Kevin Coffey's TALES OF THE UNEMPLOYED: DUH INNERNET
(The time I had to sell the Internet with the help of a legendary Mentor)
(Narrated by Kevin Coffey)
Hey everyone. I’m back—Happy Friday! I’m delighted to bring you one of my family’s and friends’ favorite stories from my personal catalog of strange but true work tales. Even to this day, most of my family and friends still only say “the Internet” in a very specific way.
(Spoiler alert, it’s in the title.)
In that very spirit, you may want to listen to my voiceover for added effect.
Enjoy!
Kevin
We’ve all worked with someone like this before. You know them, that person at work that keeps you on your toes, either from their outlandish appearance, comments, or observations, or their sheer talent to manufacture pure chaos.
Oh boy did I work with one such fellow. And how.
I go back to the shaky, early days of the Internet itself and my job of having to sell just that—the Internet.
In the late nineties, the Internet wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Its staying power was very much in doubt.
It was my very first full-time job out of college and an alien concept: some company that identified itself as a “technology start-up.”
My job was simple: paint a picture of the Internet anyone might understand, then sell it, and we could in turn build customers’ web pages, help reserve their URL, and our bread and butter differentiator: (get this) we were one of only two companies at the time that offered the ability to process online transactions. Seriously.
We had some brilliant minds that formed the company, all young folks like myself, and two experienced salesmen—one of them being an unforgettable person called Chevy.
Chevy was straight out of New York City. And when I say straight out of New York City, I mean it’s like he walked out of a subterranean deli or pizza parlor and strutted straight into our office, chomping on gum. I’ve met some hardcore New Yorkers in my lifetime, but nobody was ever more New York than Chevy.
Some quick Chevyisms, translations if you will:
The = duh
These = deez
Those = doze
This = dis
Nothing = nuttin’
Any chance of properly enunciating “th” was out duh window. Words with an “ing” ending had no chance of landin’ eater.
Where I grew up in Virginia wasn’t all that far from what NYC natives call The City, (Duh City), meaning New York City. I got to know quite a few New Yorkers in college and was given the firehose of the northeastern mentality: in-your-face directness and bravado. Yes, “you talkin’ to me?” is a real thing. But if you got on their good side by showing some authenticity, the directness was always accompanied by unflagging loyalty, even some humility, respect, and, my personal favorite: hilarity.
Chevy reminded me of what would have happened if John Belushi and Chris Farley had a lovechild that was resigned to a sales role in small-town Virginia. He was that funny.
Mainly from unintentional physical comedy, due to his unique appearance of hailing from perhaps twenty different ethnicities. He had a mane of jet-black curly hair, and almost always sported a bushy mustache inspired by Keith Hernandez, a legendary baseball player for his beloved New York Mets.
He was big and hairy but not obese. Nor was he in shape. He also had the gift of the ultimate clown, the ability to always land intentional jokes. He lacked the trait of being able to ever be serious. Every moment of life seemed to be a bit to him and I ate it up.
Chevy was my funny button. He could make me laugh any time he wanted and he knew it. I loved him for it. He made going to work so much fun. I’ve never cried at work (in a funny way) more than I did working with Chevy.
He loved the Knicks and as I mentioned the Mets more than a human should probably love sports teams—especially the Mets.
I would be on the phone in the middle of a discovery call and I would hear his chair squeak in protest as Chevy leaned back far enough to make eye contact with me, raising his eyebrows, “Duh Meeeets,” he’d sing to me, causing me to choke and the poor prospect on the other end to demand “what’s so funny?”
He equated over-caring for our sports teams when they weren’t doing so well—in the case of the Mets, often—to “family members in trouble.”
He would organize daily pranks against everyone in the office. I would come back to unspeakable sights saved as my new wallpaper assaulting me from my computer screen.
Whenever our office manager would leave, someone Chevy got into with regularly, he’d sing at the top of his lungs: “Ding-dong, duh witch is dead!”
While I was working there, I was one of the first people I knew to purchase a car online, a shiny red Acura Integra. (I still highly recommend this process as it tends to skip the part where malicious salespeople enthusiastically gang up on you in their tiny office.)
The first day I brought my Acura to work to show it off, Chevy proceeded to permanently break my driver’s seat in all of thirty seconds.
