Next day, we bought a mimeograph machine and Lewis drew a stencil with twenty-five of the gadgets on it. We ran through a hundred sheets and sent them through the desk.
It worked—we were busy for several hours, getting those gadgets out of the way as they poured through to us.
I’m afraid we never stopped to think about what the Trader might want in return for the dust-collectors. We were so excited that we forgot, for the moment, that this was a commercial proposition and not just something gratis.
But the next afternoon, back came the mimeographed sheets we’d sent through and, on the reverse side of each of them, the Trader had drawn twenty-five representations of the zebra on the bracelet charm.
And there we were, faced with the necessity of getting together pronto, twenty-five hundred of those silly zebras.
I tore down to the store where rd gotten the bracelet, but all they had in stock were two dozen of the things. They said they didn’t think they could order any more. The number, they said, had been discontinued.
The name of the company that made them was stamped on the inside of the bracelet and, as soon as I got home, I put in a long distance call.
I finally got hold of the production manager. “You know those bracelets you put out?”
“We put out millions of ’em. Which one are you talking about?”
“The one with the zebra on it.”