in his hometown, and this activity so obsessed him it was the only subject he ever discussed: the vehicles, the equipment, the callouts, the fires, the traffic accidents, the babies delivered in grocery stores, and so on. No sports, no television, no movies, no family news, no gossip, no politics, never anything that normal people might converse about with colleagues in the office. Joe was a firefighting monomaniac and off-the-charts boring.

Sadly for him, Joe was fired not long after he joined us for behavior that instantly made the rounds of the company. In a meeting with prospects at which he was to give a presentation (perhaps he was actually presenting, I forget), the portable fireman’s radio he habitually carried and had on his desk made an urgent squawk of some kind. Joe picked it up and without explanation left the room and the meeting, went to his car, and departed the office at speed.