hiring a private detective?”
I said, “Well, let’s try this. It’s an interesting idea.” So I went to the Boston
Yellow Pages, looked under “private investigators,” and found an ad that
appealed to me. I called the private investigator and I said, “Here’s an 800 number.
It belongs to somebody that has a pager. All I need from you is to know the
name and the personal phone number of this person.” He said, “No problem.
It’ll cost you $100.” And I said, “That’s fine. How long will it take?” He said, “It
will probably take about 4 hours.” I thought that was pretty impressive.
He calls back 3 or 4 hours later and said, “Ron, I’ve got good news and bad
news.” I said, “Give me the good news first.” “The good news is I’ve got who it
is.” “Well, what’s the bad news?” “It’s going to cost you $200, because when we
got the name of the person, he had an unlisted number, so we had to do two
searches.” I said, “Fine. We’ll send you a check for $200. It will be in tonight’s
mail.”
I then call the person up. He is in Dallas, Texas. The whole company was
hinging on this, plus the situation with the pharmaceutical company, and I
was scared to death about how to make this call. So I just thought, “Be as honest
as possible,” and I said, “Look, I represent a company that’s printed your
number in a document that’s going to be very widespread shortly. Otherwise,
they have to republish the whole thing, and it’s a real mess. What I’d like to ask
you is: we’d like to acquire your 800 number. Give us the right to that and we’ll
do whatever we can do to make it right for you. All you have to do is tell us what
you’d like to have us do.” And he said, “I understand. I’ll be happy to help you
out. If you could buy me a years’ worth of pager subscriptions, that will be fine.”
That was like $400. He could have said $100,000, and they would have done it.
He actually said a year, but I said, “No, we’ll give you 2 years. We’ll be happy to
do that.”
So we did that and everything was fine, and then he calls back about an hour
later. I thought to myself, “Oh my God! He has talked to an attorney. This
whole thing is going to get blown off the tracks.” And he said, “You know, I was
talking to my wife and she would really like a pager. Could you do the same
thing for her?” I said, “Sure.” The long and short of it is, we met a very decent
person. He dealt with us fairly. We bought him $500 or $600 worth of subscriptions
for his pager. We got the number literally within hours because AT&T
expedited it for us, and everything worked out. But that was probably the

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