Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Godfather II

My busy summer has been hard on a lot of things, but of them all the thing that suffered the most was my Netflix queue. I've had the Godfather II sitting on my desk since mid-march I think. Well last night things had finally settled down to the point where I could watch it. I enjoyed the first Godfather, though perhaps not as much as some, and I had always heard that part II was even better. I really enjoy the flashback sequences with Vito, but the 1950's timeline is not quite as appealing, at least not so far. However it has already taught me a valuable lesson...

So I'm in the middle of watching it and one of my friends calls me up with a business problem. It seems that a couple of months ago he made a deal. He made the deal with another company specifically with a junior partner in that other company. So over the last few months he's fulfilled his end of the deal which basically amounted to doing a lot of work, without any money up front. So now the time has come to fulfill on the deal, and along comes a senior partner who knew about the deal from the beginning, but has suddenly decided that he wants to pay my friend less money. So the question is what does he do? (not what should he have done, the answer to that is so obvious it doesn't need to be mentioned)

And just like in "You Got Mail" the Godfather holds the answer. There's a scene early on where a senator tells Michael Corleone that he needs to give him $250,000 and 5% of the gross if he wants the gambling liscense for the casio he's about to take over, even though liscenses are normally only $20,000. He then says I'll need the answer and the money by tomorrow at noon. Michael says you can have your answer now. I'm not paying you anything, I'm not even going to pay the $20,000 I would normally owe, you're going to pay that. That's what we ended up deciding. This other company is small potatoes for my friend, and either they had the deal the agreed on 60 days ago or they have no deal. And if there's no deal then my friend is free to propose any deal he wants, even one that's worse than the original deal. And not only that but let the word go forth from this time and place that you better not try and screw him over either.

Make him a deal he can't refuse

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think you scared all your commenters away.

8:08 PM  

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