“Let’s check dis baby out,” Chevy proclaimed, swinging the driver’s side door open nearly off its hinge and violently plopping down. I swear I heard the seat make a very human-sounding gasp, wheeze, and slow groan as if it were being slowly suffocated. Chevy gave the seat a hard adjustment like a silverback gorilla about to take it for a spin. I heard a very worrying CRUNK! And that did it—the driver’s seat was never right again for the entire time I owned that car.
I could go on and on. But as I mentioned, back in those days, often our principal job was to sell the idea of the Internet first.
Chevy and I had landed a presentation with a team of local realtors. Chevy was to give a PowerPoint presentation about the Internet and I was there to absorb like a sponge and help work the crowd.
We went to a dusty-smelling, poorly-lit office that felt infected with boredom. I could have probably let off a firework and gotten heads turning at the speed of sloths.
But like me, all eyes were drawn to Chevy as he set up, humming a Billy Joel song to himself at his “low” volume, which was just slightly under a fighter jet ripping apart the sound barrier. His meaty hands threatened to break the projector with every tweak and forceful adjustment. He accidentally knocked the light so it shone on a couple of startled faces probably causing semi-permanent blindness. Chevy was oblivious, bending over to plug in the outlet, his pants sagged and the entire audience got a glimpse of a hairy plumber’s crack that could never be unseen.
Just before he started, Chevy came up to me and whispered in my ear with a sly smile, “Watch me trick Fred out of his Fruity Pebbles.” It was an inside joke we often recited to one another before our sales calls.
On-screen bold lettering that seemed to match Chevy’s boldness and volume screamed, “THE INTERNET!”
As if delivering his presentation in Madison Square Garden with no microphone, Chevy proclaimed in vocals that would have made Pavarotti jealous, “DUH INNERNET!”
Sleepy real-estate agents slightly jumped in their chairs as he scared the bejesus out of all of them. But the evangelical sermon about this exciting new technology was just beginning.
In casual conversation, every other word from Chevy was always laced with graphic profanity. So looking around the room at his semi-catatonic audience, Chevy dared, “Pardon my French and not for nuttin’, Duh Innernet is da Sh**!”
I’m not sure if was his intention, but he ended up going with the one-slide, two-word presentation as he simply couldn’t help himself, he stepped out from behind the podium—the slide projecting on him for a beat—before prowling about the humid office, getting directly in everyone’s face.
Chevy was also a prolific sweater. Already his armpits were soaked, almost as if he were running tiny hoses down the sides of his shirt to keep himself cool.
“Duh Innernet is awesome. It’s like…you can ask it anydang and it will answer you.”
“Like about…” Chevy got in my face, raising his bushy eyebrows, “Duh Meeets.”
The joke died with the rest of the audience but got me laughing.
“If Duh Innernet was a beautiful woman you’d want to take her home every night and—”
I frantically waved, catching his attention, shaking my head, pleading, please don’t go…there.
“Okay, okay,” he chuckled, refraining from likely getting us kicked out. “You get duh point.” His eyes lit up as he raised his mammoth eyebrows again. “Right? AM I RIGHT?” he boomed like a football coach trying to motivate his underperforming team during halftime.
“Y-yeah,” an equally sweaty realtor said. (The room was stifling as if air-conditioning had yet to be invented.)
“Dat’s what I’m talkin’ about,” Chevy pointed at the realtor, seizing their hand with his oversized mitt, apparently crushing the realtor’s fingers into tiny bits.
“Who wants to see dis puppy in action? Huh? HUH?”
Every hand in the room—including mine—raised as if there were no other choice.
There wasn’t. The strange thing, I think everyone in the room—including myself, who knew all about the Internet—was psyched to see this new Internet thing go at full gallop.
Until Chevy performed searches at the glacial speed of the nineties’ dial-up Internet using a then state-of-the-art Netscape browser that took every bit of three to five minutes to struggle to burp up and load just a single page.
It ate up the rest of our meeting just to look up: Duh Meeeets, Duh Kniiiicks, “New York, New York” lyrics by Frank Sinatra; and Virginia realtors (nothing came up.) Someone in the crowd suggested what they most wanted to see: MLS, a way realtors could look up listings for houses and properties for sale—nothing came up.
And with that final flat tire, the meeting concluded. I’m almost a hundred percent certain no business came from our meeting.
One thing’s for certain, like me and the countless people I’ve told this story to over the years, they’d probably never forget Chevy’s introduction to “Duh Innernet.”
Funny
I tink he was pullin some legs!