Call. Call. Call.
Before I tell you about the emails, you need to understand one thing about MINO.
He loved consistency.
Not the kind that builds trust.
The kind where if you accidentally played back last week's meeting recording instead of this week's, nobody would notice.
Every sales meeting started the same way.
He'd clear his throat, look around the room, and without fail say:
"Call. Call. Call."
Not once.
Three times.
"Call. Call. Call."
It wasn't a suggestion.
It wasn't motivation.
It was more like...
...a ceremonial opening.
The meeting had officially begun.
Nobody looked surprised anymore.
The veterans could have mouthed the words with him.
The new folks quickly learned the script.
After a while, I stopped wondering whether he'd say it.
I started wondering if one day he wouldn't.
He always did.
The emails weren't much different.
If MINO needed to remind the team to call customers, he didn't write a new email.
He resurrected an old one.
Then another.
Then another.
Every new message carried pieces of the previous one like layers of old wallpaper.
Typos survived week after week.
"The the."
"You're" when he meant "your."
Paragraphs that somehow managed to be both too long and too short at the same time.
No periods.
Some commas.
A sentence would start in one font, wander into another, then finish in a third.
The strange part wasn't that nobody noticed.
The strange part was that everybody noticed.
Nobody said anything.
What was there to say?
It was the first management email I'd ever read that looked tired.
The first time it happened, I shrugged it off.
Everyone has an off day.
But then another email came.
Same thing.
Then another.
Same thing.
Weeks became months.
Months became years.
It became comical.
These weren't rushed emails.
This was his writing.
Every message was built the same way.
Find an old email.
Copy it.
Paste it.
Then one morning something changed.
The email arrived.
Still MINO.
Different voice.
Interesting.
For four and a half years I'd watched him communicate like a copy machine running low on toner.
Overnight, he was delivering TED Talks.
Gone were the wandering sentences.
Gone were the recycled typos.
In their place appeared beautifully structured paragraphs with thoughtful spacing and polished language.
There were words like intentional.
Synergy.
Transformational.
The message encouraged us to embrace collaborative excellence while remaining committed to our shared vision.
Ummm hello… we sold bottled water!!!
I read the email twice.
Not because it was confusing.
Because I was trying to figure out who wrote it.
I never asked MINO what changed.
I didn't need to.
The old emails sounded like someone who never reread what he'd written.
The new emails sounded like someone who'd never written them.
He discovered ChatGPT and passed it along in emails as his own.
Nothing else changed though.
The next meeting started exactly the way the previous thousand had.
MINO looked around the room, cleared his throat, and said:
"Call. Call. Call."