On March 20 a number of fellow home-schooling families came for the day to help. Some competitors (I guess they were officially "former competitors" now) were in to look over the inventory of parts and equipment, and pick up files. A dozen or so bargain hunters also were looking around: a trucker from Pennsylvania who had seen our signs on the road, an office manager who had read our ad in the newspaper, folks who had just been driving by, a couple of guys from the coffee-service company three doors down. "Business liquidation" means "get stuff cheap" to most people, and everyone loves a deal. The bulk-salvage guys were salivating as they came by to give us their business cards.
A former employee who had left in 1993 to open his own company (taking a top technician and a number of customers with him) bounced in. We were not, to say the least, good friends. He wandered around for a few minutes, bought a ladder and a couple of other parts, and then left. I think he enjoyed himself.
The bankers had chosen this chaotic day for their visit. They wandered around the shop, looking at the piles and shaking their heads. As they were getting ready to leave they gave me their estimate of what the liquidation of the company and the receivables would bring in. Needless to say, it was a lot more pessimistic than mine. Oh, and by the way, they said, we want to see a plan in two weeks showing how we'll be paid off--in full--within 90 days. Have a nice day.
All day long Judi, Peter, and Norm kept finding tools, parts, and equipment stashed all over the office--under people's desks, in locked drawers, on top of shelves. There was thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of inventory I hadn't known about. Out from under a desk came a padlocked toolbox that weighed 60 to 70 pounds. (Of course, I had no clue where the key was.) We used bolt cutters to cut off the lock. Inside was $250 to $300 worth of top-of-the-line hand and power tools. We found another padlocked toolbox under the operations manager's desk--again, no key. The bolt cutters took care of the lock, and more tools surfaced.
But the toolboxes were just the beginning. Digital vehicle detectors (which open gates when they detect the presence of a vehicle and which cost $85 to $90 each) appeared by the dozen. Two boxes of brand-new gate operators (worth approximately $500 each) were discovered. Brand-new keypads. Transformers. A public-address-system amplifier still in the box with its original packing. Circuit boards. Camera housings. And on and on and on.
Judi and Peter kept asking me, "Did you know you had this?" "Where did it come from?" "How much does it cost?" No, I didn't know we had it. No, I didn't know where it had come from or, more often than not, why we had ordered it. Yes, unfortunately, I had a pretty good idea of how much it cost. What a naïve, trusting fool I had been! How had this happened? Why did we have thousands of dollars' worth of stuff I never knew about? Why? Why? Why? Over and over and over that day, I said to anyone who would listen, "Now you know why this company is going out of business. The owner is an incompetent moron!"
On March 24 the clean-up crew consisted of three men, four women and 15 children. That was my move-out staff. There was a $4,000 penalty staring me in the face if we weren't out by the end of the day. I tried to get an extension; the landlord said no. We went into super high gear.
Throughout the day the pickups and vans shuttled between the ADS office and the various locations where the records and other items we wouldn't (or couldn't) sell would be stored: a friend's basement, my house, Peter's carport. (Peter and his wife took all the salable "junk" to sell at a yard sale.) The bulk-metal salvage guy (whose company's name was Subtractions--cute) came at noon and took away a couple of tons of metal. He paid me $175.
The phone company called at 3 p.m., telling me it was going to turn off our phones--tomorrow! I pretended I was upset. "Tomorrow, you say? That's March 25, correct?" "That's right, Mr. Niemann," the stern-sounding operator said. "We're going to turn your phone service off tomorrow if you cannot pay the bill. Will you be paying it?" "No, I'm afraid not," I replied. "Very well, Mr. Niemann." (You could feel the chill through the phone line.) "Good day." Click. We'd made it!
The electrical contractor to whom I had traded the phone system (in lieu of some of what I owed him) disconnected the phones and pulled the phone-system control box off the wall around 4 p.m., right about the time the junk man (whose name was Woodrow Wilson--honest) was due. The real estate agent, to whom we had to turn over the keys, came right at 5 p.m. Judi unplugged the office clock exactly at 5 and took it off the wall. We were finished except for the loading-dock area, which was piled high, awaiting Mr. Wilson, who was late. I kept calling, and Mr. Wilson's wife kept saying he was on his way.
Finally, Woodrow Wilson and his associate careered around the corner in a 1960s-era flatbed truck of indeterminate make. The sides of the truck appeared to lean at a permanent 45° angle. Mr. Wilson backed up to the loading dock. "Start throwing it on," he commanded. On it went. An old refrigerator. Rusty shelving. Old motors. Bent pieces of conduit and wiremold. The last filing cabinet. (The rest had actually sold.) A desk. A couple of old desk chairs. An automatic sliding door. A piece of an old gate. Mr. Wilson didn't care what it was or how it went onto the truck.
